I drive north along the coastal road to Bude. As a representative of HM Coastguard, I imagine I would observe the speed limits. No need for flashing lights, for drama. The desperate parents in the back want me to get there quickly, but they shouldn’t be in such a hurry. With all my coast-guard experience, I know too.
The hospital is a long single-story building—the helicopter either has to land in the car park or across town at the rugby club. The doctor on duty that day has time to compose himself before the parents arrive, as does the senior nursing sister. Neither of them would volunteer to break the news.
I drive south again toward Port Isaac. Through the outskirts of Bude my chest fills with the sense of having left something behind, something important, not at the hospital but at the beach. I hurry back to Tregardock, to find whatever it is I’ve lost. I walk down the path, through the opening in the cliffs, but arrive too late. The beach is nowhere to be seen, replaced by the heave of the implacable Atlantic. I’ve done my best, but whatever I lost or left behind, I’m not going to find it now.
I think a life can have a center, which earlier and later experiences will never match. This could be a triumph, but perhaps more commonly it’s a trauma, and if not the center, then this event provides a center of gravity. Mine is at Tregardock, and lasts from 18th August 1978 until the end of the week following the funeral, when back in Cornwall we acted as if accidents never happen. Whatever I went looking for on that first day in the graveyard at Liddington, this is what I found: the extra week, the one we’d blacked out of existence.
The decision to drive straight from the funeral back to The Mill was a fantastic gesture of defiance. Death was not going to ruin an English family holiday, and after all these years I feel the stubborn effort of our pretense. Tregardock is “just” a beach, and the Atlantic Ocean “just” the sea, and our return trip to Cornwall no more than a week we’re due because we booked and paid in advance. Grief is an inconvenience, just an emotion and therefore subordinate to strength of will.
I bet we set up our camp in a different place, though, way over to the left in the vast safety of open sand. No wonder I looked there first for the camp, because that’s where it was, a week too late.
We deleted the memory, and the extra week remained as a barrier, intact until now and separating us from the emotional impact of Nicky’s drowning. Our forced, forgotten smiles provided a template for underestimating emotion, but his death happened to all of us, not just to him. I’ve tried to locate and live the grief, to reanimate the shock of the day. That has been the aim of the inquest, the end of the pretense: we can’t have the same holiday in the same place without Nicky, we can’t live an uninterrupted life.
Since the age of eleven I’ve dodged the pain, generally kept feeling to a minimum as a precaution against sudden disaster. I’ve sleepwalked through pre-forgotten days. The project was not to feel, as encouraged in that extra week, until, hard of heart, I can ask a seventy-five-year-old retired headmaster to describe pulling a small drowned boy from the sea, when that dead boy is my brother. And I don’t even blink. Ted, tell me, how did it feel? I lean in very close toward him, to watch the tears as they form in his yellow-and-pale-blue eyes.
Smart, savage, I’m as competitive and wary as an eleven-year-old, and my interests haven’t changed: cricket, reading, coming top of the class. I like daydreaming and feeling sorry for myself and not being punished. I avoid squits who cry. I have stalled at 1978, as did Nicky.
I’d like to grow up, but I don’t want to leave Nicky behind, again. In his Letts Schoolboys’ Diary 1978, Nicky records his height as four feet and his weight as fifty-two pounds. He’s a small boy, and from my own sons I know how objectively small that is. But in my mind he’s not small—he’s still only two years younger than I am.
Once, just the once while writing this book, after a dream about waterboarding my mum, I dreamed him. He was standing beside a bus. He hadn’t grown up, and may have been eight, anyway younger than nine. He smiled at me; we were immensely pleased to see each other. I went up to him, I made the move, and we were thrilled to be reunited. We started running. We sprinted side by side up an English street, away from the bus and from other dreams. I was so happy I cried.
I miss him as an adult, the Nicky who never became a Nick. A solid, grown-up Nick Beard, on his laminated name badge at the induction day for a new job. A sporting Bearders, phoning round in search of a fellow opening bowler. N. P. Beard, the signature on his divorce papers.
The paper and cloth remnants of his short life are scattered across the floor of my room, fragments of Nicky stopping at 1978. I only hope that you will come to believe that there must be a reason for the little chap being taken. He must have brought great happiness during his short life which can never be lost. I’ve been through the evidence and haven’t found a reason.
My education (the early mornings, the short trousers, the Latin) promised that whoever answered the difficult questions would move to the top of the class. Why were Nicky and I playing together, at that particular time, and why did we run away from the others? How did we come to ignore the fears and inland caution of Middle England? What caused the death of Nicholas Beard (9)?
I came first in a class of twelve boys.
Nicky’s life and death is not a story with an answer, or a resolution. What I have is my inquest, and the relics of Nicky’s real existence carefully curated as if into a shiny red case, to be stored with love in an attic. I don’t believe the original red case existed, except as a longed-for treasure chest of stuff worth keeping. If only we hadn’t been so successful at forgetting. The red case, a fiction, stood in for all that was lost.
As a final constructive gesture, I buy a red Mossman thirty-six-inch steamer trunk, an expensive piece of secure luggage in which to store the balance of Nicky’s lifetime. The box is 36 × 20 × 16 inches, taller but shorter than a small coffin, with space to spare, should further items of Nicky’s come to light. I put in the stack of card-covered schoolbooks, about a foot high; I find room for box-files containing the correspondence, the school reports, and the newspaper cuttings. I put in the cricket scorebook and the unused name tapes, the photos and boxes of slides.
I cover Nicky’s belongings with his blazer and the tracksuit top, then his school cap and his blue cricket hat. Finally, I put in the manuscript of this book, and close the lid. This is Nicky, his life and his death, as far as we can know.
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the support, time, and generosity of my mum, Felicity Beard, and my brothers Tim and Jem. I will be forever grateful to all three of them for sharing my feeling that the time had come to talk about Nicky.
For bringing information about a 1970s schooling to light, it was a pleasure to be reacquainted with Chris Field and Henry Boddington, both formerly of Pinewood School. I’m also indebted to Guy Hake for his memories of the day itself.
In Cornwall, Bertie and Jim Watson at The Mill were forgiving of an unsolicited approach from a stranger, and kindly invited me into their home.
The RNLI has been consistently helpful throughout the writing of this book, initially through Karen Harris of the RNLI archive in Poole, then directly at the RNLI Port Isaac Lifeboat Station. In particular at Port Isaac, I’d like to thank Chris Bolton, Bob Bulgin, and of course Ted Childs.
I was able to retrieve valuable documentary evidence thanks to the conscientious record-keeping of Hillier Funeral Service in Swindon, the Cornwall Coroner in Truro, the Head of Tides at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, and the Newsroom of the British Library in London.
Finally, this book was greatly improved by the expert yet sensitive input of my outstanding editor Stuart Williams, as well as the consistently wise guidance of my agent Lucy Luck. I thank them both for their unwavering support.
About the Author
Richard Beard’s six novels include Lazarus Is Dead, Dry Bones, and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Y
ear. In the UK, he has been short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award and long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. His latest novel Acts of the Assassins was short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015. He is also the author of four books of narrative nonfiction. Formerly director of the National Academy of Writing in London, he was a visiting professor (2016–17) at the University of Tokyo, and has a creative writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia.
Also by Richard Beard
Fiction
X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking
Damascus
The Cartoonist
Dry Bones
Lazarus Is Dead
Acts of the Assassins
Nonfiction
Muddied Oafs: The Last Days of Rugger
Manly Pursuits (or How to Beat the Australians)
Becoming Drusilla
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The Day That Went Missing Page 21