“I do it myself,” he says, “but I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He is modest, a small part of what makes him good. As a headmaster he was never a loving presence, not exactly, but he’s blessed with an unlimited supply of brisk kindliness, and in 1978 he and Mrs. Boddington had concerns enough, without pupils dying in the holidays. Society was changing and their task was to haul the school out of the Fifties and into 1978, reversing the falling roster of seventy-eight pupils. Even in my time Mr. Boddington had started a significant revival of the school, at first by allowing in the civilizing influence of girls. Day children were encouraged—pupils had parents they saw every day.
Nevertheless, Mr. Boddington has a keen memory for Nicky’s death. Nicky was in the same year and class as his daughter, among the first intake of girls and who herself died in her early twenties. Nicky was kind to her, and aged nine she wrote a moving letter by which to remember him: He was one of my favorite boys in the school. We sat next to each other for the first half of term. He was very good at sports and music.
“So we had to deal with her,” Mr. Boddington says, “as well as everything else.”
We sit in his English garden with a lunch of cold meats and salad. I and other savage boys were mean to Mr. Boddington’s daughter, but I’d forgotten she was friends with Nicky, and Nicky with her. At that age, at that stage of my arrested development, consorting with the weak was understood as a weakness. The daughter of the new headmaster was weak by default, partly because her parents were so close. How weak of her, to have to admit to having parents; also, she was a girl. It occurs to me now that I may have disliked Nicky for his strengths. He was his own person, not easily swayed by peer pressure. As a letter of condolence might say, the good are taken young.
The school devised a strategy. Tim and I should make our reappearance on 13th September, the morning after the other boarders had returned the evening before.
“Your father didn’t agree,” Mr. Boddington says. “He wanted the least possible disruption.”
Dad thought we should start on the time-tabled evening, like everyone else—be brave, tough it out. Mr. Boddington the headmaster had other ideas. At evening chapel, in our absence, he led prayers for Nicky, for us, for the family. That first night of term, without us, he went round the dormitories and sat every boy down on the edge of his bed. He told each room in turn that Nicholas Beard, Beard min, had drowned in the sea while on holiday. Nicky would not be coming back to school this term.
Mr. Boddington asked the boarders to think deeply on what Nicky had meant to them. Tomorrow, when the older Beard boys returned in the morning, they should try to carry on as normal. Act normally, as if nothing terrible had happened.
I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Mr. Boddington’s measures against grief fit with the school’s defenses against more familiar types of misery, like homesickness: a brisk run after breakfast, robust sporting activity, the original Latin of the Punic Wars. Awkward emotions could be defeated.
Thankfully. I have never wanted to be unhappy, and I could not abandon myself to grief, unlike Ralph at the end of Lord of the Flies: The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. If I’d given up like this, like Ralph, the teachers would have offered no more help than the Navy man on Ralph’s corrupted beach: The officer, surrounded by these noises, was moved and a little embarrassed. He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited…
I didn’t want to cause embarrassment, and the school was a perfect accomplice in that project. Between us we colluded to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had taken place, and at school I was soon absorbed like everyone else. I wore the uniform gray, smelled of carbolic soap, sweated semolina and jam. I acted out our rarefied idea of normal, with enthusiasm.
We weren’t looking far ahead. Aged eleven, my perception of time narrowed to the busy ongoing now, and I’d deal with grief at an unspecified point in the future. I couldn’t have known it would take so long to stop playing at normal, to lose my liking for the stiff upper lip and the English way.
From the night Nicky died, I wasn’t grieving and wanted nothing more than the bathroom (or so I said), and within a week I’d been spared his burial because exposure to intense emotion was discouraged for boys my age. Better to stay away and ignore the upheaval. Go back to Cornwall and finish the holiday. Start a new term at school as if nothing awful had happened.
