I have sensed him (when I allowed myself to do so, until now at the edge of my vision) as weak, vulnerable, his defining quality being an inability to save himself from drowning. He hasn’t done anything to alter this impression, not since 1978. From the age of nine he became meek and unassuming. Of course he did. In nearly four decades he hasn’t opened his mouth, hasn’t thrown his weight around. Inevitably, unable to impose any fresher identity, he can become a nondescript cipher in a corner.
The school reports from 1978 tell a different story: he wasn’t like that at the time. Despite the coded evasions of the form—After a rather erratic start…—what builds is a picture of a boy who was overconfident, competitive, but also properly homesick. The teachers try to help him settle. They give him a new name to make him feel he belongs. On his tombstone he is Nicholas Paul Beard, and he is Nicky in my memory. At boarding school he becomes Beard minimus, defined by Latin as much as by his family. After Beard major and Beard minor (me), Nicky is the latest and least of the Beard brothers.
No wonder he’d want to make his presence felt. His first term’s report is accompanied by a letter from the headmaster, in which the school secretary’s heavy hand has bashed indents in the paper with the hard-type keys:
20th May 1977
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Beard,
I do like the latest Beard model, Mark III. But, this one is a little too self assured I believe and hope that time will wear him down just a little in this respect before he emerges as charmingly frank and straightforward as Mark I. I have been encouraged by the way he has settled down here. He has seemingly taken all well in his stride. We look forward to some very happy days with him here.
Yours sincerely,
Geoff Walters
Nicky’s schooling unfolds as a contest between the self-assurance and the wearing down. In the reports settled down reads like a boarding-school euphemism, meaning the tipping point at which Nicky stops weeping for his mummy and daddy, who for his own benefit have lured him away from the home comforts of his bedroom to abandon him in an unheated mock-Tudor mansion. He’ll soon overcome his sadness. And that, from the school’s point of view, is greatly to be encouraged.
Spring Term 1978, with fewer than six months to live: He works well and settles once the “goodbyes” are well over and done with. The hint is there again, the nudge: Nicky does not settle immediately, as one would hope. He does eventually forget the wrench of saying goodbye, but how long that will take is anybody’s guess. Days, probably, for the farewells to genuinely fade, but possibly weeks.
The teachers are less evasive when they later come to write their letters of condolence. The boy is dead, so no harm in admitting that he once openly showed emotion. I remember how touching it was to see him biting his lip and fighting back tears at the beginning of term at school and then bravely facing facts.
And in 1978 the facts to be faced were that your parents have left the premises without you. The facts at Pinewood School were that none of these boarders would be going home for at least a month, and then only for Sunday lunch and back in time for chapel (for the second time that day). The way to handle emotion was to fight back the tears.
Please, Nicky, be brave and don’t make a scene. I once saw a small boy screaming while horizontal, both hands clamped to the door-handle of a Volvo while his father tried to pull him off by the legs. That boy didn’t look very settled, not as the new term began. He had fallen short of the required standard: biting his lip and bravely facing facts.
Now that the school reports bring this to mind, I do remember Nicky being homesick. He could be sniveling and weak. I despised his weakness, because I was weak and miserable too. Unlike him, however, I knew how to hide it. The surest way was to mock the youngest boarders, those in with Nicky and he in with them. Crybabies blubbing for Mummy; look at Beard min—he’s a blubber. Nicky hadn’t the first idea about suppressing emotion. He was an embarrassment, and two years was a dangerous-sized gap between us. I was old enough to feel superior, big enough not to fear retaliation.
As a summary of his character at that age, Nicky was excellent at sport and lessons, but he missed his mummy. I missed my mummy, but I wasn’t going to show it. According to the school magazine—and I’d borrowed 1975–1980 from the obliging music teacher, Mr. Field—my childhood was full of busy displacement activities, not just competitive running and jumping but also the drawing of a pen-and-ink knight in a stained-glass window, an artwork of which I was inordinately proud. The school kept body and mind fully occupied: in 1978 the magazine had a crossword in Latin.
