The Day That Went Missing

by Richard Beard Harvill Secker 288pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £12.99

One summer’s day in 1978, Richard Beard’s nine-year-old brother, Nicky (right), drowned while swimming on a Cornish beach. Beard, aged 11, was with him in the water, and came close to perishing as well. The Day That Went Missing is Beard’s account of the tragedy, and his attempt to understand his family’s odd reaction to it. “Some families mourn by talking, marking every anniversary,” said Caroline Moorehead in The Guardian. “The Beards chose silence.” Within days, the family had resumed their holiday; they even went to the same beach, and played cricket there. Nicky’s very existence was repressed; his name was barely ever mentioned. And Beard himself internalised these habits, burying his guilt at having “saved himself”, as well as his “anguish” and “sense of loss”. Only decades later, with his own life “floundering”, did Beard, now a respected novelist, decide to breach his “locked state of denial”. The result is a “touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past”.

The confessional memoir has become a staple of modern literature, said Andrew Holgate in The Sunday Times. “It is a safe bet, though, that few of the memoirs currently lining bookshop shelves will be as cumulatively powerful, or as brutally honest, as Beard’s interrogation of his suppressed past.” It is, indeed, an “absorbing read”, said Cathy Rentzenbrink in The Times. But by its end, I was torn between wanting to “give the 11-year-old Richard a big cuddle”, and finding his “relentlessly forensic” inquest into his family’s tragedy a “bit wearying”. The Day That Went Missing isn’t so much an examination of grief as a “study in repression”. It wasn’t clear to me, however, “how much the author realises it”.