The Last Shout

The last shout came on the nineteenth of September, eleven days before the station stood down, at four minutes past six in the evening, and it was not a small one. Nell has never had to be reminded of the date and neither has anybody else who was in that boathouse, and there are eleven people in that parish for whom the nineteenth of September is not a date in September at all but a thing that happened to them, and to which the rest of the calendar is loosely attached.

A dive boat with nine aboard had lost steerage on the ebb off the eastern arm and gone onto the edge of the race with the wind against the tide and four in the water. The weather was worse than the forecast by about two hours. Trenwick launched at the same time and was twenty-six minutes out.

Culver was there in eleven.

Nell was in the boathouse because Nell was always in the boathouse, and she did what she had done a hundred and forty times, which was to move people off the slip and get the doors and put the urn on, and then to stand at the door for two hours doing nothing at all, which is the part nobody puts in the leaflet.

The first four came back at four minutes to seven. The boat went out again. One of the four was nineteen and on his second season and sat down on the wet slipway in his drysuit and did not get up for about eleven minutes, and Nell put a cup of tea on the concrete beside him and walked away and left it there, which is a thing she had worked out in the fifth summer and which nobody had ever taught her. Nell handed out towels and made tea and rang a woman in Trenwick about a car and did not look at the sea, because there is a thing you learn in a boathouse which is that looking at the sea does not help and that the pager will tell you.

They got all nine. That is the headline and it is the only thing anybody outside Culver knows about the nineteenth of September, and it is true. Nine people out of the water on an ebb tide off a race in a rising southwesterly by a station that had been told, in writing, four months earlier, that the arithmetic did not support its existence.

What is not in the headline is that on the second run the D-class took a wave badly coming off the back of the race and Roo went over the side, clipped, in the way that helms do about once in a career, and was back in the boat in under forty seconds, and finished the shout, and brought the boat in at nine minutes past nine, and stood on the slipway in the floodlights being perfectly normal to nineteen people for about forty minutes.

Nell found out about the forty seconds at about half past ten from a twenty-two-year-old called Ffion who was on her fourth shout and who had not yet learned that you do not tell the woman with the urn.

She was pouring tea. She has said that she finished pouring the tea, and put the pot down, and said something to Ffion that she cannot remember, and went out of the boathouse and along the harbour wall about a hundred and forty metres to where the wall turns, and stood there for eleven minutes in the dark with the rain going sideways.

Roo found her there at about eleven, because Mo had told him where she had gone, in the tone Mo uses. He had come off the slipway in a dry fleece with his hair still flat to his head and he had walked a hundred and forty metres along a wall in the dark and the sideways rain to stand behind a woman who sold ice cream, eleven days before the end of the only thing he had ever done, and both of them have said since that this was the moment, and that neither of them noticed it at the time.

He said, "It was forty seconds. I was clipped. It happens." She did not turn round. She said, "I know what it was." He said, "Nell." And she said, "In eleven days that boathouse shuts and I have known you for ten years and I do not know your surname and tonight you went in the water off the eastern arm and I found out from a twenty-two-year-old while I was pouring tea."

The rain did what rain does on a harbour wall. He stood about four feet behind her and did not close it, which she has said was the correct decision and which she also says she has never entirely forgiven.

"Ask me in September," he said. "It is September." "It is the nineteenth. There are eleven days." And Nell Bardsley turned round on a harbour wall in the rain at eleven o'clock at night and said the thing she had been not saying for ten years, which was: "Ruaridh, I do not care about the station. I have run their campaign for fourteen months and I have been to eleven meetings and I have said my own name into four microphones and I do not care. I care that you went in the water and I found out from Ffion."

And he said — and this is the sentence, this is the one that people who have read this story remember, and it is not a declaration and it is barely even a sentence — "I know. I have known since the fifth summer. I have been managing it for five years and tonight I did not manage it very well and I am extremely sorry."

They did not do anything. That is the part that makes people put the book down and it is what happened.

They stood on a harbour wall in the rain for about four more minutes. He said that there were nineteen people in the boathouse and a boat that needed washing down and that the station had eleven days. She said that she knew. He said, "Eleven days." She said, "Eleven days," and they walked back along the wall a metre apart and went in and washed the boat down with everybody else until one in the morning.

Nell has been asked about this a great deal and has given up being patient about it. "There were nineteen people in that boathouse who had just got nine people out of the water on the second to last shout of a station their fathers had built," she says. "What exactly do you imagine we should have done. Announced it? On the slipway? In the rain?"

What she does say, and only to people who ask properly, is that walking back along that wall a metre apart was the single hardest four minutes of ten years, and that at the door of the boathouse he stopped and let her go in first, which he had done four hundred times, and that this time he put his hand flat on the door frame as she went past, about level with her shoulder, and did not touch her, and that she has thought about that hand approximately once a week ever since.

The last eleven days were the worst of it. The station wound down. There were forms. There was a lorry for the tractor and a different lorry for the trolley and a man from the region who was decent about all of it and who Mo would not speak to.

They kept the mornings. All eleven of them. Six o'clock, the third bollard, the second marker and then the third, two mugs of the urn tea for as long as the urn was still there, which was until the twenty-seventh, and then two mugs from her kitchen for the last three.

And they did not say one word about it. Not one, in eleven days, either of them, and Mo, who by then had stopped pretending not to be watching, said to her husband on about the twenty-fifth that she had spent thirty-seven years around lifeboat people and had never in her life seen two adults work so hard at a thing.

Culver Inshore was stood down at noon on the thirtieth of September. There was no ceremony because the crew had voted, eleven to eight, against having one. The vote was taken in the boathouse on a Tuesday and it took about four minutes and nobody made a speech either way, and the eight who wanted a ceremony were every one of them people who had joined in the last six years, which Mo said afterwards was the single most instructive fact of the entire eighteen months.

What there was instead was the flag, which came down at noon, and about four hundred people on the harbour wall who had not been asked to come, and a nineteen-year-old from Reading who had driven down on her own without telling her parents and who stood at the back and did not speak to anybody.

Mo did the flag. Nobody had discussed it; four people moved out of the way at about four minutes to twelve and Mo went and did it, at seventy-two, taking rather a long time over the knots, and when it was down she folded it the way it is folded and handed it to Ruaridh and said, "Your dad's station," and went and stood at the back and was extremely rude to anybody who came near her for the rest of the afternoon.

The boathouse doors were shut at four minutes past twelve. There is a photograph of it that went in two newspapers, taken from the harbour wall, and in the photograph there are eleven people on the slipway and one of them is standing slightly apart at the third bollard with a towel over her arm because she had swum that morning as she had swum every morning, and nobody who saw the photograph knew who she was.

Everybody went to the pub. It went on until about eleven and it was, by all accounts, a good one: four speeches nobody had planned, a great deal of the fifth summer being talked about at last, Ffion being made to tell the story of her first shout again, Mo drinking gin and holding court and crying once and denying it.

Nell left at about half past nine, quietly, the way you do, and walked back along the harbour wall in the dark to the slipway and sat down on the third bollard.

She sat there for about forty minutes. It was flat calm and the tide was coming in and the boathouse behind her had its doors shut and no light in it for the first time in her ten years. And at about ten past ten she heard boots on the slip, and did not turn round, and Ruaridh came and sat down on the second bollard, which was not his, because he had never had one.