So I did.
My dad’s directions—The Mill, Port Isaac, ROUTE—were on a piece of foolscap accounting paper folded in four. I smoothed out the creases, and the Cornish sunshine picked out splinters of copper in the black ink of the handwriting.
Dad was very exact, each instruction a separate pre-computer bullet point:—Recommend,—Follow,—A30,—Approx 3 miles…, and on this occasion he’d made an effort to render his dreadful handwriting legible, mostly by putting important words in capitals: RIGHT, STRAIGHT ON, ST. ENDELLION, DO NOT. The middle of the page is a drawing of the roads between the A39 and the coast, with the final destination marked like treasure, at the end of a dotted line with an X in a box: MILL!
This exclamation mark is out of character. The map must be intended for Mum, though I don’t know why they’d be traveling apart. For now, on the page, Dad is making an upbeat effort at a jaunty holiday spirit: “RIGHT to narrow lane and gate to field is STRAIGHT ON as shown. LEFT in field along hedge and through gate down gully—MILL AHOY!!”
The final flourish from a Swindon builder with no seafaring experience is cheerily nautical. Though to be fair, in 1978 he couldn’t have foreseen that the education he was buying for his children would later allow his second son to pick apart his language and punctuation, as used on a casual map. I was only eleven. My likeliest future still involved pricing labor and materials for kitchen conversions.
Could have, should have, but I can’t change the past. Following my Dad’s map, looking for The Mill, I go wrong. There’s no good reason to miss the turning because Dad has written an impeccable set of directions, but I end up in Port Quin, not where I want to be. I reread the final section, this time more carefully. Turn sharp RIGHT before Church. Trust your Dad to know where you’re going.
Like the map says, the narrow lane and gate to field is STRAIGHT ON as shown. I turn LEFT in the field along the hedge, over a cattle-grid and onto concrete strips for the tires. On the steep track down into the valley the spontaneous tears make a comeback. Cry and drive, and I’m sobbing for the unbidden idea of an eleven-year-old boy in a police car bumping over these ruts, heart overflowing with grief. Any eleven-year-old, not just me, so I’m not sure if this is an idea or a memory. I may be about to find out, depending on what happens through gate down gully—MILL AHOY!!
The tears stop as abruptly as they started. I wipe my eyes. In memory, The Mill is a gray house in a green valley with no other buildings in sight. Mum had 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. Up to the left the house is raised on a narrow shelf of land, and the lane runs on, narrowing to a pedestrian track that descends past the sewage works to Port Isaac.
Bertie and Jim Watson, who bought the house at the end of 1978, greet me at the garden gate. My repressed self follows them politely through the gate, onto a flagstoned path, onward past geraniums and a plastic rain barrel to the open kitchen door. As we did all those years ago, they use the kitchen door at the back as their main entrance. I remember this part of the house as gray stone, and when I recognize it I feel a flood of relief. Right house, definitely.
“We like old houses,” Bertie says, a little defensively, “and think they should stay that way.”
I see the building isn’t in great repair, and I’m glad: traces of 1978 should be easier to identify.
Bertie is originally from Hertfordshire, and her husband Jim from Cheshire. She’s eighty now, though looks twenty years younger, and hints at a bustling former life. Before she and Jim moved to Cornwall to keep pigs and ewes, she tells me, she used to be an estate agent.
What strikes me about the house, before we go in, is the absence of flat space for ball games. I can envisage a few minutes of French cricket, perhaps, on a patch of grass where the washing line is. But I hate French cricket and always have, mainly because it isn’t cricket. The game is limited to skills so basic my gran could join in and, without runs to be scored, no one is rewarded for actually playing well. In that sense French cricket is unfair, because talent is leveled out. After a few days of not cricket, we’d have wanted to play a real game, in earnest, winner takes all. Nicky isn’t the only competitive spirit in the family.
Inside the house, nothing is immediately familiar. Bertie and Jim have tried to help by going easy on the redecoration, and I take it slowly, head cautiously round the kitchen door for what could be an emotional ambush. The flagstones are original to at least 1978, and probably a hundred years earlier. The blue Belfast sink has sat beneath the window for generations.
