A life washed away
When nine-year-old Nicky drowned on holiday in Cornwall, his family never mentioned him again. Forty years on, his brother confronts the terrible grief to ask why
BOOK OF THE WEEK THE DAY THAT WENT MISSING by Richard Beard (Harvill Secker, £14.99)
AN UNSPEAKABLE tragedy befell the Beard family from Swindon on august 18, 1978, during their holiday in north Cornwall. nine-year-old nicky, enjoying one final play in the waves after a blissful day on Tregardock beach, near Port Isaac, was swept off his feet and drowned.
He was the third of four brothers. richard, aged 11, was also in the water, but fought the powerful undertow and made it safely back to shore.
This captivating book, both heartrending and jaw-dropping, unfolds like a detective story, as the grown-up richard, now a highly regarded novelist, forensically investigates the circumstances and aftermath of his brother’s death all those years ago.
He is moved to do so because that word ‘unspeakable’, so often and so blithely coupled with tragedy, applies literally to the Beard family. after his death, nicky was all but airbrushed from history. Both parents, and all three surviving brothers, went into collective denial.
Indeed, before embarking on this book, richard hadn’t so much as mentioned nicky’s name for almost four decades. He didn’t go to the funeral, didn’t know the date of nicky’s death, or even of his birth. He could hardly remember him at all.
So when he visits his widowed mother and says, after a few niceties about his own children, ‘I want to talk about nicky’s death’, he is forcing open a locked cupboard of repressed emotions.
She replies that she has wanted to open up about nicky for years, and shares an abiding sad memory: of going to the butcher’s in Swindon shortly afterwards and hating the sound of the number as she ordered five, rather than six, lamb chops. But richard has heard that story before. It was always the one permitted reference to his dead brother.
He thinks that this ‘single domestic memory stands in for every sudden grief, large or small, that has since been denied or suppressed’.
What follows is a compelling portrait not just of a particular middle-class family unable to emote, but of a time — the late Seventies — and to an extent, of a buttoned-up nation.
The Beards’ has been a peculiarly English form of repression, no doubt compounded by the fact all four boys were packed off to boarding school at an early age.
In fact, the school is another source of missing information. ‘another reason not to die young: what will survive of us is our school reports,’ notes richard, wryly, as he roots through nicky’s belongings in his mother’s attic.
What is striking, again and again, is how time plays tricks with the memory. richard invites his two brothers to open up, too, and finds that their memories differ wildly, both of nicky generally and of the day he died in particular.
‘These variations emphasise the distance between us, because as a family we’ve never spoken enough to agree a story,’ he concludes.
Their elderly mother remembers nicky as difficult and naughty. ‘He was either going to be a banker or a murderer,’ she says. She also recalls him being ‘hopeless’ at games. But he wasn’t; those school reports attest to his prize-winning athleticism, and he emerges from this book as a likeable, lively little boy.
The photograph of nicky reproduced on the jacket shows a notably good-looking child, sitting on a rock gazing out to sea. It was taken on the last day of his short life.
Yet this isn’t a maudlin or even an especially sentimental account. richard seems almost
to enjoy the irony that his Beard great-grandfather not only lived well past his 100th birthday, but even features in the book of Guinness World Records, for boasting the longest recorded working-span (as a builder, from 1896 to 1981).
He is also harshly unforgiving towards his late father, evidently a remote, uptight man (who later in life asked for a knife and fork in Burger King) and appears to have been more in denial than anyone.
From 1978 until the day he died, in 2011, Richard’s father never had a single conversation with his wife about Nicky — his favourite son, the boy he called Nick-Nack — even though Richard unearths correspondence with the district council in Cornwall, concerning his pained ‘observations’ about the beach where his son had died a month earlier. Richard also finds a letter his dad wrote to Nicky at school, with a poignantly ghastly PS: ‘I expect you are swimming like a fish now.’ Richard’s riposte is merciless. ‘Obviously not, Dad, but because you’d sent him away you had to guess, and by the time you found out the truth it was too late. Nicky was not swimming like a fish. He was floating face-down in the sea, like a plant.’ He knows the detail because he returns to Cornwall and tracks down the lifeboatman who pulled Nicky from the water. He also finds the schoolfriend of his older brother Tim, who was with them on holiday, and whose own piercing memory of the morning after the tragedy was a family game of Scrabble in which he wondered whether there was a word spelled MIQI, and was mortified when Tim thought he’d said Nicky.
THE one discovery that really pulls the reader up short, as it does Richard himself, is that, following the funeral back in Swindon, the Beards returned to Cornwall and resumed their holiday. ‘To the same house?’ an incredulous Richard asks his mother. ‘We had it booked,’ comes the reply.
But we shouldn’t rush to moral judgment. That was a different England, long before we learnt to wear our hearts on our sleeves.
Besides, it’s not as though the Beards didn’t grieve, in their own singular way, for their missing son and brother.
By the end of 1979, they had become enthusiastic fosterers, with a new baby arriving every six weeks or so, ‘though sometimes if they were handicapped or black they stayed for longer’.
In due course two girls were adopted. The five lamb chops became seven.
So, clearly, both before the tragedy and after, the Beards were at least as decent as they were dysfunctional. Maybe that’s the best any of us can really say about the families we come from.
Mercifully, most of us aren’t tested by a trauma such as this one.