Richard Beard
‘I feared d I was some me kind of monster r after my y brother’s ’s death’
It’s the end of a bright summer day on a Cornish beach. As the cricket bat and picnic remains are being gathered up, two brothers ask if they can have one last swim. The boys race round dark rocks out of sight and find their own little cove; the water is high, but they plunge into the waves.
Quite suddenly, the younger boy Nicholas, aged nine, is out of his depth. He struggles to find solid ground but the undertow drags him out. Richard, 11, is stronger. He sees his brother’s desperate flailings and knows they are both about to be fatally overwhelmed. He manages to save himself, to get to the sand and run for help, but it is too late for Nicky. Very quickly, he drowns.
“He’s in the water! He’s in the water!” Richard cries as he reaches the adults. “I tried to save him.” But did he? Distressed and scared, that is what he told his parents, grandparents and two other brothers when he came gasping back to their family camp on Tregardock beach. It is a story that has served for nearly 40 years but it does not hold up well.
The novelist Richard Beard, now 50, has spent two years piecing together the short life of his lost brother – the boy who was deliberately erased from the family’s collective memory like a stain after the accident. He says the refusal of grief was wearing him down. “As I get older, denial is harder to sustain. I have to admit uneasiness and unfinished business.”
Probing as a detective, Beard began to reconstruct the accident of August 18 1978, and the appalling pretence that followed it. To begin with, he did not even know the date of the drowning, let alone the name of the beach. His own memory, before and after being in the water, was a total blank. Patiently and forensically, he gathered the relics of his brother’s existence from attics in the hope of restoring Nicky as a person, not just as someone “whose only role in life is to be dead”. He talked to people who were there that day. Cross-examined his mother. Found the Port Isaac lifeboatman who had three times tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Looked up the newspaper reports. Examined the meteorological records. And he kept going back to Tregardock beach – not just to understand the tragedy, but in the hope of finding some feelings after years of emotional lock-down. “I feared that I was some kind of monster; that we all were,” he tells me in a voice flat with exhaustion. “When I did start feeling emotional about it, I was relieved. It was a relief to know we weren’t machines.” The Day That Went Miss Missing indictment of the old-school English way of dealing with grief. Beard believes all his other books over the past 20 years, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, were a preparation for this one. Indeed, his novel Lazarus Is Dead seems to prefigure it – the biblical character Lazarus goes swimming in Lake Galilee with his younger brother Amos. Amos drowns.
Beard, who has a creative writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia and is a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, explains: “I wanted to reorganise what I thought about Nicky, and writing was the natural way to do it.”
His most important witness was his mother, Felicity, now 74, but he was nervous of approaching her after so long a silence. Her initial flood of memory was promising, but it petered out. “She needed to be challenged. I do realise it was hard for her.” In her own shaky version of events, all the boys were safe on the beach, apart from Nicky – but she never contested Beard’s account that he and Nicky were in the water together.
By far her most shocking revelation was that on the day of Nicky’s funeral – which Richard and his brothers did not attend – the family repacked their car and headed back for the holiday cottage as if nothing had happened. “We had it booked,” she said. More appalling still, they went to the same beach. They played cricket on the sand. No one spoke of what had happened there a few days earlier. “I can only imagine my parents were temporarily deranged.”
Neither Beard nor his brothers, Tim and Jem, has any memory of that additional week. Taking their cue from their father Colin, they blocked it out as effectively as they went on to block out Nicky’s existence. “It was Dad running away from all the offers of condolence and help. It was also a very defiant thing to do: we will have a happy family holiday, even though one of our children is dead.”
Beard never really forgave his father for being the prime agent of repression. “He took the line of least resistance,” he says. “That was hard for my mum. She suffered through not being able to talk.”
When he was dying, his father reached out his hand, but Beard refused to take it. “It was just too late. I was angry with him at the end for finding this sentimental streak.”
By his son’s account, Colin Beard had much to feel guilty about. He had run to within 22 metres of his drowning son, yet did not jump in to save him. “I still don’t understand why he didn’t. All the witnesses who were there say the sea was not particularly rough. Maybe his failure to jump explains his later silence.”
Through his “inquest”, Beard has discovered things about himself that he would rather not have known. Impossible as it would have been to save his brother, he knows now, from re-enacting the detail, that he did not really try. He did not like his competitive younger brother very much. Perhaps he encouraged him into the waves to show off.
The death of his father in 2011 was the catalyst for Beard to begin exhuming the past. Until then, he had admitted to no one that he was in the sea with Nicky. Nor, as he struggled out, that he knew his brother was going under. “It was absolutely clear to me I was going to die,” he recalls. “I have an absolutely sharp memory of thinking: ‘It’s now or never, one last effort, that’s all you’ve got.’ ”
His mother, he says, is proud of the book. “She is glad we went through the process of allowing ourselves to grieve after all this time.” His brothers supplied what memories they could but “did not feel the same need to go back there as I did.”
These days, he says he “tries” to be good at talking about emotions – though he is reluctant to speak about his own three children; the suppressed trauma of Tregardock remains. When the book was finished, Beard locked the material remnants of Nicky’s life in a small red trunk, together with the manuscript.
“I thought I’d lock it in the box and it would go away. But the way you’ve been living for 40 years doesn’t suddenly stop. The old instincts – to close down, go into denial, stop feeling – are there and they have to be resisted. You grow into this idea that normal is not feeling anything.
“The trouble is, if you don’t allow yourself to feel grief and sadness, how can you feel love?”
‘I don’t understand why Dad didn’t jump. Maybe that explains his later silence’
To order The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard (Harvill Secker, £14.99) for £12.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk