The lifeboat box on the boathouse wall is emptied at close and counted, because it is the station's money and every coin is logged. Every morning there is money in it. Wet. Crusted with salt, green on the copper, and when we dry it and read it, the dates are the years. Every wreck on the station's wall has a year and every year is in the box, one coin each, and the box is inside a locked door.
I am the station's treasurer, which is a volunteer's job, and the collection box is the first thing I count and the last thing I understand.
The box.
A lifeboat shaped box on the wall inside the boathouse, by the crew room door, that visitors put coins in when the house is open in the day. It is emptied at close, by me, into a bag, and counted, and the count is logged, and the box is left empty and the house is locked.
In the morning there is money in it.
The coins.
Wet. Not damp, wet, with seawater in the bottom of the box. Crusted. The copper ones green, the silver ones dull, the way coins are when they have been in the sea a long time and come out of it. I dry them and clean them because I want to read them, and I read them, and the dates are a list.
I did not see it at first. I saw old coins. Then I put the dates in order and went to the wall, where the station's history is, every service since the station opened and every wreck on this coast, and every wreck has a year, and every year was in the box. One coin. A coin from 1859. From 1881. 1908. 1927. 1953. 1962. 1981. And the years between, for the wrecks the station went to and the ones it did not reach, and the list on the wall and the list in the box are the same list.
Every morning. The same years. The coins are different, the dates are not.
What has been checked.
The box, replaced, a new one, sealed. The coins are in it.
The boathouse, at night, by me, on a chair by the box. At about two the box made a sound. A coin going into a collection box is a sound everybody knows, the drop and the roll, and it made that sound, and there was nobody at it, and it made it again, and again, at intervals, the intervals of people in a queue, each one stepping up and putting in a coin and stepping away, and I sat two feet from it and counted the drops and there were as many as there are years on the wall, and the floor under the box was wet, in patches, the shape of boots, a line of them, going from the slipway doors to the box and back.
Who.
All of them. That is the only answer. The coast has been taking people off boats for as long as there have been boats and the station has been going out for them for as long as there has been a station and the ones it brought home and the ones it did not and the ones it never reached are on the wall, by year, and they are coming up the slip at night, in a queue, with a coin each, from the year they went in, and putting it in the box.
It is what you do. You put a coin in the lifeboat box.
What is done about it.
The morning coins are logged as an anonymous donation and the total over the year is a sum I have had to explain to the regional office, and I have said that the station receives a nightly donation in historic coinage from an anonymous source, and they have asked whether it is legal tender, and I have said, not for a long time.
What I do.
I keep the books.
You thank a donor. That is the job. A coin in the box gets a nod from whoever is in the house and a big cheque gets a letter, and nobody has ever thanked these.
So I have put a book by the box. A donor book, the kind we use for the open days, where people sign and say where they are from. I leave it open, with a pen, at night, and in the morning there are names. In different hands, some of them the hands of people who did not write much, some careful, in pencil and in a blue ink that I cannot buy, one a night, working down the list on the wall in order, and the first was from 1859 and it was a name and a vessel and the words, thank you for trying.
I have the book in the safe. When it is full I am going to put it on the wall, beside the list, because the list is the station's account of them, and the book is theirs of us, and I think the box on the wall has been a ledger all along, and I have only now started to keep the other side of it.