Not that we ever acknowledged his presence, or his power. We trusted that inhibition and denial would work, sort of. Neuroscientists now have kinder words for repression, and sometimes call it “motivated forgetting.” Strategic memory loss, they currently believe, can declutter the mind and allow for efficient thinking, meaning we manage to get stuff done—scroll forward into 1979 and my results at school pick up. I’m in the sports teams and back on track.
Another concept that appears in studies of repressed memory is “dissociation.” A trauma can splinter the mind into separate zones, in some of which the memory ceases to exist. One way to accelerate or imitate this process is to occupy a permanent zone of displacement activity. We avoided Nicky’s death with multiple dissociated activities; we stopped feeling by doing stuff, as an exhausting way to survive.
Mum was always getting involved in something, anything. She became a county councilor and a magistrate, she helped found a charity. A newspaper cutting from the attic—the probable date is about 1986—describes her occasional work with a group called Compassionate Friends, helping bereaved parents. I reckon I can guess the Compassionate Friends philosophy: what else would Mum have said, as she talked strangers through their grief, except that it’s good to talk? The solution she offered others bore no relation to our ongoing family silence, but the counseling itself kept Mum busy.
Dad had his office and building yards five and a half days a week, we boys had O-Levels and A-levels, degrees, then jobs of our own. Our collective work ethic became a form of cowardice—we were too busy to look death in the face. We were actively not remembering, a stubborn ambition, but worth the effort because the platitudes felt true: time would heal. I hope you and your family will be comforted with the passage of time. Life goes on. Mum bought five lamb chops, and year after year we ate one chop each with peas and potatoes, fueled for another day. One more step is always possible.
These days Mum denies the denial. “When I’m asked how many children I have, I say six. I go through each of you by name, including Anna and Lucy. Then when I’m asked what you all do, which is the next question, I go through again, but miss out Nicky.”
“So half the time you miss him out?”
“No one notices. They don’t ask me what became of the other one.”
“You have a lot of children, Mum, and your method for answering the question delivers a big lump of information. One child can easily get lost. You know that. You keep him in and you don’t. It’s a modified kind of denial, but that’s what it is.”
In the lounge above the fireplace, the golden-wedding anniversary carriage clock ticks and tocks. On the polished sides among the many grandchildren, Nicky’s name remains unengraved, as missing as it ever was. I stare at the golden clock.
“We weren’t in charge of the engraving,” Mum says, and the conversation she had at the time has lodged in her head as a dialogue. “The rest of the family said, ‘Nicky’s not here.’ Yes, I said, but he has been here.”
She failed to convince the others to include his name, and tells me the story about the chops. She loves that story, maybe because it dates from the time before we started to forget. Not that Mum’s sporadic efforts at remembering have always been appreciated, such as the improvised vigil with Tim and Jem on the day of Gran’s funeral. They paid their respects at Nicky’s grave, while I turned away in disgust.
I remind Tim of the vigil. “You and Jem and Mum in front of Nicky’s grave. You had your hands clasped together and your heads bowed, as if the day was his.”
“Yes, I hated it. I got bounced into it.”
This forever-after period is increasingly interrupted by funerals. Guy Hake’s dad died in 2004, and at his funeral my mum was able to catch Guy for long enough to say how supported she felt during our time of trial. Guy was grateful, and comforted by this memory of his father the Reverend Hake as a source of strength. Certainly, my own dad wouldn’t have known what to do without him.
“He never came to terms with it,” Mum says now, “your dad couldn’t get over Nicky dying.”
She grounds this observation in the fact that between 1978 and 2011, when he died, they didn’t have a conversation about Nicky. “We didn’t talk about him. Not once.” Mum recognizes how staggering this admission is, but I sense that alongside the wonder she feels a kind of pride. Dad never wanted to speak about Nicky, which was wrong of him, but look at the strength of the man, his stubbornness and powers of endurance!
