“On my specific day?” I’m astonished. They’ve found someone who was directly involved. “Are you sure? Was he actually in the lifeboat on the eighteenth of August?”
“Yes. We asked him about it.” Chris has swiveled his command chair away from the radios and radar equipment. He gives me his full attention. “Ted remembers the day well.”
Unfortunately, Ted Childs is at the dentist.
“He was actually in the lifeboat?”
“He calls the shout a nasty one. Very nasty. When he spoke about it, I saw he was shaken.”
Chris Bolton knows I’m here because of Nicky (in hard RNLI type: 1978 Aug 18. Recovered the body of a bather), but there’s a limit to what he can tell me because he wasn’t there. And this isn’t 1978. These days, partly because of wet suits and better general awareness of ocean dangers, the lifeboat responds to fewer incidents. Even in 1978, most families on holiday in Cornwall had a smashing fortnight and left the county without anyone dying.
At first, in the operations room, we make lifesaver small talk about bodies. Port Isaac has a dummy for practice rescues called “Dead Harry,” but Chris tells me I’m right, sometimes the body is never recovered. Gases in a drowned corpse can create sufficient buoyancy to enable drift in underwater currents. If the body sweeps past the natural barrier of Tintagel Head, it can disappear far into the Atlantic and may never be seen again.
“In 1978, from Tregardock, how would they have called the lifeboat?”
I’m back on track. All I want, really, is to know about Nicky’s last day.
“Someone would have run to the farm,” Chris says. He knows all the beaches along the coast, and the houses at the end of lanes nearest the sea. “They’d have asked Mrs. Thom at the farmhouse to phone the coast guard. I’d say that would take at least ten minutes, at best. She’s dead now.”
“And once someone gets in trouble,” I push on, “how long do they usually have?”
Chris doesn’t say “body,” he says “casualty.” A swimmer is never “drowning,” but “in difficulties.” The length of time a person can survive in the water depends on body-mass and the clothes they’re wearing, and how well they can swim.
“There’s no fixed rule. We had a case at New Year where a man kept himself alive for forty-five minutes. Though in your brother’s case, hypothermia wasn’t a problem.”
Death by drowning can happen quickly, Chris says, in less than a minute. I remember it as quick. I have my memory and now some context: Mum keeps an eye on Jem and shakes out the dregs from the Thermos. Tim splashes in the shallows with Guy Hake. Dad, what? No idea. I’m out of sight and in the sea with Nicky. He starts to die, so very quickly, and I feel the fight-or-flight certainty that I too will soon be drowning. I fight the undertow and flee the danger. I do both, anything, everything.
Chris puts the kettle on. Bob gives me a handful of leaflets, and to defer these feelings of panic and reawakened grief I skim through lifeboating facts, finding solace in the RNLI’s organized defiance of dangers at sea: the Port Isaac lifeboat can launch into surf up to seven feet high, and a lifeguard can swim 200 meters in three and a half minutes; 140,000 lives have been saved since 1824, and 325 from Port Isaac since the station reopened in 1967. Excellent work, I think. One more wouldn’t have hurt.
Or more than one, because 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 percent of them children. They can’t all be victims of fate. Every year, even now, about 150 people drown in the UK. Compared to deaths on the road, that’s not so many, but drowning kills more UK citizens than cycling accidents. The figures are slightly distorted by suicide—no one commits suicide by riding a bike.
The most recent callout for the Port Isaac lifeboat was in response to an abandoned car on the cliffs, a note visible on the dashboard. Out sped the lifeboat, but in vain, because the suicidal driver was later spotted in a Wadebridge pub. He’d changed his mind.
Chris comes back with mugs of tea. I ask him what he thinks happened in 1978. “How do people actually drown?” I ask.
“They take a mouthful of water and panic. With seawater there’s also a risk of secondary drowning.”
Inhaled seawater is absorbed into the lungs, which damages the membranes needed to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. After an apparent recovery a person can drown hours later, nowhere near any water. “It doesn’t happen that often,” Chris says, “but it’s always a danger.”