Nicky’s last direct involvement in the life of the family, later that September, was when Mum and Dad drove to Launceston to hear the coroner’s findings. We can’t find the written report, but it did once exist because “The Cornwall Coroner” website is clear about the duty of coroners to investigate deaths which are reported to them and which appear to be due to violence, or are unnatural, or are of sudden and of unknown cause. This was as true in 1978 as it is today. A death at sea requires an inquest, and the website claims that all Coroners’ records in cases of death are protected by a 75 year seal.
My hopes are raised, but the prompt and polite Coroner’s Liaison Officer in Truro is unable to help: Sadly despite an extensive search we can confirm that we are no longer in possession of this file. Although we do have files dating back to 1978, only a sample of each year has been retained and this file is not among them.
“The coroner was very kind,” Mum says, and she can quote phrases from the verdict. “Nicky hadn’t eaten a heavy lunch. That was in the report. He was a well-nourished child of nine.”
Mum has these judgments of the formal inquest by heart, official confirmation that she took good care of her children. Nicky was healthy, well fed, with no one making the classic 1970s mistake of allowing a child to swim after eating. She was a loving mother who’d looked after her baby, except for the fact he was dead.
The coroner records a verdict that was probably Accidental Death, but it wasn’t Unlawful Killing or Misadventure—otherwise Truro would have kept the file. The case closes, and the events between one last swim and a signed death certificate have taken barely six weeks. For the last five of those, from the final week in Cornwall through starting back at school, we acted as if nothing had happened. How was that working out for us?
As a short-term solution our 1978 English prep-school idea of normal, involving buttoned-up shirts and polished sandals, seemed to be going just fine. We battened down the hatches, an island people with experience of storms at sea. Lash the sails and squat tight below decks. The winds and the rain will pass. Meanwhile, amuse yourselves as best you can.
12th September 1978, and Mr. Boddington circulated news of the tragedy round the early-evening dormitories: “You will feel sad, but try not to show it.” He was speaking to a receptive audience, a group of children who had been trained from the age of eight to excel at this very pretense. They knew the routine. First, acknowledge that sadness exists. Your parents have gone home without you: it’s enough to make anyone sad. Confront the sadness, as in the preface to the Summer Term 1978 magazine:
The news that Nicholas Beard has been drowned while on holiday in Cornwall came as an enormous shock to us. We, staff and boys and girls, will miss his enthusiasm, his lively personality and his talent more than we can say. I’m sure that all readers will join us in extending our deepest sympathy to Mr. and Mrs. Beard and to the rest of the family.
Then carry on. Apart from the shocking news from Cornwall, Summer Term 1978 had been a tremendous success. As always, the gloss A5 pages of the Blue and Grey serve up an advertorial of excitements and exploits. Beard minor, second of three, and older brother of the drowned Nicholas, took part in life-saving partnerships for the Cricket XI. Good boy. Not to be outdone, the Colts Under-11 cricket coach has the doomed Beard—Beard min—taking a very hard and low catch at gully: it surprised me and moreover it surprised him. We didn’t stop living that summer just because Nicky was about to die.
&n
bsp; In the autumn, back at school only one day late, we carried on running and jumping and painting pictures and writing French composition. The magazine for that term is Winter Term 1978, and I’m back on show as is Tim, though Nicholas is not surprising anyone, not this term. He has taken his last blinding catch.
Time marches on, and Pinewood School’s attitude to grief is best illustrated by an article published to commemorate the death of the former headmaster’s wife: Throughout this difficult term Mr. Walters has missed only one lesson, and that on the afternoon of Mrs. Walters’ funeral. Mr. Geoffrey “Goat” Walters, MA (Cantab), on the staff since 1942, missed a single thirty-minute class to bury his wife and is praised for his devotion to duty. An example to everyone, he picks himself up and dusts himself off. He gets on with it, as did we.
Which, from September to Christmas 1978, after a summer of sudden death, meant a part in the annual school play. R. J. Beard is cast in a stage adaptation of The Speckled Band, an early Sherlock Holmes story. He will play the role of Miss Helen Stonor, tragic victim of a crime that Holmes is enlisted to solve.
