Photo: Mstyslav Chernov
I owe my life to a man called Jimmy.
On a cloudy day on a Whitstable beach he heard a shout from a boy whose brother had slipped beneath the water, the mop of his hair bobbing on its surface.
Jimmy’s response was instant.
Sprinting across the shingle, he dived straight into the waves in his work clothes and best watch, grabbed the child and pulled him to safety. Man and boy collapsed back on the beach, dripping and gasping.
Jimmy was my grandfather, the child he rescued my dad.
His action was driven by a simple truth – that a single human life is a profoundly precious thing.
The value of the life he saved that day is felt keenly, many miles and years away, down the generations, and wherever I call home.
Whatever our worldview, many of us share an unshakeable sense that when someone’s being sucked out to sea, you get up from where you’re sitting and do something.
That’s what happened a summer ago, in another epic rescue on an English beach.
At Durdle Door in Dorset, a powerful undercurrent pulled a swimmer out to sea. The waves were so wild that a rescuer was swept out, too, while holidaymakers stood helpless on the sand.
Then twenty of those watching started moving towards each other. Each found the arm of another, one holding the next steady as a human chain reached out into the surf.
Both lives were saved.
This extraordinary act by ordinary people shows what’s possible when we choose to commit and come together to protect life.
But a sense of shared humanity can seep away when individuals from a particular place or people group get depicted as a faceless, menacing mass.
Demonising narratives (‘invasion of our southern coast’, ‘swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean’, ‘marauding’ migrants*) can subtly and steadily shift the way people are seen – and the value attached to their lives.
(Like when Italian Roma sisters Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic went swimming one day on a Naples beach. The sea was rough and the current strong. After they got into difficulty, their lifeless bodies were heaved up on to the sand and left for collection while sunbathers sat feet away and continued to work on their tans.)
The ocean has been on the UK Home Secretary’s mind recently. She’s been working with legal experts to find an innovative way around existing international law so boats of people seeking refuge in the UK can be stopped in the Channel and sent back out into open sea.
That seems a pretty high-risk strategy when human lives are at stake.
Because the thing is those boats aren’t full of one-dimensional caricatures. They carry people as beloved as the boy on the Whitstable beach.
Like the 14-year-old from Mali who attempted the journey from north Africa to Italy a few years ago.
The waves were high, and they closed over the boat he was travelling in.
He sank to the sea floor, along with the school reports he’d stitched into his clothes, to show the Italians what a good student he was.
The sea is vast and salty. Like tears that will never stop.
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* ‘the invasion of our southern coast’ – Suella Braverman, October 2022
‘swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean’ – David Cameron, July 2015
‘desperate migrants marauding around the area’ – Philip Hammond, August 2015
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