“I’m fairly sure Nicky drowned the first time round.”
“You should talk to Ted Childs,” Chris says. “He was in the boat. You can see he still feels deeply about it.”
At the mention of feeling, I find another question: “Why aren’t there lifeguards at Tregardock?”
Dad’s letter of observations (whatever it said) hadn’t roused the District Council to tame the wild allure of Tregardock Beach: no lifeguards then, none in evidence now.
“The spot is too remote,” Chris says, “and the beach accessible only at low tide. We have plenty of safe beaches elsewhere.”
Like sheltered Port Gaverne, for example, a short walk from Port Isaac harbor and a natural fortress against the worst of the Atlantic. Port Gaverne is a safe place for children to play, and a beach we knew because it features in that last packet of photos.
I show Chris the 1978 cutting from the Sunday Times about killer waves:
Bank holiday visitors to north Cornwall face a new peril this year. Rogue waves, born hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, have swept four holiday-makers to their deaths in the past month, and there are fears that more fatalities may follow.
Sunday Times, 29th August 1978
“There is no such thing as a freak wave,” Chris says. “They’re quite common. What people don’t understand is the speed of the tide.”
At which point the phone rings, and I’d love to see Chris and Bob spring into lifesaving action. But instead of an incident, on the other end of the line is retired RNLI crewman Ted Childs. His appointment with the dentist finished earlier than expected, he’s at home and he could drop by right now, if anyone’s interested. His house is a two-minute walk from the lifeboat station.
So far Dad hasn’t featured in anyone’s memory of the day: he’s absent from my version and from Mum’s and from Tim’s, though he was with us that day at Tregardock. I have the cricket photograph to prove it, and parents are the fifth emergency service, the in-house 999. They’re supposed to rapid-response their children’s cries for help.
By 1978 it was common knowledge that Dad wouldn’t be succeeding his grandfather into the pages of Guinness World Records. The tumor in the back of his neck had expanded and twisted round the top of the vertebrae, and was now reaching toward the cells of the brain. Mum remembers the hospital surgeon, an Egyptian, describing two possible outcomes to surgery. The knife might cut out the cancer, and Dad would live, though he’d wear a neck brace for the rest of his life.
“If we get it all.”
But if the scalpel failed to slice deeply or precisely enough, perilously close to bone and cartilage, Dad would die. This was the third major operation on his neck and his last chance—a final attempt before he had no neck left on which to operate.
Dad’s medical records would confirm the details, but the family doctor tells me by phone that the records are lost. All I have is a medical file from Dad’s study, but the dates are too late, only a couple of years before he died. He had a lot wrong with him, by the end, even without historical procedures described as tissue removed from spinal cord at least 35 years ago. The consequences remain worth noting: neck movements are all generally restricted by approximately 30%. Doctors’ letters refer to an impressively scarred back of neck.
He never did wear a neck brace. He left the carved skin open to the air, like a reminder that he should have died. If anyone was going to die in 1978, it should have been him.
There’s a recent literary tradition, plausibly started by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch, of using memoir to unravel a son’s inhibited rel
ationship with his English dad. The father is emotionally repressed but essentially kindly, and it turns out he was trying to express his love through action (going to football matches), not words (“I love you, son”). I have a sense of English dads in English memoirs declaring their unspoken love through pottery, ornithology, hill-walking.
This is not the story told in my fiction. I can’t recommend the role of Dad in a novel by Richard Beard. My dads are overworked and distracted, arrested or beaten in fistfights, slain in battle or alcoholics who die after falling drunk from ladders. What a poor collection of dads I have assembled, of poor dads. My real dad was absent from school life but also felt missing when we were home. He turned up like a visitor in the evenings, just as we were visitors in the holidays. And then was often back out again for snooker. The only occasion we saw him for longer than a weekend (which didn’t include his Saturday morning at the office) was two weeks every summer, and in 1978 for the holidays in Cornwall he wasn’t a healthy man.
