“Did you actually see him floating?”
“Some ladies were with me at the top of the cliff. They told me he was floating.”
Mrs. Kettel from Sutton Coldfield, and Mrs. Margaret Snowball from Royston. I have their condolence letters, but neither of them recounts in writing the exact events of that sad afternoon. Mum is saying she didn’t see Nicky at this stage with her own eyes, or she couldn’t look, or she looked and has subsequently blocked the vision of what she saw.
“Did you think he was alive, by the time you were up on the cliff with the shoe?”
“The sea wasn’t as rough as they said.”
“Did you think he was alive?”
“He was quite near the rocks. I thought he was alive.”
Above the beach, clutching the shoe, waiting for the Port Isaac lifeboat. Someone, and Mum doesn’t remember who, had been sent up the path to raise the alarm. Coast guard, please, quick as you can. At the farm old Mrs. Thom had to be in, and not out shopping or in the garden, near machines or running water, or in the coop with the chickens, or fixing the washing machine or upstairs wearing earplugs writing a thesis. Access to Mrs. Thom’s landline was a potential delay, as was the physical fitness of the messenger. Delays were more likely than not.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Kettel and Mrs. Snowball offered comfort.
“I couldn’t bear to look,” Mum says. “They gave me reason to believe Nicky was alive.”
“They would, wouldn’t they?”
Everyone wants to believe that catastrophe can be averted, and I should know. I’d given Mum false hope from the moment I came running from our one last swim. Only one of us came back, and I didn’t say Nicky was dead. Those weren’t the words I used.
“He’s in the sea,” I said, “he’s in the sea, I tried to save him.”
Before the lifeboat arrived my grandparents led us away from the beach, up the path toward the farm and the cars. We’d have walked, I see no other solution. At my stage of life now, as I write this, I’m stronger than any of the adults at Tregardock that day, and I can’t imagine carrying an eleven-year-old boy from the beach up the steps, up the path, not all the way to Mrs. Thom’s farmhouse. Despite even the keenest surge of compassion, the children would have had to walk.
“Gran and Grandpa were going to drive you back to the house,” Mum says. “I was on the cliff top when the helicopter arrived.”
Ted Childs reconstructs 1978. Ten minutes at least for someone to run from the beach to raise the alarm, a fumble of time for Mrs. Thom to alert the coast guard, the double-rocket alert bursting above the village, then a further twenty minutes as helicopter and lifeboat race to the scene. The helicopter scrambles from RAF Chivenor, about forty-five miles away. The lifeboat from Port Isaac gets there first.
His memories remain fresh.
“On that day at Tregardock,” Ted says, “we arrived to four or five people standing on an outcrop of rock, waving towels at us and pointing at a spot in the water.”
No, not yet, Ted. He can bring the lifeboat right up alongside, as close as the old D-class can go, but only when I’m ready. “How long did you say the trip would take?”
“About twenty minutes. That’s between the flares going up in Port Isaac and the boat arriving at Tregardock.”
Add the minute I need to run from the water to my mum, then five at least before someone is sent up the hill, and by the time Ted Childs and the lifeboat bump into view, they’re forty minutes too late. He didn’t know that, of course. As the boat slides in, he’s hanging over the side looking for a “swimmer in the water” or “a bather in difficulty.” At worst, Ted will be first to spot “a casualty,” so forty minutes after I left Nicky drowning in the sea he is officially a bather to be rescued, and the RNLI cannot stress this enough. The RNLI has no authority to speak of bodies or to declare anyone dead. Only a registered doctor can do that.
“The sea conditions were good,” Ted says. “There was no question of us losing our lives that day. If we’d lifted him out and handed him to the parents you wouldn’t even have remembered it.”
But we do remember it, alas, which explains why I’m here. Only we don’t remember it well enough. That’s how Ted Childs can help. Ted spotted the “bather in difficulty,” and now I can’t put him off any longer. I’ve been aiming at this moment since I first went to the churchyard, whether I knew it or not, and I’m not going to back out now.
I ask Ted to remember the details. All the detail he has, for me.
