MY BROTHER, THE BOY WHO WAS WASHED AWAY
Moments after this photo was taken, nine-year-old Nicholas was dead... seldom to be spoken of again. Forty years on, his brother set out to uncover the truth about that tragic day and, with aching poignancy, confront the ghosts of his past
I smash my arms and hands into the water, my feet thrashing I take one more step and suddenly I’m blubbing my heart out
ABRIGHT seaside afternoon in the summer of 1978, and I am on a broad stretch of beach in Cornwall with my brother Nicholas. I am 11, he is nine. We clamber round some rocks to a cove. The two of us are in the sea, jumping as the waves roll in. Until now I have tried not to know this and many times I’ve squeezed shut my eyes and closed the memory down.
We are having fun, buffeted and breathless. Suddenly he is out of his depth. I think I try to push him back towards the shore, with my toes touching the sand and my mouth barely above the water. Then he is further out than me. His neck is stretched to keep his nose and mouth in the air, his mouth in a tight line to keep out the seawater.
I cannot reach him and I don’t want to go in deeper. He tries to put his foot down and his head goes under. Now I, too, am out of my depth.
I decide to leave him. A conscious decision. I kick my legs and launch into a desperate crawl, face submerged. I smash my arms and hands into the water, head down, feet thrashing, because I understand that for me it is now or never. Faster! Harder!
I understand with absolute clarity that I have one go at this. Fail to make headway and I will drown.
When my legs next dropped down, my feet touched sand. I don’t remember looking back, or arriving at our family’s encampment on the main stretch of beach. I was crying, I was running. My face was out of control.
That’s close to all I know. I can’t remember everything and I can’t erase everything, however fiercely I’ve tried.
In nearly 40 years, either alone or with my family, the anniversary of my younger brother’s death has never been acknowledged or commemorated. Which is an epic level of denial. As it is, the older I get the harder it is to pretend that denial works as a strategy for sustaining inner peace. The memories I’ve wanted to suppress refuse to stay down.
We erased the accident at the beach, and along with the pain we effectively deleted Nicky the person. We may not have meant to, but we did. NOW, however late in the day, I want to conduct an inquest to find out when, where and how Nicky died. If I find the route to the correct door in my brain, an intact memory may make itself known.
Mum will be able to help. I phone ahead to warn her I’m coming. I don’t say why. In Mum’s bungalow, I hold back because first we have to set up camp. Tea, biscuits, the tray on a table. She knows I want something. I eat a chocolate biscuit. I’m stuck for an opening line because I’ve spent so many years not asking this question, but I’m in the mood for straightening stuff out.
‘Lately I’ve been behaving strangely,’ I say. ‘I want to talk about Nicky’s death.’
Mum has wanted to open up about Nicky for years and barely knows where to start. At the butcher’s, as it happens. One of the hardest times, she tells me, was when she forced herself out to the shops. ‘Five lamb chops.’ Five, not six. The first time she came home without any dinner for Nicky, it almost broke her heart. ‘Mum, I don’t know the date.’ ‘18th August 1978,’ she says. I check: I’m not falling apart. The inquest has begun and the past can be pulled back into being.
‘He was a difficult child,’ Mum says, ‘a naughty child. He was either going to be a banker or a murderer.’ Why would Mum say that? ‘He wasn’t like you,’ she goes on, unstoppable now. ‘He was hopeless at games, and not very brainy. At cricket he tried, but he was out first ball. I’d go to watch his match, and he’d drop a catch.’
Which might help explain why he died. He didn’t have the co-ordination to fight against the water. Though mostly it’s because he was nine years old.
‘He looked completely different to you three,’ Mum says, referring to myself and my other two brothers. ‘Huge brown eyes and thin black hair.’
I let a pause develop, because I can be unkind. ‘Your dad was definitely his father,’ my mum says. ‘You can be sure of that.’
In the years after Nicky’s death, I never once heard my dad speak my brother’s name. Whatever memories or mementoes Dad kept were his alone, and his was the example we followed. Now, several years since Dad died, I can rummage around his study. I pull out a green plastic bag from a filing cabinet. Mum watches from the doorway.
‘In the attic we have a red suitcase full of Nicky’s stuff,’ Mum says. ‘As well as the papers in that bag.’
I separate out the contents: school reports, a vinyl-covered ring-binder clamping a thick collection of commiseration letters and a Certified Copy of an Entry of Death – 18/8/78, Dead on Arrival at Stratton Hospital, Bude. Cause of Death: Drowning in the Sea. Accident.
I climb into the loft space. No red suitcase. ‘I’m sure it’s there,’ Mum calls up. ‘Shiny, and square.’ ‘What’s inside it?’
‘His letters, his schoolbooks. His blue cricket hat.’
‘What blue cricket hat?’ I don’t always recognise Mum’s parallel version of the past. I want documents, evidence, objects, but there’s no red suitcase. I do find loose letters, a few photographs, his blue school blazer.
Encouraged, I search on. I don’t find a carefully tended shrine, but nor has Nicky been systematically erased. He has slipped to the bottom of cardboard boxes and into the linings of trunks. I keep finding pieces of him. His birth certificate, his size 3 cricket bat, six Premium Bonds, his old school cap. The family has shared a desire to postpone, and possibly delay for ever, the acknowledgment of Nicky’s existence. And therefore also his non-existence.
School reports offer half-truths at best, but I’m grateful for any source that can tell me more about Nicholas Beard.
It seems within a year of starting school, Mum’s ‘difficult child’, doomed to a life of banking or homicide, is a ‘delightful and able boy’.
