In Running for the Hills, his first book, Horatio Clare lyrically describes growing up on a dilapidated sheep farm, a childhood with no television but surrounded by books – among them novels of the sea by Joseph Conrad and Nicholas Monserrat. Horatio has since gone on to write many more vivid and compelling books of nature and travel.In Down to the Sea in Ships, he records two extraordinary voyages aboard container ships, depicting the people, the stories and the worlds of the trading seas. He was provoked to write his latest book when he interviewed an elderly security guard in Dover. He told him he had taken this minimum-wage job standing in the rain in the night “to make sure we’re looking after them”.
Horatio went on to listen to others involved in the story of the people who cross the Channel in death-trap dinghies – guards, rescuers, processors, volunteers, staff, drivers, refugees, services, out-sourced accommodation and transport company workers. They all explained to him that the entire story of the small boats is a lie.
“The crisis in the Channel is the greatest maritime search and rescue operation in the history of mankind,” Horatio writes in the print issue of The Tablet magazine this week.
“It’s Dunkirk all over again, only this time, the Great British public aren’t cheering the rescuers. When I was a lifeboatman we felt like heroes. All along the south coast, Border Force and the RNLI crew I interviewed do heroic work every single day and night, under horrendous pressure.
“You think your job is stressful? Try rescuing panicking parents, kids and babies from a sinking boat in fog and waves in the dark. But these Best-of-British heroines and heroes go to work with their heads bowed, hoping they won’t be abused by Nigel Farage and his trolls for being ‘a taxi service for migrants’.
How can we talk about hope, as a country, when we cannot even see our great deeds for what they are? Dover is not ‘up in arms’ over ‘immigration’ or ‘overwhelmed’ by ‘migrants’. The people of Dover are doing what they always have done, throughout British history. They are saving people from the sea.
“They are making sure – these extraordinary ordinary British people who are lied about and misrepresented by their own media – that when refugees get here they find the country they hoped for, the country they believed in.”