The Day That Went Missing

by Richard Beard

  “To the same house?”

  “We had it booked.”

  The Week After That

  Tim doesn’t remember, nor does Jem and neither do I. We have independently deleted the memory of an additional week in Cornwall, starting six days after Nicky died, on the Thursday, the evening of the funeral. Thursday 24th August; we’re back. I can only imagine my parents were temporarily deranged.

  “Did Dad think another week was a good idea?”

  “He must have done. Otherwise we wouldn’t have done it.”

  We weren’t alone, again. In the week no one remembers, we shared The Mill with a woman Mum had met at riding stables, along with her two children.

  “She was a single mother, this was their summer holiday. They’d been looking forward to it for ages.”

  “How old were her kids?”

  “I don’t know. Eight? Six?”

  I have no idea where they slept, but that’s the least of my worries. “And these people, they knew what had happened the week before?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they still wanted to come?”

  “It was arranged. They’d have had to change their holiday plans.”

  Six days after Nicky drowned at Tregardock we unpacked our bags, the same bags, in the upstairs bedroom at The Mill, the same room we’d shared with Nicky. We left the buckets and spades downstairs, ready for a trip to the beach. What were they thinking of?

  “Did we go back to the beach, to Tregardock?”

  “We did, yes,” Mum says.

  “What did we do when we got there?”

  “We were a family on holiday. We acted normally, as if nothing had happened.”

  “We must have been sad.”

  “I don’t think we were.”

  “At the very same beach?”

  “Yes. We didn’t want you to be scared of the water.”

  “I am scared of water.”

  In Cornwall we attempted to pass off the extra week—the fourth week since Mum and the little boys had first arrived—as ordinary. We’d show danger and death that we were essentially unmoved. Nicky had drowned in the sea at the end of the second week of a four-week holiday, the house booked and paid for in advance. We’d had to miss nearly a quarter of our summer break for the funeral. But Nicky was buried now, the dry earth heaped on his coffin. We might as well finish what we’d started.

  The boy is dead, but what can you do? No, really, what do you do? We’d been sitting on the floor in Swindon staring at the drinks-cupboard door, under instructions not to answer the phone. Snap out of it! In that definingly English phrase, pull yourselves together. We could not accept, in 1978 in Swindon, the notion of legitimate emotional trauma. We didn’t respect emotion as a useful human response. Pull yourself together, hunch up, shrink the target for those vast feelings as they drift close by like planets.

  “And we spent a day at Tregardock, the actual beach?”

  I ask twice, because even though I lived through this, I find our return to The Mill and Tregardock unbelievable. We’re back on holiday, with house guests who are acquaintances of the family. We wake to another glorious day, sun shining and no special plan—say, Sunday 27th August—and someone suggests making the most of the weather with a visit to our spectacular beach. Read the tide table (on this occasion, I think, study it ever so minutely, and more than once). Come on, people, as a family. Grab your swimmers and let’s have a super day out.

  On Tregardock Beach, in the week after the funeral, Mum and Dad make the immense effort to act as normally as possible. I think about what this means—normal was before Nicky died. That’s how to act, and it would consciously be an act, to keep the children happy. Back on the appalling beach, we three boys find some reciprocal show of our own, to keep our mum and dad as happy as they’re keeping us. Everyone is performing; no one is happy. And so a disastrous template for survival takes shape.

  Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, pull yourself together. Life will continue, but more harshly, and under the control of a great many imperatives: look forward and get on with it. Move on.

  “Was going back a kind of running away?” I ask. “Especially from everyone who wanted to feel sorry for you?”

  Mum offers a pragmatic explanation, as if psychology has no greater hold over us than feelings. “After Nicky died, we packed up the Cornwall house in a hurry. We’d left stuff down there.”

  Besides, we’d invited Iris Grebezs and her two children to share our holiday. In return, Iris could offer support and company to Mum because Dad was dying from cancer. For that fourth week in August, I think, a change of plan would have felt like admitting defeat.