“The lifeboat comes off the power,” he says, “as per standard procedure. We don’t want to clatter into potential rescuers who might be in the water.”
No potential rescuers are in the water, not one. The helmsman Mark Provis maneuvers the boat toward the “swimmer,” takes the boat round and upwind, to shelter the casualty in the lee of the hull. Though by now none of the lifeboat crew, whatever the training manual says, can pretend they’re dealing with a live bather. On an afternoon of August sunshine, with a calm sea and perfect visibility, this is a lift of a body. The tragedy is clear for all to see—worse even than a body, a small drowned child.
“He was at the further end of the beach, about twenty-five yards out and it was high water. There was no breaking sea.”
The beach had disappeared, and Ted Childs pulled Nicky out of seawater rolling uninterrupted onto hard black rocks. I press Ted to be as specific as he can. Dry-eyed in the Port Isaac RNLI office I feel ruthless, rational. My default attitude is emotionless and cold, a state both familiar to me and effective, one I adopt as if I’d never otherwise make any progress.
Years ago, when I smashed those sunglasses belonging to a useless stranger, I felt detached from the experience. I was looking down on the scene, and that’s instinctively where I preferred to be. I’m outside the experience again now, in recognizable territory. I fix Ted Childs eye to eye and he’s welling up, but he too has the English education, with advanced proficiency as a headmaster. He won’t cry, but if I get this wrong he might stop talking.
Careful now. I ease the pressure by asking how the crew dealt with the event afterward, how they coped. “What was the mood in Port Isaac?”
“Pretty somber. I suppose we stuck to the normal routines. Later we had to make statements to the police. In those days there wasn’t counseling available, but I’m not sure counseling always helps.”
I’m not offering counseling. I’m after the images and impressions Ted carries in his head. I want his memory.
“What did Nicky look like in the sea?”
Ted Childs lets his gaze drift round the office, appraising certificates on the walls, photographs of the lifeboat in action, and commendations for bravery. Then his eyes are back on mine as if he must have misheard and will give me a second chance to ask a kinder question, or the same question more kindly.
“Was he facedown?”
“He was facedown, with his arms out like that.” Ted flops his arms up above his head, bent at the elbows, hands limp at the wrists. “I lifted him out of the water. I actually picked him out of the water.”
“Was he already dead?”
I know from Chris, the operations manager, that this is the forbidden word. But come on. You can tell me, after all this time. I’m his brother.
“If I was a gambling man—,” Ted says, but he breaks off. He doesn’t need to finish his conditional sentence. Surely he doesn’t, because in a spirit of heartfelt compassion I will allow him to stop at that. Surely.
“Would you say he was dead?”
“Well, it looked that way.”
Ted got his elbows under the white armpits of Nick-Nack Nickelpin and hauled him over the lifeboat’s rounded orange sponsons. You never actually know. In RNLI training the crewmen are taught not to assume, because impressions can be deceptive. Human beings want to live. Ted Childs tried resuscitation, mouth-to-mouth, three times.
I look at Ted’s lips now, and will do so again. Constantly, in fact, in all the time that is left to us. His
bottom lip is plump and slightly blue. He may not be able to feel his lips, after the dentist’s anesthetic.
“The helicopter arrived at about the same time as the lifeboat,” he says. “The winchman was lowered down, and I hooked Nicky into the winchman’s harness. We practice all the time, but this was different. My most vivid memory of that day is Nicky hanging loose against the winchman, being winched up to the helicopter.”
The drilled interchange between RNLI and RAF took about five minutes, according to Ted. I used to watch Blue Peter, so I can hear the heavy thump of the rotor blades and see the churning white water and the emergency-orange expertise that allows civilians to hope. Even after the delays, the waiting, the facedown body in the water, the onlookers could hold hope in their hearts: a lifeboat (at last!), Nicky pulled aboard, textbook resuscitation, the famous helicopter-winch procedure as seen on TV, and then the bulb-nosed Wessex yawing north and chopping hard up the coast toward Bude. All these professionals. They know what they’re doing.