Through the kitchen, an interior doorway leads into an open-plan space on either side of a staircase, again with the original floors and beams. No carpets. The hard edges of stone and wood were not projections of my hardened mind. So far, so good. My memory has some of the facts right, which is reassuring, but also I suspect grief to be indestructible and endlessly patient. Should I blunder into ghosts, however intentionally, I worry about the emotional impact. But wherever the feelings went, it seems I didn’t leave them lying about at The Mill in Port Isaac.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s very kind. I’d love a cup of tea.”
Bertie makes the tea and I apologize for my state of distraction. The last time I set foot in this house was not a happy time, and I hope she understands. Having said that, the long years of family denial mean I don’t know how much of the original experience is left inside me. I’ve come here as terrified of finding nothing as I am of finding something, and don’t want to discover that my dead brother has no enduring emotional reality. That isn’t the information I want to retrieve.
“Maybe we should have tried counseling,” I say, worried I’ve been impolite, paying more attention to the house than to Bertie.
“I’m not sure counseling is a good idea,” Bertie says, as if she’d made up her mind years ago. “Everyone has their own way of dealing with grief.”
We sit outside on the porch with a view of the green hill opposite, and Bertie tells me a story about the nature of chance. She thinks she’s telling me about buying the house, and on the surface she is: she’s a reliable narrator about property because of her former profession. She and Jim made their first offer for The Mill in May 1978, three months before the Beard family arrived in Cornwall on holiday. This information fits with a letter I found in Dad’s filing cabinet. It was sent by the former owner of The Mill, Mr. A. D. Gill of Petersfield, Hampshire, on 10th October 1977. Mr. Gill makes a note of Dad’s interest in the house for August 1978, but as yet have made no firm plans for next summer. He suggests my dad get in touch next May or thereabouts, so as late as May 1978 Mr. Gill couldn’t commit to letting the house for August.
He was hoping to sell it, and if he had, The Mill would not have been available for holidaymakers in the summer of 1978. My dad wouldn’t have made the late booking. None of the events that August would have happened as they did. Fate would have intervened.
Jim and Bertie’s sale fell through, the house remained a holiday let, down came the inland grockles and their little boy drowned. I hear Bertie’s house-buying history as a story of luck gone bad. Fate was against us, but only by a couple of months.
That autumn Jim and Bertie tried a second bid, and the sale went through by the end of the year. Mr. Gill, possibly discomforted by the summer’s events, may have accepted a lower price. But I have no evidence. All I know is that Jim and Bertie came in too low with their original offer to save Nicky’s life. If Mr. Gill had sold them The Mill in May 1978, as they’d hoped, the Watsons would still be here now, but I would not. Chance, bad luck, I don’t know what to call it, but those are the words that apply. Nothing has to be.
“Of course you can look around,” Bertie says. “Take your time, I’ll leave you to it.”
About two-thirds of the way up to the second floor, the stairs split in opposite directions. The branch to the left leads to my bedroom. I know this. Adults to the right, childre
n to the left. I’d have crossed this staircase (down to the split, then up again) to get to the bathroom—the bathroom is next to Mum and Dad’s bedroom, via the right-hand staircase. When I see the layout of the stairs and the bathroom, I realize how easy it was for Mum to intercept me, and how plausible for me to seed the idea that nothing was wrong. I wasn’t looking for my mummy; this was the route to the bathroom. Mum misunderstood the situation. I needed a pee, that’s all. Just along there, in the bathroom right beside her bedroom.
Though obviously that wasn’t all, or I wouldn’t be in The Mill nearly forty years later with Bertie and Jim. Children are not tougher than they look.
I’m confident there’s valuable material here for me, at the very least a real-life setting to fit around that midnight memory. Back downstairs, in the dining-room section of the open-plan ground floor, I stand in a shaft of sunlight from the window. My eyes flit from the table to the chairs, to the kitchen door, to the table, to the chairs, from the present to the past, peeling back the years.