Not recorded in the magazine for public consumption was the way we taunted a classmate of Nicky’s for smelling of urine; another (a day boy) we mocked without mercy for his anti-allergy lunchbox containing Mummy’s special sandwiches. We loathed the taint of home on anyone new, the reminder that somewhere close they had loving parents who respected their childish needs.
Nicky is soon compensating in the same way I did, by proving how strong he is. By Spring 1978 he’s first in his term’s Final Order, and first in every subject except Maths (fourth). First in French, History, Geography, Scripture—all first. First in English, and that’s my subject, where he is never satisfied unless he is top! He has a somewhat arrogant manner, but why shouldn’t he, because he’s active and well coordinated, and always gives 100% effort.
I end up trusting what his teachers say because this level of scrutiny is rare. Nine adult professionals think carefully about my living, breathing brother and three times a year they deliver a judgment in writing. No change goes unobserved. He’s a terrible loser, is Nicholas Beard, Beard minimus. From this distance I admire his competitive spirit and his will to win: he must learn to curb his temper when things do not go his way. But I doubt I admired him at the time.
He must learn to accept defeat more graciously when he meets it. He holds his own and does well to compete with others who are often physically much larger than he is. Like an older brother, for example. I start to hesitate about taking on my younger crybaby brother, because with his relentless 100 percent effort and his coordination and competitive spirit, he’s in with a chance of winning.
Stubborn little bastard, yes, I remember that now. Wiry, indefatigable, he keeps on coming. And, Christ, the tears and tantrums when the natural order prevails and I’m top dog. Hard cheese, suck it up. I’m older and bigger than you. I’m alive.
A mile on from the wooden post announcing Tregardock Beach is a second Tregardock marker pointing left along a narrow track. Yesterday, in the car, I couldn’t find the word, let alone the place. Today the National Trust is leaving nothing to chance. Tregardock Beach is aggressively signposted. Turn left here.
I turn right and walk uphill, away from the booming ocean, and within twenty minutes I reach a farmhouse at the end of a narrow lane. I wonder about parking, for a lumbering Vauxhall Viva or a ’77 Jaguar, an S-plate special. Tight into the hedge, I reckon, as close as the paintwork allows, keeping the lane free for farm vehicles. Four boys tumble out of the lane-side door. The boot is stuffed with bags of rolled-up towels, a wicker basket with the picnic in tin foil and Tupperware, buckets and spades, cricket bat.
Leave the beach ball, more trouble than it’s worth. Everyone ready? Then away we go.
But first, these many years later, a deep breath. From here where the cars park it’s a fair old trek to the sea, and I identify a possible cause for drowning right there. A nine-year-old boy with skinny legs exhausted from the walking, the running, the cricket, and therefore lacking power in his swimming kick. The Beard family’s grand outing to Tregardock Beach, at the pace of the slowest walker (Jem, 6), began with a twenty-minute hike. Twenty-five, if we keep testing the grass seeds and refuse to do as we’re told.
Before I set out for the beach, I try to flatten the emotion by telling myself this isn’t the first time since 18th August 1978 that I’ve been in this place, about to follow this path. Today is not an extraordinary day, and I have nothing to fea
r. That’s what I tell myself, then I wait for the payback from years of emotional repression. The dividend for shutting down emotions as a routine response is invincibility at moments of stress. This is a psychological gamble, in England embraced as a gift. The English don’t fall apart, our most prized national characteristic. Look at history and see how economically productive this quality can be.
Except now is the first time I’ve stood at the top of this path since 1978. I can’t predict what will happen when reality collides with memory. For now, on this sunny Cornish morning, I’ve put aside the paper evidence to search out and try to inhabit an elusive first person, the me who long ago was here.
The track starts at a kissing gate, with rusted hinges as old as I am. Then leads downhill along the side of a field, the wild grasses ripe and tempting. I strip the seeds neatly into my fingers, and liberate them into the field on the breeze.