“We never found the coroner’s report,” I say. “Dad may have destroyed the paperwork if he was upset by knowing the details were always available.”
“Not once,” my Mum says, “in all that time.”
“In his office we didn’t find any telling mementos,” I say, “nothing that looked like his private acknowledgment that Nicky existed, and that he could make us feel.”
But as scientists like to say, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Perhaps I’ve yet to search in the relevant place. I look up 18th August in all of Dad’s pocket diaries after 1978. He either has meetings or he doesn’t, but I see no indication of a day of special remembrance. I check 18th August on the health charts the doctors encouraged him to keep toward the end. Nothing out of the ordinary—on 18th August 2008, the thirtieth anniversary of Nicky’s death, his blood pressure is up but his pulse is at its lowest for a month. Maybe he forgot the date, like I did.
In 2011 the cancer came back. Dad would not be challenging his grandfather for Longest Working Life, but he did have Galahad’s privilege, more or less, of knowing when he was going to die. He was given three months, and decided to write his life story, the confession of a dying man, the equivalent of a final phone call from Death Row. At last he had his chance, he could try to speak to us.
He made some notes on a spreadsheet, with the years and months in the left-hand column. In 1965, Feb, he has MARRIAGE! and in Nov of the same year, Tim. In 1967, Jan—Richy. 1969, the year of Nicky’s birth, is blank. 1978 records his grandfather’s 100th birthday (April) but amazingly, for Aug 1978 his mind has gone blank again—Holiday?
Of the writing itself, he managed half a page. A couple of lines announcing his possibly not uncommon project of settling his final account, then a line or two about finding the actual writing harder than expected.
“I am a very superficial person,” he concluded. “There is nothing beneath the surface.”
By the end he didn’t dare look; even a glance inside was a risk too great to take. When no more steps were possible he retreated to his bed in the bungalow, along the corridor from the lounge where I would come to ask Mum my belated questions. I did broach the subject of Nicky with him before he died, because bedridden he was a captive audience and neither of us had much to lose.
“Dad, tell me about the diaries. In Cornwall, the day after Nicky died, we gathered round a table in the holiday house. You said you kept a diary that not even Mum knew about. You wanted each of us to say something about Nicky, so you could write it down.”
“I don’t remember.”
“It was before we took communion in the holiday house.”
“I never kept a diary.”
“Never?”
“Oh, Richy,” he said, and waggled his fingers in the air like he used to when very drunk. It was a gesture that seemed to mean all life is dust and will fly away and he didn’t care, so neither should I.
“Dad, you said you kept a diary. Have you ever kept that kind of diary?”
“No.”
At the very end he reached out his hand, and I didn’t take it. A bit late for that, I thought, a bit late now for emotional needs. In every other respect I was sad and attentive, as demanded by the occasion, even when all he could say was “What’s the time?” and, possibly, “Water.” He often asked for water. His kidneys had packed up, but he felt thirsty. I fed him blots of water from the spout of a small striped teapot. His eyes went gray like a troubled sky and his lips thinned, pulled back into his mouth. His chin, to
o, somehow receded. He looked like his mother, then he died.
I haven’t mourned him, and I did not cry at his funeral. I’ve read books that say trauma memories can be reawakened by an extreme emotional state that matches the original experience. If that emotion is grief, I knew when my dad died to carry on as if nothing awful had happened. A lesson he taught me himself.
Now
The dead are not always remembered. Nicky’s infant school before Pinewood, Kingsbury Hill House in Marlborough, dedicated a Music Cup to his memory, and I have a headmaster’s letter bursting with good intentions: 8th June 1979, Dear Mr. and Mrs. Beard, The cup which you so kindly brought in this morning glistens in my study and is such a timely reminder of how we all should turn personal tragedy and suffering into a vehicle for others’ joy and happiness.
The cup has been lost, the school itself a memory: closed in the year 2000, the land sold to developers. The school buildings have become luxury flats. We don’t remember, no matter how eloquently we say we will.