Bertie pops her head round the door. “Everything all right?”
“Was this always the dining room?”
“There used to be an oval table when we first arrived.”
“Could I sit down for a minute?”
“Of course you can,” Bertie says. “More tea?”
Oval, round. My past exists. I own a former self, once trapped in this very room, at a holy communion with an ordained vicar. I remember now. I think of the ceremony as a kind of séance.
Then I see it.
The chair I’m sitting on looks toward the staircase and the kitchen beyond, and a flush rises in my face. My heart skitters. An adult stranger, a dressed-down minister of God, has the light of the kitchen doorway behind his head. It is actually difficult to make out his face. My dad is standing beside him, near the stairs, making a speech. I remember this. He said that unbeknown even to Mum, he’d always written a diary. Now he wanted to record our thoughts about Nicky. One at a time, we should think of a memory or observation, presumably while Nicky remained fresh in our minds. This must have been the day after, not much later.
My eleven-year-old self is squeezed between bodies on both sides, but the question progresses around the oval table. Here it comes, closer and closer whether I like it or not, and I can’t escape. What did Nicky mean to me? That’s Dad’s prompt. Think of a memory that’s worth writing down.
My turn. In the silence everyone looks, waiting for my contribution. I don’t know. I’m not ready for this. I don’t know what Nicky meant to me, or what I’m supposed to say.
I punched him in the face. Share this.
Earlier that year Nicky had stood in the doorway of my Swindon bedroom, and from inside my territory, with a closed fist, I punched him straight in the face. I had no reason to do so. My bedroom was at the end of the corridor, beside the toilet, and he came down to tell me something. It was time to go out, probably, and we were wanted downstairs. Whatever the message was, I stood and looked at him. I punched him hard, like on television. Boom.
He did not fall down, and I was instantly terrified. Nicky bawled and ran toward the stairs, while I hid inside my wardrobe, pulling the door closed behind me. I crouched in the darkness behind the coats and jeans, because Mum would be up to punish me. There would be no end to the justice coming my way, so I hunched in the dark narrow closet, invisible, miserable. My mum shouted my name. She was coming, I knew it, she was coming to pay me back.
Except she wasn’t. I don’t doubt she was furious, but she was shouting my name because it was time to leave. Put your shoes on, bring a sweater. Come on, hurry up, in the early summer of 1978 you’re not a little baby. I was not a baby, I was eleven years old and I hurried up. I climbed out of the wardrobe and went downstairs and stepped into my trainers and we left the house.
I can’t have punched Nicky in the face for no good reason. I believe everything can be explained. Perhaps I felt threatened, and wanted to remind him I was older and stronger in the most direct way possible. I felt a need to strike him down, to cause him pain.
Nicky was extremely kind and helpful and a great conversationalist. He came to my room with a simple request or message, but before he could showcase his conversational skills I hit him. Everything Nicky did he did well, be it sport, work, his music, or just kindness and good manners. Let’s see a good-mannered response to a punch in the nose, because everything you do you do well, like running away to your mummy. You squit, you blub-face crybaby. We all remember Nicholas at the Barbecue as a bright handsome boy with a lovely sense of humor.
Around the table at The Mill I had an opportunity to share the story of the punch. If I can remember it now I’d have remembered it then, but I wasn’t planning to confess. Not so stupid. Tough, yes: Nicky got that much right, one out of two, half-right in his judgment of his brother.
“He was really good at sport,” I said, because it was my turn and I wanted to please. Safe start, but what next? What kind of things did people say to avoid raw feeling?
I said: “He was always generous in defeat.”
What a lie that was. Then I couldn’t go on. I choked back tears, then I was sobbing, racking my insides onto the table. The tears put an end to my charade, my search for the acceptable words. Nicky was not generous in defeat; he was a terrible loser, graceless and bad-tempered in defeat. The day after was far too soon for me to be saying what I felt expected to say in public, but under duress I gave it a go. Right from the start I was open to evasion and repression.
The Collected Letters of N. P. Beard amount to the following:
From: 25 Letters, 2 Postcards, 2 Easter cards, 1 Christmas card, 1 Birthday card.