I am the inside-front cover-girl for Winter Term 1978. What I see is a full-page black-and-white spread of a boy who has picked himself up and dusted himself off. He is eleven years old and is getting on with life in a broad-brimmed white hat attached to his delicate pointed chin with a length of taffeta. He is wearing a full-length white lace dress, white opera gloves, a pearl necklace, and a short black cape. Someone backstage, a responsible adult, has modeled a suggestion of breasts to fill out the dress.
Look closely: the decorous sidesaddle perch on the edge of the chair, the approved posture for we delicate young women from the past. What do I see? I look terrified, a confused small boy encouraged by an eccentric school to deal madly with grief. Then again, maybe I’m just acting, because in The Speckled Band poor Miss Stonor fears for her life: I am merely performing her emotions.
I seek out the original Conan Doyle story, as published in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is narrated by Dr. Watson, played in 1978 by my fellow survivor and older brother Tim, aged thirteen. He is pictured in the magazine’s theater review wearing spats and a tailcoat, muttonchop whiskers spirit-gummed to his cheeks. Presumably, during our rehearsals in the gym, he interacted with a Helen Stonor similar to Conan Doyle’s original character:
A lady dressed in black and heavily veiled, who had been sitting in the window, rose as we entered. (Helen is grieving, and noticeably ill at ease.) “It is fear, Mr. Holmes. It is terror.” She raised her veil as she spoke, and we could see that she was indeed in a pitiable state of agitation, her face all drawn and gray, with restless, frightened eyes, like those of some hunted animal.
Why does Miss Helen Stonor feel compelled to call on Sherlock Holmes? Why, Dr. Watson, because her sister is dead! Her sister! The unexplained death of a sibling is an outrage that demands investigation. Holmes and Watson therefore travel to Helen’s stately home, where they make a thorough investigation of the bedrooms. Helen Stonor (for it is I) describes her evening ritual: she locks her door against the dark, but hears screams in the night. Through the grounds of her stepfather’s estate, cheetahs and wild baboons roam freely, like dreams of ancient fear.
It was difficult to believe that beneath her makeup Helen was a member of a very successful Rugby XV.
It’s also difficult to believe that Helen made no connection with a sibling dead only two months earlier. Equally unbelievable is the idea that a healthy way to deal with grief, condoned by teachers and parents alike, involves dressing as someone else and hiding in a fictional story that mirrors recent events.
But back to life onstage, where The Speckled Band is into its final act. As long as the mysterious death of Helen Stonor’s sister remains unsolved, Helen’s own life is at risk, threatened by forces of disorder. Under these circumstances she has no prospect of happiness or inner peace. Unless, of course, Dr. Watson and the incomparable Sherlock Holmes can unravel how and why her sister died. Sherlock Holmes has an eye for detail, and his famous deductive method. He will account for premature death and hold the chaos at bay.
As will Pinewood School. The repression was organized, collectively enforced, so how quickly could I be made to forget? Quickly, I think. Don’t speak of it, or dwell on what might have been. Ignore life’s broken promise from a term earlier that there will be no problem here. He will be a great asset to the team next season. Forget the boy who is unavailable for selection.
I inhibited my feelings, and never looked back. Now, I’m grateful for the existence of the school magazines, as a valuable window on what we actually did. As well as dressing in women’s clothes, in Winter Term 1978 I passed Piano Grade 2, not well, but worthy of note in Music Report. By Spring 1979 I’m scoring goals and playing Bridge and preparing for additional music exams. No more cross-dressing required. The worst is over.
Alongside Nicky’s letters in the attic, I found some of my own. At about this time I seem to live a serene existence of rugby matches and bland Saturday films like Ring of Bright Water, about a man and his otter. In the letters home I make sure to mention I’m doing well. I cannot wait to be home.
Before long I’m also writing stories. My published piece in the magazine of Spring 1979, aged twelve, is “The Diver” and, true to the title, the story is about a terrifying dive from a thirty-foot board. My stomach hollowed, felt strangely empty, my heart came to my throat… I was terrified. Nevertheless, the narrator overcomes the terror of jumping, which is also a fear of water, because many people are watching. Then he wakes up and it’s all a dream. The diving board was my mattress, the surface of the water, my bedroom floor.