A stream gurgles to the left of the track, and then the track itself becomes slate bedrock through a head-high tunnel of gorse. I cross the coastal path, where I first turned right and away from the sea, I keep moving toward a gully cutting a V in the cliffs. As I reach the indent a view of the Atlantic opens, and below me the crumbling track traverses a steep incline, angling toward water breaking on the slick black sealskin of rocks.
I start crying. Just like that, no warning. Keep walking, keep moving. I don’t know what the sudden tears mean, but they’re strangely welcome. Why else did I come here? I take a step and another step down the slope and now I’m blubbing my heart and eyes out, but my legs keep moving, then I call out loud for my mum. Out loud into the air over the edge of the island landmass, over the heaving sea, and this spasm of harsh salt tears lasts roughly fifteen seconds. I don’t have the strength, I imagine, to let go for any longer. I cut out my weeping and wipe my eyes and tell myself to shut the fuck up. This is no way to deal with emotional stress, or not a way I recognize. I wipe my eyes and pull myself together, because this is the place.
The end of the track is marked by an orange-and-white life buoy stuck on a wooden post. Public Rescue Equipment In case of Emergency call 999 and ask for the Coastguard. Maybe my dad’s letter had some effect, especially if the previous sign said Run Up to the Farm and Knock on the Door. I check my phone: no signal. So in case of emergency I may be running to the farm. Please take your rubbish home with you.
To the right of the life buoy are steps carved into solid rock, with the route to the beach indicated by a small yellow arrow. On this particular day, at this time, the steps descend into a surge of ocean. Not a single inch of sand is visible, only white water on rock.
This is definitely the place, but the tide is in. I hadn’t considered tides. I’m an inland visitor ignorant of the sea, and of the daily rhythms that expose then submerge my long-lost Tregardock, revealing the beach then hiding it from view again. I ought to stand by the life buoy and wait for this analogy to germinate, for the afternoon tide to roll back and exhibit the secret expanse of beach, disclosing my past, laying bare my memories. The natural world offers up these correlations effortlessly—the outside is the inside, because everything connects. What is now submerged will soon become apparent.
Gradually, even as I wait and watch, a thin stretch of wet brown sand shows itself, but I’ve seen enough for today. The beach looks like it may emerge as huge, just as I remember, especially if the water recedes beyond the brackets of each individual cove. A vast strand may appear here, proof that my memory is accurate, but the tide has only recently turned and it’s far too early to say for sure.
Besides, I have a meeting arranged at The Mill. After the passing of so much time, I’d rather not be late.
From his schoolbooks I know what Nicky had in his mind when he died. Seven is three less than ten; Old King Cole was a merry old soul; the wild duck or mallard lives mostly on water, and the female is not so bright.
Name Beard min, Subject Words and Sentences, Form Transition A.
He knows the position of the polestar, and can spell pence and France and police. He can tell the time, as tested and ticked in his earliest English workbook—it is 4 o’clock and at 4 o’clock I have my tea. He has sufficient motor skills to cut out his footprint in colored card and measure its area at 118 square centimeters. His foot in April 1978 is about the height of a standard paperback book. He can follow instructions like draw a line 10 cm long, and has spent time on conundrums that are harder than at first they look: how many 2s in 12?
His schoolbooks, manufactured by Philip and Tacey Ltd, England, are bound in washed-out green or red card, and by the age of nine Nicky’s head is buzzing. His brain finds room for the history of Edward III, Possessive Adjectives in French, St. Aidan. He can tell right (5×5=25) from wrong (650−431=121).
Nicky leaves traces of his existence in diagrams, drawings, numbers, words. Look at him, making his mark, in pencil or washable ink, but what can be learned from schoolbooks? Answer the question with a complete sentence: the books may reveal the boy who Beard min was.
Only Nicky was just doing what his teachers had told him to do. As I flip through the books, learning little I didn’t already know, I start to feel that every hour Nicky spent in a classroom was wasted. At some point, all children at school feel this, usually while staring out of a window at a tree, and every child is right at the time. Life can end abruptly, without warning, at any given moment. Instead of rote-learning Farming in the British Isles, Nicky would have existed more richly outside, throwing his penknife into the bark of a giant redwood. I don’t know if he owned a penknife. I didn’t find one in the attic.
