“It’s such a dangerous beach,” Mrs. Thom’s daughter said. “Which one was yours?”
“1978—a small boy.”
“I don’t remember that one.”
“I’m writing about it.”
“Oh no. We have trouble enough with surfers. They block the road. Don’t write an article. ‘Best secret beach,’ that kind of thing.”
Not what I had in mind, not exactly. Recently at Tregardock I stood in the January rain on the brown sand, squinting at the spray from heavy gray breakers. The week we spent in Cornwall after the funeral, I think, acts as a barrier. I had been to Tregardock since Nicky died, possibly more than once, less than a fortnight later. That extra, forgotten week obstructs contact with the day itself, because the fencing was erected almost immediately. Any emotion I feel at the beach is triggered by Nicky’s death, but also by the painful effort to suppress his death.
I visit the crags of Tintagel. Out of season, I’m alone on the steep path round the cliffs and I remember—I think I do—the pretending, the stress of making these outings bearable. We acted a story of enjoyment: The legendary birthplace of King Arthur… This castle was built at least 500 years after a real or fictitious “Arthur” fought the Saxons away to the East. In 1978, in the week we returned as a depleted family, we struggled through a real or fictitious “holiday.” We pretended to believe in it, even if we didn’t, and tried to diminish Nicky’s death into an event that happened to him but not to any of the rest of us. The task of making 18th August 1978 a forgettable date, ridiculous though that sounds, was off to a determined start.
Some episodes of the day I can never re-create. So I invent them, knowing it’s impossible to invent from nothing. I do the best I can. I sit in the conservatory of my Port Isaac bed-and-breakfast while imagining a 1978 breakfast at The Mill. We squabble over the cornflakes, and Nicky grabs the box from my hand. As he eats, head low to the bowl, a spot of milk settles on his upper lip and his eyes dart sideways to check he can reach the sugar.
In the seat by the window Tim runs his finger down the columns of August tides. We’re not in a hurry, but if we miss low tide we’ll lose the best of the sand. In the kitchen Mum butters rolls for the picnic, adds the ham, while upstairs Dad tries on his shorts for the first time since August ’77. He checks the weather by nudging the curtain aside, and the sun is bright in the sky. He’ll be glad to get out, find the wide-open spaces where the boys can let off steam.
Three on the backseat of the Viva and two in the boot. Or Nicky and Jem with Gran and Grandpa, which is good, because then the big boys can stick together. I’d like to impress Guy, the Captain of the School.
I decide to reenact the drive, alone, starting at The Mill. On the way down, into the field, over the cattle grids, onto the concrete tireway and then the final section of metaled lane, I’m newly arrived from Swanage, I’m silent back from the drowning, I’m here in the car again the week after, wishing I were anywhere else, the past within the past within the past.
I turn the car and sit facing the way I came, hoping Jim and Bertie don’t pop out to say hello. I’ve worked through the timings. I contacted the Head of Tides at the UK Hydrographic Office, and from the historical data he can tell me that low tide at Tregardock on 18th August 1978 was 12:05. The next high tide was 5:08 p.m.
When Ted Childs arrived in the lifeboat, he encountered “high water,” which I took to mean the tide was more in than out. The beach at Tregardock had disappeared, and from watching the beach closely I know the sand is covered about an hour and forty minutes after each day’s low tide. So, on the day in question, the lifeboat arrived sometime after 1:45.
We weren’t first-timers at the beach. Watch the tide closely and about forty minutes before the beach fully submerges is the time to think of packing up, and to head for the steps in the rocks. Thirty minutes and we should really be moving, so by my calculations the last swim was probably with fifty minutes of beach remaining, therefore about 1:00. Even if the lifeboat covered the distance from Port Isaac in the shortest possible time (twenty minutes to raise the alarm with Mrs. Thom, twenty minutes to mobilize), Ted would have encountered high water on arrival.
Nicky therefore died between about 1:00 and 1:20 on 18th August 1978. The date was only the start. I can recover the actual time.