To: 30 Letters, 21 Postcards, 10 Birthday cards, 3 Notelets.
I convince myself I have the material counted, categorized, under control. I have this many letters to and from, and no more, and I can study Nicky’s collected letters in their controllable entirety. Three of them are in envelopes stamped with a first-class nine-pence Queen. She looks as unmoved as ever and fails to make eye contact, indifferent to the discovery that only one of Nicky’s surviving letters is to me. Nicky is six years old, and understandably brief. I was eight and had already left home.
Dear Richard, How are you? Jeremy and I are very well. How do you like school? Love, Nicky.
He missed me terribly, but didn’t know how to express his feelings. That’s one interpretation. Another is that Mum sat him down and made him write a letter to reassure me at my new school that home life hadn’t simply vanished. They weren’t to know that it had, just as it would for Nicky two years later, supplanted by Victorian architecture and a jostle of boys tamed by intricate routines.
Nicky missed me terribly. I have no evidence that I ever wrote back.
At Pinewood School we had to write a weekly letter every Sunday morning, with strict formulas to guide us: the letters were checked for correct presentation to include margins, indents, and the appropriate sign-off. Senior boys should end letters to parents Yours faithfully. The younger ones, for a while, were allowed to continue to love.
In his letters from school, after he too left home, I search out Nicky’s dreams: For my birthday I would like an action man tank or a model or an encyclopedia and a chess set, please. He provides me with objects I could use in that character questionnaire. Desires also reveal character, but Nicky wants what every boy wants, and expects to live to get it. Elsewhere, the letters are full of generalized observations, like a self-conscious historical novel: This is the silver Jubilee year. I like it at this school.
I learn that in rugby his position is scrum-half and which football team he supports—Mum writes: Daddy says did you see Liverpool won! For Mum, this is only one of a thousand exclamation marks. She hardly ever uses full stops, and her weekly letter to Nicky is bright and desperate with exclamations. It’s as if Mum has discovered she can make her limited communication with her boys tremendously exciting, through punctuation. At this distance her rele
ntless cheeriness feels forced and therefore sad.
Nice to see you on Sunday and Monday!! You are growing up! Soon be a teenager!! The exclamation marks are a visible response to our dispersed family, but my dad gives less of himself away. He is emotionally elusive behind his orthodox punctuation and illegible handwriting. Keep trying, he writes, whenever I can read him. Keep trying and I am sure you will move up to top place.
Nicky replies faithfully in blue Platignum ink, and like everyone he has problems spelling eighth, Uncle, guard. I sometimes want him to be more interesting as a correspondent than he is: I have decided what to call the ginger teddy. I am going to call him Ginger.
His letters are buoyant with goals scored and selection for that week’s match. He enjoys his tests and his games, and every piece of news can be made competitive: Is Jeremy able to swim a width yet? If he can in the holidays I can challenge him to a race.
Between the lines Nicky comes across as a buttoned-up stoic, a small boy accepting the boarding-school conventions that govern family relationships: It was nice to see you on Sunday, you looked very well. This is the entire emotional content of his letter in that particular week, a polite observation to his mother replacing the rough-and-tumble of demonstrable homely love. Mum tries to respond in kind: We had a lovely weekend, didn’t we? It won’t be long now until the Christmas holidays, it will be nice having you home.
Mum betrays a constant longing to have everyone home, but in the meantime appeals for feelings to be kept muted, please, for everyone’s sake: It was nice to see you on Thursday, thank you for being big and brave and going into class, it makes it better for when I come across.
In both Mum and Dad’s handwriting “Nicky” looks sometimes like “Ricky,” and vice versa, so I often can’t be sure if the letters are to him or to me. We are, in any case, interchangeable. At the same school we wear identical clothes, with the same basic timetable to our days, and essentially each of these letters from home carries the same silent message. From Mum, with the exclamation marks deleted: why the hell aren’t you here? I miss you. From Dad: keep trying, it’s for the best.
The Day That Went Missing Page 6