In other words, the fear is not overcome, not outside a fictional dream. I was terrified in my own bed, at night, with no way back into the water.
“I do remember the nightmares,” Mr. Boddington says.
How is that possible? I was composing stories, playing hockey (filling that difficult inside role), losing a squash match at the Shrivenham Military College, but I was also waking up screaming in the night and needing to be calmed by an adult. Three times at least, Mr. Boddington tells me, during that first term back, I was comforted after dark in the arms of his wife.
Mrs. Boddington held me in her arms, and Mr. Boddington told me it was over—really, the worst was over now. I’d soon settle down, and I did, into the determined cultivation of my hard English heart. I was encouraged to adopt false values by good people, and later in life I’d come across Mahatma Gandhi’s intense frustration with the “hardness of heart of the educated.” He meant the privately educated English ruling class he’d encountered in South Africa and India—trained to subdue their emotions and rewarded with a mention in the Empire cumulative scoring book. We were encouraged to dismiss our feelings for ourselves, and so lost the ability to feel for others.
My next piece of Creative Writing, published in Winter 1979, is called “The Confessions of an Actor,” in which the first-person narrator attempts a convincing performance. He is fantastically costumed, his face elaborately painted, but he keeps fluffing his lines—I mispronounced nearly every word, an infinity of errors. The subconscious is issuing a protest, but through so many layers of pretense that no one heard it at the time. Certainly I didn’t myself.
I look for evidence of cosseting in the first term back without Nicky, of special treatment out of pity. I don’t find any. In the itemized school fees, for example, postal “disbursements” are the same this term as any other. I didn’t indulge in needy correspondence. Extra fruit and extra milk appear as a separate charge, but as always this means “some” fruit and “some” milk, an orange a day, and half a pint of milk in a blue Bakelite mug. In the documentary record, normal life has reimposed itself.
“There’s something odd,” Jem says. He’s thinking back to when he was about ten or eleven—he has a memory of an impression about a memory. “I felt there were normal years, that pas
sed as years do, month by month. But also that I’d lived a year in my life that was shorter than the others, as if the whole year was contained in a single autumn. That seemed literally true to me. Even now, I can believe that.”
A death in the family accelerated Jem’s growing up, a whole year of emotional life compressed into five months between August and Christmas. If we could hold out and push on into 1979 without serious damage, we might survive. Nicky had no claim on 1979.
In random letters I find evidence of pinched disquiet. Gran wants to help, but submits to the family compulsion to keep carrying on: I don’t want to go to Bournemouth one bit, but must think of Father, we are rather at odds at the moment.
Eventually Gran’s resistance to moving on will amount to a plate she has made with a photo printed on it of Nicky and Jem climbing a smooth low-level tree trunk. She hangs it on the wall above her chair, and the rest of us ignore it. We crave undramatic weeks, in which we experience no overt strong emotion. That’s our definition of ordinary, or normal, not realizing we’re creating a problem not a solution.
Of inexpressible grief, or emotional crisis intruding into everyday life, I find little evidence, no matter how diligently I search. In September 1978, for example, the schedule E Assessment of my Dad’s tax return “shows a considerable amount of tax unpaid.” Promising. The drowning of a son makes Dad useless for the routines of financial management, because tax is banal compared with death. But no, on 1st November 1978, two and a half months after Tregardock, he has settled with the Inspector of Taxes. He will pay £75 by 15th December, end of story.
In his diary from October onward the school sports matches are systematically marked, whereas earlier in the year they aren’t. These match-days will be our points of contact from now on, a silent touchline vigil replacing the conversations we didn’t have, not at the time or since. Dad used to watch all the matches against other schools, without fail. And usually Mum would turn up too, and bring a cake. God knows how we’d have managed if I hadn’t made the team.
The Day That Went Missing Page 17