Which means we set out from The Mill after breakfast, at about 9.30, to make the most of the daylight hours in which Tregardock is the finest secret beach in Cornwall. Right, then, everyone aboard? We can go. Dad drives carefully, of course he does, he has unsecured kids in the back, and half an eye on his own father who is following in the burgundy Triumph Dolomite. I time the journey: twenty minutes and twenty-seven seconds from The Mill to the beach, on average. Estimated arrival time 9.50.
Slide the car close in to the hedge, on the right of the lane to keep the farm access clear, then the boys tumble out on the left. At the speed of a six-year-old (though I haven’t yet timed this with one) the walk down to the beach takes about twenty-three minutes. That’s from the end of the lane to the orange life buoy above the steps in the rocks.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” Dad says, on 18th August, because the family is reunited and this is genuinely a wonderful way to spend a summer’s day; he says it the next time too, a week later. What else is he going to say, now that we’re back? The follow-up visit in 1978, after Nicky has been buried in Liddington, is like a blanket over the original event. The shape remains, but none of the detail. I want to remove the smother of the blanket, but to study the blanket too.
Down the steps in the solid rock (careful!), over loose boulders then rock pools then sand, wet acres of the stuff offered up by the retreating tide. On the beach I walk back and forth, waiting for the tidal equivalent of 1:00. I’ve worked out that the full reappearance of 1978’s precise circumstances depends on replicating the exact state of the tide.
Before then, find the location of our camp while the tide is out. I walk to the left, far enough to feel distanced from anyone else, then a little farther. I can’t find the place. I take out the paper wallet of last-day photos and hold them up against the landscape. I try to match reality to the images. Close one eye, open one eye. I can map where we played cricket, the rocky backdrop in the photograph and in life unchanged. I give up on the camp, but measure out a cricket pitch, marking a crease with my toe, then stand at square leg and field to Nicky’s batting. Now I do this. Then I did this.
“Come on, Dad,” I say, to no one in particular. “Finish him off, put Hake on to bowl.”
I hold up another photo against its real-life background, of Tim and Guy and Mum splashing in the water. They’re much farther to the right along the beach than I’d remembered.
As for the camp, I have a photo of Gran sitting on blankets, with a rock behind her, but I can’t find a match. I go over and over the ground, from one end of the beach to the other. How much change can have taken place? I make allowances for rockfalls, mussel colonies, the arbitrary lay of seaweed and miniature limpets that turn black rock brown.
Tregardock is more variable than I’d imagined. I need to factor in the weather, the angle and height of the sun and the strength and direction of the wind. There’s an ancient saying that no man can step in the same river twice—the river changes and so does the man. A similar truth applies to the ocean and shore on a wild Cornish beach. I can’t just turn up at Tregardock and expect the past to fall into place. Each time I come, though, I’m better prepared, calculating when the time and tides are right, hoping for a perfect facsimile of the landscape and a revelation of exactly how, and possibly why, the drowning could happen. No doubts will remain in my mind.
I try different seasons. Glasses on, glasses off. I fear I’ll never be certain that conditions now are as close as possible to conditions then, and I take this instinct to my friend Dru, once of the merchant marine. She confirms what I’ve started to suspect: a new moon, as on 18th August 1978, occurs on the same day every nineteen years, but the tides
are unlikely to coincide: the concurrence of lunar phase and tide time will prove so rare as to be effectively none. This means that at the right time of day, about one in the afternoon, today’s tide conditions will rarely if ever replicate those I can’t precisely recall from 1978. I check with the Hydrographic Office. They agree with Dru.
Doubt breeds more doubt. At Tregardock conditions are capricious, so I can never say for certain exactly where we entered the water, and whenever I try to pin down the place I face a countdown: the beach is fast disappearing. I look around and all the footprints in the sand are mine, like a chaotic marching band going over and over the same piece of ground.
The attic, the interviews, the letters, the driving, my own books, the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. I have been assiduously playing and replaying the story, as if in some version it might end happily, or at least differently. My sad story of two small boys in the sea—one survives, one dies—is not the story I would like to have told.
Then one day research and reality come together. I find the camp. I have the shape of the rocks behind Gran’s head imprinted on my mind from the photos, and I’m at the beach at the right time after investigating the tides. I missed the camp previously because the base of the rock where Gran sat is under water. Tidal action over the years has scooped out a moat of sand.