“Frankly,” Ted says, “it was a great relief to get him off our hands.”
The silence between us stretches out. Ted felt this one especially hard, he thinks, because of his job. At his school he was in constant contact with small boys of Nicky’s age and size. “Every springtime I watched them jumping into the swimming pool.”
And presumably jumping out alive, time and again, like a film projected in reverse. I will not let Ted go. I stare at his lips, which last touched the lips of my brother. I want to thank him, to embrace him, to never let him go. And yet. Out of habit and defensive strategy I do not emerge from the cold.
“Was there any evidence of physical injury on the body?”
I’m greedy for the remains of Nicky’s final breath on Ted’s warm lips, but instead I hide behind a fact here, a fact there, one more item of information to defer the inevitable. I’m a fugitive from the emotions that matter. “Was he marked in any way?”
Ted sighs. “He was just a little boy in a pair of swimming trunks, and very wet.”
One more try, as if crewman Ted Childs has more to give, though probably he doesn’t. Maybe a conclusive detail he’s withholding, or of which he doesn’t understand the significance.
“I don’t suppose rigor mortis had set in?”
I ask that question in a desperate attempt to eke out a connection with the last person to hold Nicky in his arms. Ted Childs was the last person at Tregardock to see Nicky almost alive.
“No,” Ted says. “He was a floppy little body.”
The Boy Is Dead
Finally.
“He’s in the sea,” I said (Mum says I said), “he’s in the sea, I tried to save him.”
I was the only witness, but I never mentioned that the situation was hopeless. Not at the beach, not at the camp, not on the long walk up to the cars. I can’t be sure that’s true. I definitely didn’t say he was dead—what I doubt is the hopelessness, because how would I know what counted as a miracle, when I was eleven? Unexpected good news could be the way of the world, encountered in earnest for the first time. Maybe I could leave Nicky struggling, but a lifeboat, a helicopter, a hospital, and the help of responsible adults could bring him back alive.
In retrospect, considering my final vision of him in the water, no outcome but death seems possible. I may have blocked that truth immediately, in favor of a hope that was less upsetting to me and everyone else. Even then I wanted the truth not to be the truth. Mum and Dad stayed with their endangered child. They too hoped for the best, for a while.
I don’t remember the helicopter. I think I should. Helicopters, ambulances, police cars, we’d summoned the vehicles of every boy’s fantasy, the illustrations from an exciting book. In a way my memory is unnecessary—I can pull the relevant specifications from the RNLI archive and paste them in here to create a picture: at that time the rescue helicopter in use at RAF Chivenor was a yellow Westland Wessex XS675, a humped, bulb-nosed machine, rivets punctuating the panels of the outer steel shell. On the one hand, I can misuse that information, concentrating on detail as a way of sedating emotion. On the other, well-directed research might spark a recollection.
I don’t remember a yellow helicopter, of any description. But I paste it in, adding the Wessex to the picture growing from the kernel of my memory. Gradually, I’m piecing together a single day from as long ago as 1978, when I was as alive and conscious as I am now. If I can accurately re-create the day, as far as that task is possible, I’ll move closer to recovering what’s lost. And despite my coldness with Ted, that includes the pain I’ve wanted to avoid.
“Once you boys had left,” Mum tells me, “your dad cut his legs scrambling on the rocks. He was trying to get as near as he could to Nicky.”
Who wasn’t that far out. Ted Childs said twenty-five yards, and not in open water. Twenty-five yards—twenty-two meters—but the tide is coming in and the rocks marking the cove are rapidly submerging.
Apart from this desperate clamber, Dad is conspicuously absent from everyone’s memory, either at the camp as I ran in gibbering or earlier in the day. Given his cancer diagnosis, buckets and spades may not have commanded his full attention. At that time he was living with the idea of death, yet death crept up and surprised him.
