Guy gets the logistics spot-on. He’s playing in the dregs of waves at a safe spot on the beach while Nicky and I are farther down, to his right if he’s looking out to sea. Yes, correct. He has a vision of me, once he knows something is wrong, standing down there to the right on a boulder or rock.
I have a color photograph from the Liverpool packet and can check what I looked like that day: a well-made youngster with a wet fringe split by seawater, wearing only trunks, happy to be alive and the center of a camera’s attention. In Guy’s head I’m standing on a rock, silhouetted against the sky by the strong August sun. I am some distance away, glistening with saltwater, desperate, beautiful, cinematic. Or so I imagine.
Guy distinctly remembers the helicopter. Finally, someone does.
He heard the distant chop of the helicopter’s approach and turned to face the sea, because by then he was a way up the path. His memory is equally reliable when I test him against my recent visit to The Mill. He has the steep drive down and the hills on either side of the house. He has the bunk beds, his mind mapping onto mine and, with Jem elsewhere in the house, the four of us boys sharing a room. Then just the three of us.
“There was sobbing in the night.”
Guy shuffles the postcards of his memory, but the crying and the darkness return to the top, time and again, the crying in the darkness of the night.
“How was it for you afterward,” I change the subject, “when you left the house and drove away with your parents?”
“I knew not to expect any special treatment.”
He means pity, or compassion. Guy had excelled at our kind of education, where emotional muteness was a virtue. But he has, since, shared the experience at Tregardock in certain situations with others, not least when he went on holiday to Bude with his own two daughters.
“It was scary,” he says. “I wanted everyone to be aware of the risks.”
In his life he’s had other scares, a variety of setbacks. “Traumas don’t make you stronger,” he says, referring to experiences of his own, “they make you more vulnerable.”
I ask him, as I’ve asked the others who were there, what he thinks happened that day.
“Your brother was in the sea, bashed his head against a rock, fell unconscious, then later was pulled from the water.”
These are not the facts of the matter. If we never agree the facts, no one can learn any lessons, to be passed on to the next generation and the next, for their own safety. Guy’s two daughters will be dangerously ill-informed.
“He was knocked unconscious,” Guy says, “then there was a delay before the body was found. There were big rocks there. I don’t see how anyone could have helped.”
I appreciate Guy Hake’s effort at a general absolution from blame, which is the level of diplomacy expected from a Captain of the School. I ask him about that. His appointment as Captain over all of us was presumably a reward for good judgment and common sense at an unusually tender age. From that perspective, what did he make of Nicky’s death?
“I do wonder whether you should have been playing on the rocks.”
We weren’t. Not that the detail matters to others, not even to the police, who told me repeatedly—but without evidence—that Nicky’s death wasn’t my fault. First, though, they made sure they had me on my own. Just me, in the back of a wipe-clean police car.
“It wasn’t your fault. Do you understand? There’s nothing you could have done. It wasn’t your fault.”
The drowning was bad luck, nothing more. I don’t remember every detail, no one does, and by waiting so long I’ve lost important particulars of the story. Either that, or the piecemeal version I’m assembling now is actually full of truth, memories never distorted by multiple and changeable retellings. I don’t know, I can’t decide. I’m indecisive. It’s one of the consequences of learning at an impressionable age from uniformed police that I’m genuinely not to blame. Nothing is my fault—I don’t have to take responsibility.
Jem and Guy believe a random incident rendered Nicky powerless, either a fall or a wave, and he was subsequently washed out to sea. Mum can have Nicky wandering off by himself, happy for that luckless story to blot out any other. Her invented version is fiercely maternal—she gifts me an alibi. She swears I was on the beach beside Jem and Tim, so obviously I’m not to blame.
The day, unfortunately, has not yet ended.
That night at The Mill, terribly, we had to eat, we had to brush our teeth and flannel our faces and go to bed. Mum would never have been far away, making us younger than we were, putting us to bed as if reclaiming a time before this dreadful evening that we wished had never come. She tried to soften our newly hard lives by turning down the beds—she found Nicky’s pajamas beneath his pillow.