I imagine something sporting, wrote Mr. Boddington from Pinewood, and in 1978 members and friends of the Beard family donated money for some permanent memorial. The cricket scorebox at Pinewood School lasted thirty years, and now clings to useful life as a groundsman’s shed. On a cold February day I decide to return the school magazines on loan from Mr. Field. I leave them inside the main door and walk across the frosted pitches to the battered scorebox. I have a screwdriver in my pocket, to unscrew the brass plaque from the door. No one else is remembering but me.
Then I realize the plaque exists for exactly that reason, so I stare at it for a while before leaving it be. In whatever lifetime the plaque has left, its words may still bring Nicky, or an idea of him, into someone’s living mind. Nor are the facts I’ve gathered about Nicky’s life exclusively mine. When I talk to Mum I give her a summary of Nicky’s school reports and his appearances in the Blue and Grey, I list his certificates and show her photographs in which he’s batting, swimming, running. “Why did you think he was going to be a banker, or a murderer?”
“I don’t know,” Mum says. “I don’t know why I remembered him like I did.”
Mum sounds bemused but also defiant, as if protecting the falseness of the memory. After all, why should I know any better? I show her a receipt for Nicky’s place on the waiting list for the secondary school where his big-boy elder brothers went. “You told me the plan was to send him somewhere less competitive, where as a non-sportsman without too many brains he’d be better able to cope.”
“I was wrong. Or your dad told me that was going to happen. I never knew he was on the list.”
Mum examines the piece of paper as if the truth in black and white is a lie she can see straight through. She fetches her glasses and reads the receipt again, and I wish she’d trust the documents as I do. This is our past as recorded in writing, evidence that travels securely through time. Mum, this is 1978 as it was.
All I did was look, and then assemble the evidence. I disagree with the many letter writers from 1978 who didn’t know what to say. There really aren’t words that can express my feelings. This was the most common reaction, but they weren’t trying hard enough, or hadn’t completed the training. The words exist, and techniques for effective communication can be honed with practice. The language exists to make sense of grief, I’m sure this must be true. I’ve searched out words that can express my feelings.
In midlife, denial and distraction wear thin. I could see through myself, from the present into a past of transparent strategies worthy of international acclaim: Richard Beard (UK), Longest Unbroken Period of Denial. And looking into the future, I could see more of the same: write about anything else but this. Then suddenly I was free to rummage through my dad’s old files. It felt like the time was right.
When finally I faced the reality of a child’s death—the dates, the documents, the facts—I realized this was always the story I’d been trying to write. In among the 1978 condolence letters a woman called Edna, half of a married unit called Edna and Tom, is terribly sad and has been thinking of little else. She wonders what on earth anyone can do: Tom said: you don’t have to write a book to say how sad and sorry you are about the loss of a little chap. But…
But, Edna, maybe you do. Maybe all these years later I did.
Nearly four decades after the event, I have carried out my version of an inquest. I’ve tried to stop time in Cornwall on a single day, though I’ve never before worked like this, surrounded by the debris of the past. I navigate a floor covered in photos and school reports, letters and random items of vintage clothing. I sit down, I stand up, I welcome and curse the return of feeling and kick my chair across the room. Feel, damn you, feel something or forget, forget it ever happened.
“One hopes it was over quickly,” Mum says, thinking of Nicky in the water, because the day and the boy and the death are newly open for discussion. Their time has come again.
“He wasn’t in pain,” she says, a statement neither of us can substantiate. He was terrified, I know that. I saw his strained tight-lipped face. I felt the terror of death.
Mum hasn’t finished: “He was doing what he wanted to do.”
He was a runner, Mum, and a cricketer. He understood parabolas and bounce, the certainties of the level playing field. If you think he was a swimmer you pay too much attention to holiday snaps. Of Mum’s three hopes, the speed of it is most likely to be true. Nicky probably died quickly. One swallow of seawater, Chris Bolton of the Port Isaac RNLI told me, and panic can kill. Quickly, very quickly, the lungs fill up and Nicky surrenders, facedown, finished.
