Haunting memoir of brother’s death
THE DAY THAT WENT MISSING
by Richard Beard Harvill Secker, £14.99 IMAGINE being 11 years old. Imagine playing with your younger brother in the sea off a rocky beach in Cornwall. Imagine realising he is suddenly out of his depth, seeing the look of terror on his face as he slips beneath the water and drowns.
Now imagine trying to forget it all. Imagine never being allowed to grieve and instead being encouraged to act as if the day had never happened.
It sounds extraordinary but this is the story that Richard Beard tells in The Day That Went Missing, his memoir about the death of his nine-year-old brother Nicholas. In the summer of 1978 the Beard family of six – two parents and four sons – set off for a holiday in north Cornwall. On a day trip to Tregardock Beach, Richard and Nicholas split off from the family group to go for one last swim. While splashing about in the water the tide suddenly came in, leaving both of them struggling to stay afloat.
Richard, older and a better swimmer, made it back to the shore. Nicholas didn’t.
It was a tragic accident. But it is what happened next that compelled Richard, nearly 40 years later, to write this haunting and unsettling memoir. After the death the family returned to their home in Swindon for the funeral which the boys were not allowed to attend. Once that was finished they packed up the car and returned to the same cottage they had just left to finish their holiday. They even made another visit to the beach where Nicholas died.
This is just the beginning of what Richard describes as “an epic level of denial” as the family dealt with the death by essentially pretending nothing had happened.
It is a particularly English way of confronting grief: the very definition of a “keep calm and carry on” stiff upper lip.
“For nearly 40 years I haven’t said his name,” Richard says in
the opening pages. “In nearly 40 years, either alone or with family, the anniversary of my brother’s death has never been acknowledged or commemorated.”
However, as the years pass, Richard, a well-known author, begins to re-evaluate how the death has affected him.
“The older I get the harder it is to pretend that denial works as a strategy for sustaining inner peace,” he remarks wryly.
So he embarks on a voyage of discovery about his past, trying to “piece together the story we’d collectively conspired to forget”.
He is forensic in his approach, determined to pin down exactly what happened.
At the beginning he knows almost nothing. He cannot remember the date of Nicholas’s death. He can’t remember if a body was recovered. He can’t even remember his birthday.
Piecing the jigsaw together is difficult. People have different memories and conflicting views.
He speaks to family members, revisits the beach, scours desperately sad school reports (the brutal suppression of emotions first begins at boarding school, Richard points out) for information and reads local newspaper stories about the accident.
His father died in 2011 so Richard turns to his mother to fill in the details. While she can provide some of the facts, such as the date when Nicholas died, she also reveals that after the funeral she and her husband never spoke about Nicholas again, “not once”, although she believes her husband never got over Nicholas’s death.
His own memories ebb and flow and the harder he tries to produce a clear-cut version of the truth, the more it seems to evade him. All of our versions exist and for the same reason: we remember as much as we can bear, he concludes.
This is an absorbing, unsettling and at times painfully difficult read but by the end of the book it is clear that Richard found it cathartic to dig up the past.
His story is an important examination of grief and denial and the huge damage caused by the idea that feelings and emotions are something best packed away and ignored.