“What did you do with them?”
“I don’t remember. I’d have taken them away, what else could I have done?”
I went to sleep, or I didn’t go to sleep. Guy Hake has his durable postcard memory of the sobbing in the night. I woke up, or I was already awake. I climbed out of bed and left the room, down the first section of stairs, up the other side, crossing to the landing, hoping for adult solace. I am ashamed to be looking for solace, so in the embrace of my mother’s arms I say all I want is the bathroom.
I allow myself to be comforted, out of pity for my poor indestructible mum. Vividly, in all these years, I’ve remembered the comfort as unnecessary. Children are tougher than they look. I wanted that to be true, immediately and forever after, but I doubt it was. I just had a talent for pretending, until now.
“I understand,” Mum says, “of course you can’t sleep. Don’t feel bad. Everything will turn out fine.”
On the night Nicky died I wasn’t making a simple trip to the bathroom. I wanted to be held, and to hear the truth. Nicky was dead and I did feel bad and nothing was fine. I was a small boy and my brother had drowned in the sea, and that is truly terrible. It is a terrible and bad thing to happen, Mum, and that’s okay. It’s okay to say so.
3
Words Are Singularly Useless
The Day After
The Week After
The Week After That
The Rest of 1978
Forever After
Now
The Day After
On Saturday morning, the day after, Guy Hake’s parents arrived at The Mill to fetch him. The strongest feelings Guy remembers are from the morning, waiting to be rescued from our family grief. He was trapped, and his disquiet started the moment he woke and came downstairs.
“Jem was up and about, and he’d drawn a picture of the beach and the helicopter. I remember how awkward that was, his child’s drawing of a day out. I don’t think anyone had told him to do it. It was spontaneous.”
A six-year-old boy gets up early from his holiday bed to draw a picture of his bewildering yesterday at the beach. He has seen a helicopter, and in his experience of life so far his drawings are reliably the bomb. If he colors in the shapes with care, using felt-tip pens that don’t go over the lines, he’ll make everyone beam with joy.
“I felt passive, helpless,” Guy says. “I didn’t know how to react. That morning we sat around. Lots of sitting around. I didn’t intervene much, apart from the Scrabble.”
Guy experienced three generations of an English family coping with emotion. Mum and Dad were at a police station, probably Launceston, and facing a long, bleak day, the day after—“The police were so kind,” Mum says. Jem’s drawing of a happy yellow helicopter lay ignored on the table, while he wondered why no one wanted to stick it on the fridge. In the front room of The Mill we sat, waited, then children and grandparents formulated a response to a world of unreasonable sorrow. We played Scrabble.
“Really?”
“That morning your parents weren’t there,” Guy says. “Someone got out the Scrabble box, I suppose as an attempt at normality. We had to do something. Me, Tim, you and one of your grandparents—the four of us played Scrabble. I have in my head a nugget of sharp e
motion that came out of the game. It’s silly, but this is what I have.”
“It’s what I want. Tell me.”
“In the letters on my rack I had an I, another I, an M—M for mother—and a Q. I rearranged them and said, ‘Look, MIQI!’ and I chuckled. I meant Miqi like Mickey Mouse. I didn’t mean anything, but of all the things I could have said: ‘Look, MIQI.’ Tim misheard and thought I said Nicky. Nicky with an N. ‘Don’t,’ he said.”
Shut up, Guy. You have a Q, so wait for a U. Everything in its place. Don’t try and be clever. Instead, Guy shouts out a word that sounds like Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, the already forbidden word. He didn’t do it on purpose, but that’s the sound, give or take an M for an N. And why not? The letters are in the bag. Try to bring him back with a single word, but it has to be the right one, correctly spelled. MIQI is meaningless. You can’t put MIQI down for points.
“I was mortified,” Guy says. “The whole time I was thinking what do you do? How do you behave?”