Bad luck, circumstance. Too young, too old. Too early, too late. I was immortal and he was not.
Aiming for as complete a picture as possible, I wrote to the bystanders on the beach that day, because in the formal, correct manner they’d headed their condolence letters with a return address. I reached out to the useless man on the rocks, who once wrote: You don’t remember me I am sure, however I was one of the people who clambered along the rocks with you at Tregardock last Friday afternoon in an attempt to save your son.
His original letter traveled first class in 1978 from Sutton Coldfield, with no phone number, but anyway I couldn’t have explained on the phone. Please do not feel a need to answer this letter. He writes to us then, I write back to him now. We think, we write. We live in 1978.
These days, no reply. I look up the address on Zoopla, and the house has been sold several times over since 1978. My envelope, for all I know, is lost among pizza leaflets and boiler discounts.
When writing fails, for more material I can visit Tregardock any time I like, because Cornwall isn’t as distant as it was. Now, when I climb into the car, I presume I won’t need my dad’s handwritten directions, but more often than not I tend to get lost. And when I do eventually arrive at the beach, literally half the time the beach isn’t there.
I rarely cry on the path, not these days. My inquest has made me reassess why I sobbed out loud on the first trip back. Nicky died here, but I was also blindly reliving the horror of the week after the funeral, back so soon with the feelings raw. Every time I come to Tregardock I revisit the death but also the refusal to grieve, the immediate repression, and I regret that epic success. I reexperience the pounds-per-square-inch pressure on an eleven-year-old in trunks; the same trunks as one week earlier.
What am I actually looking for, on these trips to the beach? The sand isn’t home to hidden documents, and that’s an added motivation: my search for feelings in the paperwork can keep those feelings at bay. My dry-eyed desk research can sometimes feel like emotion managed. So I like to visit Tregardock, to make the inquest complete: I’m seeking out raw feeling, of the type I’ve denied for so long, but how will I recognize what I’m looking for? It will probably make me cry.
From the beach, if I find the sand submerged at high tide, I walk up to the farmhouse, and from the farmhouse I retrace my steps to the beach. Then back to the farmhouse. In the
wind, on the wet slate of the path, I cast about for a memory of leaving a brother behind, the first time, of walking uphill from the beach to the cars while Nicky was drifting in the water. I can’t be sure of the memory, because I walked this path nine or ten or eleven days later, doing my best to forget. I try to imagine the walk to the beach in the final week, after the funeral, and I see a relay of anxious glances:
“All right?”
“Fine.”
To the beach, to the farmhouse. Back to the beach, I play all the roles. Walking down, I’m eleven, a child anticipating fun. Can you see the sea? And a week and a bit later I’m pretending nothing has changed. Yes, Dad, I can see the sea. Walking up, I’m slow with brothers and grandparents, leaving Mum and Dad at the water’s edge desperate with unfounded hope. I consider the lies I may have told, to others and to myself. He’s in the sea, I tried to save him. Nicky was dead.
I walk back up in the skin of my dad, shins bleeding, then as Mum, clutching a size-three shoe and swallowing her heart. I try every permutation, searching for a combination that may open up a high-fidelity memory, or a ravishing pain, or an insight of stunning significance. An ending, a beginning, or if neither of these I seek out the safety of knowing that nothing can surprise me now. Each trip up and down is a reenactment, like a lonely weekend hobby that never captures exactly how it was on the day. At the reenactment of the Battle of Hastings, there’s always a bloke in specs.
I run up as the messenger, whoever was sent to raise the alarm with Mrs. Thom at the farmhouse. At the farm, out of breath (13 minutes 27 seconds) I sometimes see Mrs. Thom’s daughter as she checks on the gates with her dog. She is the age now that Mrs. Thom was then. I say hello but not much more, though once I phoned about a room she had to let in the farmhouse. She was happy to chat.
The Day That Went Missing Page 19