In 1977 Nicky starts boarding at Pinewood School, aged eight and a bit, and in Form 1 is ‘a little overconfident’. By the end of the year,
he has risen to second in a class of ten. He is ‘a natural cricketer’. Mum has it all wrong.
A banker? He was a caring and helpful young pupil. A murderer? He was a lively, cheerful boy. We forget. Nicholas was a brainbox with a talent for sport. I’m glad the school reports bear witness, because Nicky is otherwise ghostly in his absence.
IT’S time to revisit the scene. I walk along the coastal path feeling physically sick. I sincerely want to find Tregardock Beach, and the smaller cove beyond it. I want to stop guessing, or imagining. The path dips and a track to the left feels familiar. I walk along it, heart thudding.
I did not imagine I would react like this. I’m terrified of moving closer to the past. I want to keep the grief at a distance. TREGARDOCK, 1 MILE. The letters are burnt into a wooden signpost.
I try to flatten the emotion, because the British don’t fall apart, our most prized national characteristic. I start crying. I don’t know what the sudden tears mean, but they’re strangely welcome.
I take another step and now I’m blubbing my heart and eyes out, then I call, just once, for my mum. This spasm of harsh salt tears lasts roughly 15 seconds. I don’t have the strength, I imagine, to let go for any longer. I cut out my weeping, wipe my eyes and pull myself back together.
The end of the track is marked by an orange-and-white lifebuoy stuck on a wooden post. To the right of the lifebuoy are steps carved into solid rock.
This is definitely the place, but the tide is in. I ought to wait for the tide to roll back, but I’ve seen enough for today. Besides, I have a meeting arranged.
IN MY memory, The Mill, near Port Isaac, is a grey holiday house in a green valley. Mum remembered a cottage covered in clematis. But at the end of the lane I park outside a rectangular, white-painted farmhouse with green shutters and guttering.
I follow the owners politely along a flag-stoned path to the open kitchen door and feel a flood of relief. Right house, definitely. My memory has some of the facts right, which is reassuring, like the layout of the dining room. I stand in a shaft of sunlight.
Then I see it. A flush rises into my face. My heart skitters. My dad stands with the light of the kitchen doorway behind him. He is making a speech. I remember this. This must have been the day after. What did Nicky mean to me? That’s Dad’s prompt. Think of a memory worth writing down. Everyone is waiting for my contribution, but I’m not ready for this. I don’t know what Nicky meant to me, or what I’m supposed to say.
‘He was really good at sport,’ I said, because I wanted to please. ‘He was always generous in defeat.’ What a lie that was. I choked back tears, then I was sobbing, which put an end to my charade. Nicky was not a good loser.
The day after was far too soon for me to be saying what I felt expected to say. Right from the start I was open to evasion and repression.
NICKY died on a Friday. On the Sunday we drove home to Swindon, and we broke the journey at Exeter services for a miserable fish-andchips, our usual motorway treat. Nicky’s funeral was on the Thursday. That same evening we made the long drive back to the Cornish coast: our holiday wasn’t yet over.
I have deleted the memory of that additional week, and I can only imagine my parents were temporarily deranged. Six days after Nicky drowned we unpacked our bags, the same bags, in the upstairs bedroom at The Mill, the same room we’d shared with Nicky. What were they thinking of?
‘Did we go back to the beach, to Tregardock?’ ‘We did, yes,’ Mum says. ‘What did we do when we got there?’
‘We were a family on holiday. We acted normally, as if nothing had happened.’ ‘We must have been sad.’ ‘I don’t think we were.’ Nicky had drowned in the sea at the end of the second week of a four-week holiday, the house was paid for in advance. We’d missed nearly a quarter of our summer break for the funeral. But we might as well finish what we’d started. Everyone was performing; no one was happy. And so a disastrous template took shape.
Mum says: ‘I wrote a letter from Port Isaac to your gran, you should read it.’
Every new discovery feels like a miracle.
‘Dear Mother, It may have seemed a strange decision to come back here, but we would have been smothered by telephone calls, friends, letters. This way we have been able to come to terms as much as possible, in our own way. We have even managed to go to the beach, I can’t tell you the agonies we went through.’
Better to ignore the upheaval. Go back to the beach. Finish the holiday, start a new term at school as if nothing had happened.
‘I did break down,’ Mum says, ‘about three months later. One day I stopped what I was doing and I cried for a couple of hours.’ ‘And then? ’ ‘You have to take a deep breath and get on with it.’
I COME to Tregardock to revisit the death but also the refusal to grieve, and I come to seek out raw feelings of the type I’ve denied for so long.
I stand in the shallows and feel the undertow beneath my feet. I see a backbone of rocks reaching into the sea. If Dad had scrambled to the last rock along, he’d have been 20 metres from Nicky’s body, at the most.
Jump, Dad. Leap in and stop just looking. Maybe his failure to jump explains his later silence, and why he made questions feel unwelcome.
Since the age of 11 I’ve also dodged the pain, and my interests haven’t changed: cricket, reading, coming top of the class. I have stalled at 1978, as did Nicky.
I’d like to grow up, but I don’t want to leave Nicky behind, again.
Nicky’s life and death is not a story with a resolution. What I have is my inquest, and the carefully curated relics of Nicky’s brief existence.
I don’t believe the original red case existed, except as a longed-for treasure chest that stood in for all that was lost.
As a final gesture, I buy an expensive red steamer trunk and put in the correspondence and school reports. I put in the cricket bat and some unused name tapes, the photos and Premium Bonds.
I cover Nicky’s belongings with his blazer, then his school cap and his blue cricket hat.
Finally, I put in the manuscript of my book, and close the lid.
This is Nicky, his life and his death, as far as we can know.
We buried him – and then returned to finish our family holiday