Guy Hake was a product of Pinewood School, an exemplary pupil. We shared an education and a model of how to conduct ourselves. Faced with inexpressible despair, the big boys from Pinewood sat round a table and played with words.
Later that morning, finally, after a lifetime measured out in Scrabble tiles, Guy’s parents arrived.
“There was hugging,” Guy says, which was acceptable because his dad was a vicar. “That was among the adults outside. I stayed inside.”
Guy’s dad led a prayer session that was “grounding, comforting.” His father was a former army captain who had served in Palestine and now, as a commissioned officer of God, he passed on his beliefs about how the universe turned. God was responsible, if anyone was, but God was never at fault because, naturally, he was God. God was infallible, with a child’s sudden death the mysterious expression of His will.
We would all of us have known what to expect from a vicar. At school in 1978, with chapel twice a day, Christian values were utterly familiar. The words of the Eucharist, as recited by Reverend Hake on 19th August, plugged us into a history older and more significant than our own. The body of Christ had been an idea two thousand years before Nicky was born, and the blood of Christ would outlast us.
My brother Tim remembers the informal communion service around the table at The Mill as “emotional.” “Guy’s parents didn’t just come to pick him up. They wanted to be supportive.”
“Were you standing up or sitting down?”
I want detail as an anchor, but I ought to know better by now: the emotion is more lasting than any specific fact, not that anyone encouraged this notion at the time. Of course not: we didn’t want the pain to last, or to take root. Looking back now, the instant religion applied by Reverend Hake that Saturday feels like a clamp, an emotional tourniquet from a length of the nearest cultural material. We used a vicar because we had one handy.
When I visited Jim and Bertie at The Mill, I sat at their dining-room table until my face flushed hot—the room contained the memory of Reverend Hake’s communion, and I contained the memory, and for a brief moment I and the place were one. The Saturday group communion is a definite physical memory, as Jem would call it. The event has stuck, immovable, resisting the general cover-up.
We gathered at the oval table in the dining room to praise the grace of the Lord. His ways are ineffable, but comfort is available to the quick and the dead. The Reverend Hake would have recommended that we contemplate Jesus, and His many encouraging words and deeds. I imagine this was the gist; it usually is, and may have helped us because the phrases were familiar.
In my physical memory I’m kneeling on a stone bench, and Guy’s dad has taken over. He is at ease with death because he’s a vicar, and he has imposed his spiritual rank. But what did we actually do?
I have the refreshed memory from my visit to Jim and Bertie. Everyone is kneeling or sitting at the table except Dad, who stands. He tells us that all his life, secretly, he has kept a journal. What he wants us to do—though I suspect now this may have been prompted by the Reverend—is to go round the table and for each of us to say a word in turn. We should share a thought about Nicky.
The day after, and already this. Lest we forget, presumably. Nothing too formal, Dad adds—whatever Nicky meant to us. He had a piece of paper ready, and a pen, and he planned to write down whatever we said as an act of preservation.
Nicky had been dead a day. He was with us twenty-four hours earlier, but Dad was worried we’d forget. Either that, or he was seizing this opportunity to cauterize the remembering, to get it over and done with as soon as possible. We had a minister at the table, so in 1978 this is probably how churchgoing people aimed at achieving closure. Write down some feelings to seal off the pain. They have to be written down, mind, or the words float free, beyond repressive control.
I’m about two-thirds of the way round the table, in the order of speakers. I have bodies close in on both sides of me, the wall behind me, the table in front. I’m paralyzed by good manners, and the habit of doing as I’m told, but I can’t get out now and I’m terrified. I don’t want my turn to come, but Tim has managed and so must I.
What did Tim say? I wasn’t listening.
At Jim and Bertie’s, with Bertie making tea in the kitchen, the room had been quiet, rays through the window and the tick of a clock. The windowsill was recessed into the thick ancient wall, like a stone bench at about knee height, and our knees would have touched because everyone was jammed in together. My memory conflated the stone windowsill and the knees, creating that physical sense of kneeling on a stone bench. The memory was false, but the emotion true: the flush can still rise, one side of my face electric, nerve endings flashing in bursts. I didn’t know what to say about Nicky.