His little boy Nick-Nack Pinwin facedown in the sea, 22 meters from the shore. Dad could have reached those rocks within seconds, a minute at the most, long before the runner had started up the path to Mrs. Thom’s phone. Dad would have stood within swimming distance of Nicky thirty-five minutes before Ted and the lifeboat hoved into view. Ted said the body was at most 22 meters from land, so Nicky could have been even closer before the lifeboat got there. Twenty meters… eighteen, half the length of a swimming pool. The world record for long jump, in 1978, was 8.9 meters. Dad could have got halfway to Nicky in a single leap.
The other half he’d already covered by clambering along the rocks, cutting and grazing his legs. Dad, you’re dying from cancer, jump! What difference will it make? Instead he looked before leaping. And looked again. Jump! But he did not jump, even though looking not leaping must have broken his heart.
He might have pulled off a stunning rescue. Or died himself in the heroic attempt. We’d have missed him, sure, but we were already preparing for life without him. In subtle ways we’d started the work of accepting that outcome, though admittedly I have in mind an exchange in which my dad’s life is traded for that of his son. Dad had cancer and couldn’t bowl a decent off-break, while Nicky has special gifts and always gives 100%.
Ted Childs clipped the harness around Nicky’s dead body (arms and legs through the straps, secure the lock-pin in the central lug) and the helicopter winched him up, the floppy little body hanging from the winchman in his one-piece immersion suit and dark-visored helmet.
Mum and Dad then had the walk from the beach.
“Someone told us help was waiting at the end of the lane,” Mum says. “We climbed up the path as quickly as we could.”
“How did that feel?”
“I don’t know. I was crying. I could barely see. We chased the helicopter to Bude hospital in an ambulance.”
“I’m sorry,” Chris Bolton told me. “But it wouldn’t have been an ambulance.”
In Mum’s memory the lifeboat and the helicopter, converging with an epic sense of urgency in our time of need, were joined at the lane-end by a police car and an ambulance. In retrospect she mobilizes every emergency service except the fire brigade.
“It’s unlikely the police would have been there,” Chris said, “and in the circumstances there wasn’t any need for an ambulance.” He didn’t want to sound heartless, but he was an expert familiar with the procedures. “The coast guard had sent for the helicopter, so no point doubling up with an ambulance.”
Chris suggested the vehicle that raced to Bude was probably the blue coast-guard Land Rover. I press Mum to remember as much detail as she can, and to forget the ambulance. She concedes the ambulance, and decides it was probably a p
olice car.
“Or the coast-guard Land Rover?”
“Yes,” she says, “that could have been it.”
Mum and Dad sit facing each other on benches in the back. No sirens or lights, because the coast-guard Land Rover is not battling traffic. Of the journey, Mum remembers that Dad refused to have his legs treated. I don’t know who by, now that we’ve erased the ambulance. Maybe by her, but he waved away the offer of support. There they sat sliding and swaying, face-to-face for the twenty-five miles to Bude, blood clotting on Dad’s legs where the rocks had bashed through his skin. He is wearing his acrylic swimming trunks, at a time like this. Trunks, a short-sleeved shirt, blood on his shins and silence.
Fifty minutes later the Land Rover turns into Stratton Hospital, Bude, a kilometer inland from the coastline. “Can you see the sea, Dad?” “No.” And thank God for that; it feels almost like being back in England. Everything may turn out well.
“A doctor came out to the Land Rover with the news,” Mum says. “We were inside the vehicle when I heard the words Dead on Arrival.”
Something-something dead on arrival, the doctor said, then dead on arrival some other stuff. The surrounding words have not survived the proximity.
“I remember the noise I made,” Mum said. “I wailed.”
She remembers the wail—I see the abandon of grieving Middle Eastern mothers on the news—and then she collapsed.
The mind’s camera cuts away, and the next scene is Stratton Hospital, interior. Mum is inside the building to identify the body.
“Where was Dad?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember him there, except as an absence.”
“You mean he didn’t go in with you?”
“I might only have been alone in my mind.”
What difference can it make, especially now?
“The nursing sister came out of the hospital,” my mum says, tracking back. The Land Rover with Mum and Dad in the back pulls into the ambulance bay, again. “The sister gave us the news. Dead on arrival.”
The Day That Went Missing Page 12