  “It gave me something to do,” Mum says. “I washed the bed linen and the clothes and prepared food for the trip back down. We had a week left on the booking.”

  Mum heard recently that Iris Grebezs had died. The children were called Alexis and Emma, and thanks to the search-friendly “z” in Grebezs, and the fondness of popular newspapers for giving everyone’s age, the Bristol Post helps me identify one Emma Grebezs (38) as living in Bradford on Avon in 2009. In 1978 that makes her seven, and she may have a better memory of this week in Cornwall than I do. I track her down to a marketing job in Canberra, but she doesn’t answer my e-mail. Perhaps she’s the wrong Emma Grebezs, who hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about.

  Of those of us alive and available, only Mum remembers the extra week, and she must have realized the profound oddness of going back so soon. In one of the condolence letters to my gran, the return trip to Port Isaac is all the gossip: Eileen said they were talking of going back to Cornwall to finish their holiday. Of course, they have the other boys to think of, but if they do so I think it will be very brave of them.

  This is “brave” used in the sense of tough, of toughing it out, as when my friend Dru applied for gender-reassignment surgery. Everyone told Dru how brave she was, and she hated it. “Brave” meant tough but also “not something I would do,” and by extension “misguided” and probably “stupid,” an action incomprehensible to any rational, healthy onlooker.

  We weren’t healthy, not in the last week of August 1978, we were a family sick with grief. We tried so very hard to act our way out of it. At Tregardock we played cricket to pick up the fun of our interrupted summer. Easier to stay in bat now—one fewer fielder to make run-outs and catches, but the wide-open spaces make me feel tearful, so let’s try something else. Play in the waves? I don’t think so.

  Or maybe we could. Champions of denial, princes of theater, we acted extraordinary emotion out of existence. For props, we had nothing more exotic than cricket and a picnic, but we were fiercely motivated. I’d have willed that week to be emotionally flat, the new normal. Make it happen.

  “I found a letter,” Mum says. “I wrote a letter from Port Isaac to your gran, to explain why we went back there. You should read it.”

  Every discovery in the attic feels like a miracle, and this letter survived with Gran’s stuff that was shunted upstairs with her crockery and walking sticks. Mum has been rummaging in the attic on her own, and has come across evidence. The extra week in Cornwall is real, with documentary proof.

  Dear Mother… It may have seemed a strange decision to come back here…

  It does, Mum, it does. The letter shows Mum wrestling with the strangeness even in 1978, but she reasons we need a time of peace. We would have been smothered by telephone calls, friends, letters, this way we have been able to come to terms as much as possible, in our own way.

  Our way seems to involve the ideal of a Cornish holiday cottage, so alluring at most other times, colliding with the reality of The Mill and Tregardock, places in our recent family history steeped in violent death, and therefore the opposite of peaceful. We have been shopping in the village and have even managed to go to the Beach, Timmy went swimming, I can’t tell you the agonies we went through.

  So we did go to Tregardock, and I feel sadness for Mum, for the letter of condolence she has to
write herself because no one else has come close to understanding. I know the men miss their children dreadfully, but to have had the joy of giving birth to a child, to have shared the delights and sadnesses with them, only to have them snatched away without warning, must leave a gap, never wholly understood.

  I’ve been trying to understand this gap from as many perspectives as I can, but inevitably I keep coming back to my own. At the foot of the first page of the letter I appear in person: Richard has shut the episode out of his mind, and only when forcibly…

  I hesitate before turning the page. My brother drowned less than a week ago. I don’t want to be forced into anything. I turn the page.

  … reminded does he break down, so a period of peace was right for him also.

  For nearly a week in Swindon I’d tried to eject the episode from my mind—out, out, then slam the door. I’d braced my back against it (not that peaceful). How now could I be forcibly reminded? Break down the door, and when Mum forced her way in, I too broke down. She says so in the letter. Please, I’m trying to keep the memory away. I’m doing all I can.

  Our thoughts at the moment are that Jemmy will go back to school on Monday 11th Sept and the boys will go at the end of that week. Richard will not be ready for schoolboy questioning so we will wait until the wonder has finished.