My turn. In the dining room at The Mill everyone watched and waited. “Nicky was really good at sport.” I searched for a second acceptable phrase to complement the first. “He was always generous in defeat.”
The words sounded passable, roughly the kind of thing I imagined people said in a situation like this. I used an intonation that suggested further satisfactory observations would follow, as in a prepared eulogy.
Instead, I burst into tears because: a) I never volunteered to speak in the first place, and b) what I came out with was a straight, barefaced lie. Nicky hated to lose. I knew it and so did everyone else. Nevertheless, that’s not what I said.
Nicky was generous in defeat. The day after he drowned I tagged him as a defeated competitor, implying that someone else was therefore the winner. I didn’t have to look far to see who that person might be. I’m alive, I win; but if I said by way of apology that Nicky didn’t mind losing (even though he was dead) maybe he’d be generous enough to forgive me.
Just in case he was listening. I don’t know what becomes of the dead.
The living either talk or they don’t, and the tribute that day continued to move round the table or it didn’t. I never had my full say, nor did I escape, because I was still in my seat for the holy communion. I hadn’t known that was allowed outside a church, but nobody seemed to care.
We each took bread—ordinary bread from a kitchen plate—a scrap each, torn from a sliced brown loaf. Take, eat. I wasn’t a confirmed Christian, but I recognized these words and most of the others from obligatory months of Sundays. Blood of Christ. I drank a sip of wine.
In this, at least, I was suddenly grown-up, though the novelty wouldn’t last. The familiarity of the ritual did help, I think, and gave short-term comfort because those ancient incantations reassured us that nothing really changes. In the context of a higher spiritual reality, a dead child barely registers.
That’s what we wanted to believe.
The Week After
On the Sunday we drove from Cornwall to Swindon, in separate cars. I don’t know who went with whom, but we broke the journey at Exeter services for a miserable fish-and-chips. That was our usual treat on the way home. The next ordeal was the funeral.
I haven’t found an or
der of service, and Mum says none were printed. No one had time, or the heart, because more written evidence so soon was simply too much pain to bear. Mum isn’t certain when the funeral happened, but I get lucky: Hillier Funeral Service Ltd of Swindon, a family business as old as Beard’s Builders, is a meticulous keeper of records. In their archived files they have an itemized invoice for Nicky’s funeral—for a copy by email or post, forty years on, all I need do is ask.
The funeral is set for Thursday 24th August. Hillier’s will arrange the transport of the body.
“We had no TV that week,” Mum says, “no music, no games.”
She remembers the silent days in Swindon waiting to bury her child, and blames the grimness on Dad. “He thought we should all grieve like him. Sit in a chair and do nothing.”
Whereas in fact, Mum tells me, she had plenty to do, and having more than enough to do has since become her preferred style of life. She had to monitor the transfer of the body and choose suitable hymns. My dad’s father helped with the practicalities, and as churchwarden of All Saints Liddington he advised and checked on arrangements. I see how the toing and froing kept him away from his darkroom, but anyway the prospect of developing the holiday photos would have defeated him. The canister of film brought a lump to his throat, but pictures were pictures. He selected a random address from a photo magazine and sent off the film in the post. No one knew him in Liverpool.
“We had a brilliant GP who offered us counseling,” Mum says.
“I don’t remember any counseling.”
“Your dad refused. ‘No, we don’t need it,’ he said. He sat in his chair.”
Twice a day, from his chair, he’d have heard the dogs barking at the postman and the letters of commiseration as they slapped on the mat. We hear that you don’t want visitors or “phone calls” on your return. Offers of help in the letters are not taken up, nor is the possibility of a complete break at our humble home or a bid for the boys on their own.
The Day That Went Missing Page 14