I can’t blame a man with cancer. Can I? All these years I may have held him responsible in secret, an accusation as silent as our memories of the day itself. I don’t know, so I take a second look at his pocket work-diaries. I’d found a stack of them in his study, and at first put them aside because they weren’t journals—I wanted his thoughts and feelings, but had found his appointments.
Look again, I think. His yearly diaries from the early seventies through to his death in 2011 are business-to-business freebies bound in dark blue or black fake leather, about the size of a thin smartphone, perfect for the inside jacket pocket. 1978 is a gift from the Brickhouse Dudley Group, makers of cast-iron pipes and drainage products. Keep looking.
In July 1978, with no idea of what lies ahead in August, he makes a trip to Lyons to discuss French-manufactured doors and windows. Otherwise his life is active with regular commitments. He drinks and plays pub skittles on a Monday, has committees to remember, places to go (Wantage, Clifton), and people to see (Saker, Soulsby). On the first Wednesday of the month he meets staff at 3.45, and on the second Wednesday he meets with the Directors.
The month-to-a-page diary answers the question of Dad’s whereabouts. A line is drawn in pencil down the left-hand side of the page from 5th August until the 17th. While his family are on holiday in Cornwall with his wife’s parents he has a full schedule of meetings, with McHugh and Eyles, and reminders of GK and the CHELT JOB. He has his Directors’ meeting scheduled for Wednesday the 16th, so he can’t have arrived in Port Isaac earlier than that evening, though the arrow down the side of the page denoting holiday dates changes from pencil to pen on the 17th, suggesting 17th August as the day of arrival.
Another arrow, from 9th to 17th August, is labeled BOYS TO HAKES. Did I go to the Hakes’? I can’t remember. With Tim, I did go at least two years running to a weeklong Christian summer camp organized by a teacher at the school. Maybe Guy’s parents drove the three of us down there. In my dead dad’s study I search through his correspondence and yes, dated 31st January 1978, a letter from the teacher: I wondered whether Timothy and Richard would be able to come down to Swanage in the summer holidays. In August 1978, before traveling to Cornwall, we played in the docile seas off Dorset and heard about Jesus.
According to the diary, we arrived in Cornwall—Tim, Tim’s friend Guy, Dad, me—the day before the drowning, on the 17th. 18th August was our first day as a recomposed group, including my dad’s parents, so we did something special to celebrate the reunion: we drove to the spectacular secret beach at Tregardock.
Mum had already spent ten days in Cornwall, to see if she could cope alone with the little boys. She could. She had managed without us, and without my dad. This is not the happy family holiday I’d imagined; I had assumed we’d been together for at least a week (Nicky died on a Friday) and that our holiday had been cut short about halfway through the usual fortnight. In fact the holiday for me and Tim and my dad had hardly started.
If we arrived late on the 17th, after a long drive south, the disaster happened within twenty-four hours. My brain scrambles to make sense of this information, to find whatever logic will settle it down. If Dad had stayed away, Mum would have taken more care. She’d taken care of the little boys without his help for a week and a half, and they were both still alive. Dad arrived late. He brought the big boys with him, and to make our first full day a family treat he took everyone to Tregardock Beach.
Another observation, now that we’re back at the beach: he did not dive into the Atlantic to save his son.
In old photos I use the magnifying glass to gauge how much of Dad’s neck is missing. 1968, not a problem. In slides taken by my grandfather, he has a neck. I want to tell Dad to take his tie off. Ten years later he’s had two operations and is steeling himself for another, and the photos are mostly of his face. He doesn’t look like a man who’s going to die—he looks like my dad.
I search for other clues in his letters, but those to Nicky are a scrawl, always in black ink, with sharp right-slanting diagonals steepling into loops and plunging into tails. Dad’s handwriting is close to illegible, but in one undated letter from Oxford’s Ratcliffe [sic] Hospital he writes to Nicky in block capitals. He makes an effort to communicate clearly because on this occasion the message must get through—confined to a hospital bed, he has missed his third son’s first day at boarding school, aged seven and a half:
MUMMY TOLD ME HOW WELL YOU WENT BACK TO PINEWOOD FOR YOUR FIRST TIME. WELL DONE!—I REALLY HAVE THREE BIG BOYS NOW.