  Of all Mum’s letters, this is the only one I’ve ever read that doesn’t contain an exclamation mark. Mum is not herself. As if to prove it, she signs off Colin and Felicity, alleging dual responsibility even though these are her thoughts in her voice. My mum makes the letter an official missive from the institution of marriage. She has delivered the official position taken by Colin and Felicity. No further statements will be made at this time.

  I doubt we visited Tregardock every day, because there’s only so much forcibly reminded anyone can take. Once upon a time, in a period I hadn’t placed until now, we made a family outing to King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel. The village of Tintagel is about seven miles north of Port Isaac, past the turn to Tregardock. This may have felt like progress of a sort, a literal moving beyond and looking ahead.

  The castle at Tintagel is a dramatic ruin spread across the rugged green myth of a cliff-sided headland. Steep paths offer precarious views of a possible epic past, but in particular I was taken with the shop. I loved the postcards, one for each Knight of Arthur’s Round Table, a coat of arms in a shield above the name and a brief description of that knight’s qualities. I bought six, blowing my pocket money, and my collection included Galahad, famous for finding the Holy Grail. As a reward he asks to die at the time of his choosing. I treasured those cards for years—Gawain, Percival, Tristan. Any of these doomed knights would have saved a bather in difficulty, or perished in the attempt.

  They’d have perished, probably, what with the weight of the armor. Arthurian knights can rescue anyone in distress but a drowner.

  In the evenings, back at The Mill, if in doubt we had Scrabble. Otherwise I can say with some certainty, despite the black unremembered void of the week, that our second attempt at a happy holiday was not a total success. From the jumble in the attic I have The Empire “Cumulative” Cricket Scoring Book, an A4 landscape hardback with gold lettering on a red cover. Two cricket matches have been scored.

  The first imaginary game has been immortalized by N. Beard, joined in the box by his counterpart from the opposition, J. Hobbs no less, presumably full of drinks-break chatter about his career as England’s greatest batsman. Nicky’s match is dated 3rd August 1978. Nicky has fifteen days left to live, and the synapses in his brain fizz with the boyish alchemy of an invented cricketing extravaganza: All England vs Pakistan at Old Trafford. Nicky’s imagination is engaged, attuned to the joy of fiction. Pakistan bowl seventy overs, Graham Gooch anchors the home innings with a staunch if slow century, and then the keeper Alan Knott lifts the mood with his unbeaten 132.

  In reply, Sadiq and Mudasser have put on five for no loss before Nicky gets bored because England aren’t batting. Only two overs of the Pakistan innings are completed (a maiden for Willis). Match drawn.

  The second and final game in the scorebook is dated 28th August 1978, and I’m indebted to the pedantry of cricket’s obsession with records. A cricket scorebook demands various items of information, including a line for the date. 28th August is the Monday after Nicky’s funeral. We are back as a family at The Mill. Over the weekend we have visited the beach, and Tintagel. By Monday morning we need to keep ourselves occupied.

  In the scorebook that day Mum has done the writing, all of it: she’s trying very hard here. We’re sitting at the table where nine days earlier we ate the bread and drank the wine, and Mum fills in Pinewood School vs All England, the match to take place at Lord’s.

  Players are selected and their names listed in batting order in the spaces provided. For All England, Boycott bats at one (of course) and Willis will open the bowling with Botham. In the Pinewood XI, T. E. Beard opens the batting with Howell. Guy Hake, a disappointment as Captain of the School for failing to save a junior boy from drowning, is demoted to come in at five. This match is entirely a work of fiction, but Nicky doesn’t feature for either team. I’m batting number ten for Pinewood, reluctantly making up the numbers.

  The match never gets under way. Mum has filled in the teams, but Willis won’t bowl or Boycott bat and the many boxes and columns will forever remain blank. Every page of the rest of The Empire “Cumulative” Cricket Scoring Book is blank.