This is definitely the place. The camp is closer to the steps than I expected (onto the beach, turn right). Which means our patch of sand where we set out for our last swim is also farther to the right. The story comes together. One last swim. Come on, Nicky. Straight down from the camp the main beach is open and safe, boring. I run to the right and round the back of a large rock, to our own special place, the sand I’d scouted earlier. Here, near the northern headland at the right-hand end of Tregardock, the waves are bigger. The waves are bigger today, they were bigger then. The beach is still too wide. This is the place, but not yet. The patch of sand will shrink as the tide comes in.
I wait. I watch the swell come at an angle off the headland, waves in from the right, sand dragging out to the left. Crosscurrents, not a familiar danger at the Old Town Gardens in Swindon, where usually we went to play. I stand in the shallows and feel the tide on my feet. I marvel at the undertow, dragging the sand from beneath my toes, but can’t see the fun. I wade in deeper, up to my knees, then change my mind. Most days of the year, swimming in these waters isn’t recommended. Ask the local RNLI: the lifeboat crews know the route to Tregardock.
Am I frightened a rogue wave will pick me up and sweep me out? I am not; that never happened. I do notice that the camber of the sand is steep here (conspicuous before the tide comes in, then hidden), and there’s a kind of hump just at the wrong place, which will accelerate the deepening of the water. Easy to see the risks, at this stage of the tide, now that I bother to look. Back then, our timing was simply unlucky. I should acknowledge the senseless chain of events—nothing but timidity would have saved us.
We were not afraid. Summer holiday, beach, last swim, waves, adventure. We plowed straight in.
Not yet, the tide isn’t quite there, but soon it will be, sooner than you’d expect. Mum is packing the lunch after the best of the day. Four of us had traveled long-distance by car on the 17th, and we’d been cavorting at Tregardock since the tide was halfway out at ten that morning, three hours ago. Everyone is tired, beneath the burning sun.
Along with the ancient rocks, I wait. A rock the size of a cricket scorebox, larger, perfectly obscures my view of the camp, about eighty meters away. I retreat round the back of this rock, then jog out from behind it and onto the little beach, to surprise my memory with a replica of the past. Not yet. The patch of sand is still too big. Soon. There are often freak waves, so as Chris Bolton said, not that freakish at all. These waves can eat up an extra ten meters of beach in one go, but they don’t rush in often enough to act as a warning. Back behind the rock, out I trot again, to encounter afresh the beach and the sea and sky. Depending on the timing, the beach can look appealing and innocent. No sign of the more dangerous waves. Good luck, bad luck.
Once we were in, a thrilling freak wave would suddenly have put ten more meters between us and dry land. Taking our bearings from the cliffs to the right, we thought we were in the same place; we were, it was the Atlantic Ocean that had moved.
Now.
I check the time. Matched against high tide on 18th August 1978, the equivalent is 1:13. I have the time we went into the water. Wait. I stand on the shore and endure a sickly, queasy few minutes. As the last person to see Nicky alive—confirmed by Ted Childs—I know how far out we went. I see where we were and, busy with our laughing and jumping, we had no idea the planet was shifting around us. Even on a calm day some of the waves are magnificent. At astonishing speed this part of the beach is closing off, becoming a cove. I sight the full length of Tregardock to my left and yes, the main beach is fine, with plenty of time to spare.
Unlike here. Now. I locate where we were, and the water is about chest-high to an eleven-year-old, and to eyes at sea level the rocks are in the eyeline, forming a cove, making us invisible. Now. Seven minutes after going into the water, at about 1:20, the panic starts. I’d have to be in the water to be absolutely sure, but I’m not going to do that, even so many years later. Nicky’s head goes under (1:21). I swim back in (1:22).
My body hollows out, like an undertow dragging away my heart and innards, leaving behind loss, a memory of loss. On the sand I turn to run, and the sea has rushed in so the cliff at the back of the beach is closer than it was, especially if an adult is there. I run to him, let him know a boy’s in the water, a boy is in the water. He stands up with manly purpose and hands me his trivial sunglasses. I run again, back toward the family, over sand, over rocks, and the glasses are in my left hand and I smash them onto a rock. I run toward the people I love.