I AM VERY WELL AFTER MY OPERATION AND THE HOSPITAL IS VERY GOOD.
He needed to write like this because an earlier letter is annotated by Nicky, who gets past a couple of individual words (settled, happily) before printing between the lines in his own no-nonsense capitals: I CAN’T READ DADDY’S WRITING.
Except after a narrow escape from death, Dad didn’t make the effort. As I try to decipher his letters now, he might as well not have bothered. Only one word in four or five is legible, but he never deigned to accept that his handwriting was problematic. I wonder now whether this stubbornness is indicative of the arrogance identified for the Sunday Times by an exasperated District Councilor: Most of them come from inland areas… and have no idea of the danger of the sea.
Dad could have informed himself. In the attic I found the 1978/9 Official Holiday Guide to Rock, Polzeath, Port Isaac, Wadebridge, which features a full-page black-and-white image of children hurdling gentle waves. This is the innocent fun we were aiming to emulate, so if only he’d read the contents, the guide would have been twenty-five pence well spent:
Lifeguards are on duty on the beaches and they often see their first duty as being to save holidaymakers from themselves. You would not believe how stupid some people can be.
Like choosing to swim at a beach without lifeguards, for a start, who could have saved us from our own stupidity. If Dad had paid attention to his pocket diary, he’d have seen that 18th August was a new moon, marked with the 0 symbol, and new moons produce tidal bulges. The dangerous Atlantic just became seasonally more dangerous. But Dad had paid for the seaside and that was what we were going to enjoy, even if we were a family from Swindon with too much recent money who knew nothing about the natural context, setting off for our all-day beach trip to a beach that was never there all day.
I wonder now what kind of tourist chooses to take his family to Tregardock. Dad never proffered us tips for life, not explicitly, but the long hike to the special beach must have registered as a lesson that arriving at a worthwhile destination isn’t easy. And that once you get there the pleasure doesn’t last, due to the tide, to circumstances outside our control. The message contains a grim Protestant realism, as does a choice of school that favored 1950s shorts, elastic snake belts, and walks down the drive after breakfast.
Dad was deliberately getting us away from other people: he wanted to feel superior. Much later in his life he’d ask for a knife and fork in Burger King. At the same time, he and Mum were full of fear—
between the M5 and Port Isaac we never bought layby strawberries because the Gypsies would judge us by our car and overcharge. No matter which car we happened to be in. Tregardock Beach, as a relief from these pressures, was empty of people who would judge.
The fear made Dad want to feel superior, especially to the fear, and avoiding the beaten track was a way to achieve this—on Tregardock Beach, or at a tiny private boarding school in the countryside outside Swindon. The pride, the fear, enough of both to contribute to the death of his son: at the end of one of Dad’s letters to Nicky at school I eventually decipher the postscript—I expect you are swimming like a fish now too. Obviously not, Dad, but because you’d sent him away you had to guess, and by the time you found out the truth it was too late. Nicky was not swimming like a fish. He was floating facedown in the sea, like a plant.
I haven’t finished. Don’t blame the beach, Dad. Don’t write a letter of “observations” to the council, because you chose Tregardock, a beach without lifeguards. You rented a house where there was no open space for energetic games, so on that vast expanse of sand we were unleashed, out of control. One more thing: I raised the alarm, and minutes earlier two small boys had been playing in the water close to the shore. Why couldn’t a grown man jump straight in?
I don’t understand that.
In Swindon I’m at the dining table with Mum eating steak and salad, no carbs so we can live forever. Recently Nicky has had a constructive influence on our relationship. I keep dropping by, usually to make another trawl through the study or attic. Sometimes I think I’ll sit Mum down for a big definitive interview, but instead I sneak in questions here and there.
The Day That Went Missing Page 10