  Nice try, Mum. Tough gig. I see myself wanting to play along with your desperate attempt to please, colluding in the date, the place, team selection. But then the effort of imagining anything else but the very recent past proves too much. We close the book. We blink back tears, look out the window, and wonder how the sun dares shine.

  The Rest of 1978

  The catastrophic four-week holiday finally comes to an end on 2nd September. We have ten days in Swindon before school starts again on the 12th, and at some stage in this period Mum walks to Eastcott Smith, the butcher’s, and decides in the queue that chops for tea would be nice.

  “Six,” she says, as Eastcott or Smith waits in his blood-smeared apron, cleaver in hand. She clears her throat. “Five lamb chops, please.”

  The bill from Hillier Funeral Service Ltd arrives in a plain but heavy envelope.

  “I was shocked,” Mum says. “It came to three hundred pounds.”

  I check my copy of the invoice, and the total Hillier bill is £285.01. Note that one pence, the final reckoning. Mum has forgotten swaths of experience, but she’s not far off the price of death in 1978, a detail sharp with indignation. She buried her son; if that wasn’t enough, she had to pay for the privilege. In today’s money the undertaker’s bill is about £1,550 for the 193 miles’ transport, the extra man, Mr. S. the gravedigger, and sundry funeral services that concluded with the orderly burial of a nine-year-old child. This includes an Anglican ceremony and the body in the ground six days after death.

  In the early-September post, along with the undertaker’s bill, comes a package from Liverpool—Max Spielmann. The Specialist Photo Printer. Mum and Dad look at the pictures of Port Isaac sailboats, then of Nicky on his last day alive, sitting on a rock hugging his knees, gazing seaward as if at the future. The packet disappears into an underused drawer or cupboard, next to random objects destined for the bin or attic.

  The efforts you have to make to help the three brothers through their great grief must impose an intolerable strain on your already overstretched nerves and sorrow.

  The schedule for September 1978, in my dad’s pocket diary, is similar to the working months of July and October. His meetings reconvene on 4th September (10.00 JONES AVONPRINT). 12th September is marked as Boys Back, despite Mum’s hope for some extra days of grace. 12th September is the official start of Winter Term 1978, and from that Tuesday onward boarding school can share the intolerable strain.

  “This must be terrible for your parents.”

  Tim remembers t
he exact words of adults reminding him in the weeks that followed how his parents must be suffering. They were, but ten days after driving back from Cornwall we were offered an escape from their pain. The school would know what to do. Plato tells us that the development of character is more important than the acquisition of knowledge, says the 1975 prospectus, and character would be formed by a sample day like this one advertised in the brochure:

  7.15 Everyone rises and makes his own bed

  7.45 Breakfast (cereal, eggs, bacon or fish, bread, butter and marmalade, tea)

  8.05 Inspection

  8.10 Surgery

  8.20 A brisk run down the drive for some fresh air

  8.35 Morning prayers in the Chapel

  And on goes the day in sections ordered with military precision that leave few available margins for grief. From Chapel to Assembly, then eight daily lessons and five meals (Breakfast, Break, Lunch, High Tea, Supper) with an hour for compulsory rugby and more Chapel then bed and lights out by 8.15. Then morning again, and the boys make their own beds, clean their own shoes, wait at table and really help to keep the place tidy. All for £525 a term, not including extras like carpentry, notepaper, and fruit.

  “There was some kind of announcement,” Tim says, when I ask him about our first days back at school. “It was definitely referred to officially.”

  It. Thank God for pronouns, I think, standing in diplomatically for the noun. We’d be speechless without “it” to take the place of death and drowning and your tragic loss. We need “him” for Nicky and Nick-Nack and Nickelpin. Dead now. Not coming back, not even to school.

  “Was there a service in the school chapel?”

  “I can’t remember. There must have been.”

  I visit Pinewood’s former headmaster, who took over from Geoffrey “Goat” Walters in 1977 and remained the man in charge for the next twenty years. Mr. Boddington lives alone, not far from the school, surrounded in his retirement garden by the flowers of an English summer. I compliment him on the color in his borders and the plants rising higher than the fence.