He’s in the sea, I tried to save him.
In the natural shelter of the family camp, where in August 1978 we laid blankets beside the rocks, since partially submerged, I bend over and, with my hands on my knees, I sob. The place is in me, the physicality of the memory. Tears drop onto the lenses of my glasses and I bring up huge gulps of undigested grief. Then the sound groaning from my own mouth pulls me up—too low, the bass of a grown man. Wrong. At a time like this a child can cry, a child should be crying now.
I straighten up. I don’t trust the grief breaking out from inside me to last. I run back to the big rock, reenacting the excitement from before the swimming, round the rock to the beach, the sea, look at the amazing waves! Immediately I reach the water I turn round, rerun in my own footprints back to the man at the cliff, take his glasses, leap over rock and sand and smash the sunglasses and hare back fast to camp.
The same story. I reenact the movements to prompt a revelation, and when the emotion surges the acting comes to an end. I can’t help myself. I buckle over, hands on knees, and sob out loud. “I tried, I tried,” bawled out to no one, nobody here but me. Something must be done, but I don’t know what. I heave out blunt pebbles of semi-eroded grief. I hear a man crying. Wrong, not the sound I’m expecting to hear. I straighten up. I escape myself, into an imagining of what happened next.
I visualize the kerfuffle in our sheltered camp, the shouting, the dramatic scene. Dad would have hated that, the fuss, wherever he was. From my mum a Colin! Gran in shock, I’ll fetch the others. And I wail. I am wailing, and I am telling lies.
“I tried, I tried.”
These are the lost words that come back to me with the tears, at the end of the line that is now.
Already, Dad is clambering over the rocks, bashing and grazing his shins. Someone decides the children shouldn’t see this. Maybe it was him, his first reaction. I don’t know. I don’t know my own father. But we were the first to leave, and we’d almost reached the lane before help arrived thirty, forty minutes too late.
I walk slowly toward the steps, negotiate the rock pools and loose boulders, climb the deep indentations in the rock. O
n the grass beside the life buoy I stop and look back, down. This is where Mum waited, clutching Nicky’s shoe to her throat and not being comforted by well-intentioned strangers. Where is the lifeboat? Where is the rescue helicopter?
From up here I see the scorebox rock already surrounded by white water, and beyond that a backbone of smaller rocks reaching into the sea to confirm my memory of a cove. If Dad sliced up his legs on the last rock along, by my calculations he’d have been twenty meters from Nicky, at the most. The water was calm, Ted Childs of the RNLI (headmaster) says so. On the calmer days at Tregardock it is never inconceivable to jump into the ocean to save the life of a child.
Jump, Dad. Leap in and have a go. Do your best. Try your hardest, then keep trying.
Maybe his failure to jump explains his later silence, and why he made questions feel unwelcome. Emotional endurance can be brave, we know that in our family, but pushing on regardless is not the only form bravery takes. Up here where rock gives way to grass, I can see that Nicky died while the marked-out crease for cricket was still intact on the main expanse of sand. From up here, from down there, from every angle, his death feels avoidable. None of the stories I tell make sense of it.
I take the hard walk up to the car with head lowered, legs heavy and arms hanging loose (21 minutes 18 seconds). Endurance is not the same as courage, not always.
The accident happened earlier in the day than I’d have thought, and the lifeboat was a long time too late (high water at 1:48 is twenty-eight minutes after we first started to struggle). Nicky was dead by then; he’d been dead for a while, and so the charade began. I knew but didn’t dare say. Dad had scrambled out to within twenty meters. He watched Ted pull Nicky from the water, and he watched his limp dead son rise, dripping, with the winchman into the belly of the Wessex.
He must have known, like I knew. As he followed by road in the coast-guard Land Rover he knew his son was dead, and at last I’ve found a connection between us. We’re a pair of lying, hopeful bastards. We knew before the others, and we hid our knowledge. We pretended everything might turn out fine, then pushed the truth out of sight and endured.
The Day That Went Missing Page 20