Subject English Composition. I have a prejudice in favor of the truths offered by fiction. I expect creative writing to offer insights into character and worldview, so I put aside Maths and Geography to pay closer attention to English and Word Building and All My Own Stories. These books have been locked away for decades, where no one has thought to read them. Like unearthed sacred texts, I discover, they never quite deliver on their promise of revelation.
Much of Nicky’s writing is handwriting practice, about Lucy Locket who lost her pocket but Kitty Fisher found it. Nothing in it, nothing in it, Just the ribbon round it. Otherwise, his stories have a simplicity that suggests he struggles with the slipperiness of fiction: One day a cat and a dog went for a walk down the road they met a man the man said where are you going the cat said down the road.
Nicky is more naturally a chronicler, a nonfiction specialist:
Yesterday we went to Lydiard Park and we played rugby and Timmy and Peter won. Then Timmy said I would like to go home so we went home.
For Nicky, these true-life adventures are recent, and always will be. I trust him to document domestic life in Swindon in the 1970s as if it were yesterday:
Yesterday we went to Gran because Mummy went to Little Cote then we came home with Jeremy then we had some sandwiches and we watched TV.
We had some sandwiches and we watched TV. That’s the way we lived, and Nicky feels no urgent pressure to elaborate.
In the absence of revealing fictions, I hope for doodles—free-range thoughts trapped like fossils in the strata of yellowing pages. I look for Nicky’s inner life betrayed by unguarded moments, and eventually I’m rewarded. At the back of an early English schoolbook from when he was about seven, I find five loose sheets of Basildon Bond. Nicky has been daydreaming. Yes, I think, here at last, his authentic character exposed. He has decided, for no obvious reason, to judge his family, though in pencil, as if not entirely confident of his verdicts. This is new: he’s experimenting out of school on loose sheets of letter-writing paper.
Each member of the family has a separate page, though “Mummy” and “Daddy” are blank. Perhaps the task of providing an honest description of his parents was too daunting for a seven-year-old (or a son of any age, for that matter). As for brothers, Nicky decided his observations were worth putting on record. We each have our separate page:
Timothy
Fat well you can’
t say that.
Very untidy but allright
Supose he’s all right.
I’ve studied Nicky’s end-of-term reports, and now in his schoolbooks he reports right back, making a note on each of his brothers. It’s only fair he should have his say. Jem is five and still at home, but Nicky has an opinion:
Jeremy
Adventurous he’ll be allright
When he grows up
He likes to get ahead with everything.
Nicholas Beard—Beard minimus—knows his own mind:
Richard
Tough and stupid
Sporting but silly
Very much like Timothy
Thanks, Nicky, you’re entitled to your opinion, which I won’t dismiss simply because you’re dead. Stupid?
Tough and stupid. Emotionally, yes, fair comment and true and increasingly evident. Sporting but silly, and my silliness will allow sport to distract me for years to come, without end in fact. Very much like Timothy. I was never fat, so I must be allright, supose he’s all right.
Though Nicky never actually goes so far as to write that down, not on the page he dedicates to me.
The holiday home we rented in the summer of 1978 features in contemporary newspaper reports of the drowning—His parents, staying at The Mill, Port Isaac, were on the beach nearby when tragedy struck on a sunny afternoon (Western Evening Herald, 19th August 1978). From the Swindon attic, I also had the page of directions handwritten by Dad.
I’d checked on Google, but the Cornwall Tourist Board had no Port Isaac holiday house registered as The Mill. Instead the Internet gave me The Mill, Port Isaac, as a “small working farm.” The owners had a barn conversion to let, and inquiries were welcome. I’d therefore picked up the phone and inquired about the barn; I explained about the dead brother. The owners said drop in, come and see us any time.
The Day That Went Missing Page 5