At other times his memories aren’t wrong, not exactly, but they differ from mine. These variations emphasize the distance between us, because as a family we’ve never spoken enough to agree a story. We haven’t collaborated on acts of recollection, so our memories exist in isolation. In some ways this allows each of us a more direct encounter with the past—we remember what we remember, our independent memories unvarnished by sharing and retelling. On the other hand, memories that have warped, possibly for reasons of self-protection, can evolve unchallenged. Denial makes this divergence possible.
“I still have the Mr. Men pendant I wore that summer,” Jem says. “There’s something wrong with it. It’s the shape of Mr. Greedy, but it should be purple. It could be Mr. Dizzy, but the color and shape don’t match. I’ve checked the back of the books. My pendant could be Greedy or Dizzy, but it’s neither. I don’t know who it’s meant to be.”
All through that summer Jem wore a pirated Mr. Men pendant, close but not the real thing. He can picture Nicky’s pendant, and the fine silver-colored chain. He thinks Nicky had a Snoopy. We agree the story, and anyway I’ve seen the pendant in a photograph, up close under a magnifying glass. Snoopy, the dog from Peanuts, without a doubt.
In his house Jem had been storing a significant stock of photos, the two boxes of our grandfather’s slides that he’d kindly sent me for inspection. I ask him how he came to have them.
“I asked for them. They were going to be burned.”
He also has a framed print that Gran used to keep on her bedroom wall, of him and Nicky bursting out of sandy blocks on a sprint up an unknown beach.
“I believe this is the last photo,” Jem says. It might be, taken with one of my grandfather’s many cameras. Always racing, right to the end. It fits, and this is the version according to Jem.
“How did you get hold of it?”
Unbidden, I have an insight into how Mum must feel. Nicky used to be her territory, but now I’ve decided he’s mine. I’d prefer Jem not to have taken an interest, but he evidently has.
“I asked for that, too.”
The running photo is on the top shelf in the toy room of his new house that I’ve never visited. Nicky and Jem in the sand is next to a photo of Dad, and another of Jem’s first child as a baby. This is the past that Jem has chosen to exhibit.
“What do you think happened on the day Nicky died? I appreciate you were only six, but any memory you have. When you tell the story, what do you say?”
“I don’t.”
“To your wife, for example. You must have told her something about it?”
“Nicky was swept out to sea and he drowned.”
Our exchange is a mismatch because I’m prepared. I’m several months’ cold with research. I’ve had my shocks, my feelings, but also long experience of putting them aside. “You use that phrase to tell the story? He was swept out to sea and he drowned.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you say, but it’s vague. How was Nicky swept out to sea?”
Jem looks at me. He has a talent for silence, of the kind that asks me to hear the echo of what I’ve just said. His silence also acts like a challenge; whoever speaks next is the loser.
“There must be more,” I say, “even in this version. He was swept out to sea and he drowned. How did that happen? There’s no context, no story.”
“He was walking along the seafront and he was swept out to sea and he drowned.”
“Not sure that makes much sense. He walks along and gets swept out. Have you ever known anything like that to happen? I mean to anyone else you know, in all the years since? Is that something you normally worry about, when you take a walk at the seaside?”
Memories can evolve, and over time lose contact with the true original events. We develop adaptations of the day. Nevertheless, Jem also has what he calls “physical memories,” and we agree on what he means—an intense visceral connection with specific moments around Nicky’s death that feel lived and immutable. These constitute vivid memories of the day that no amount of repression or evasion will budge.
“I remember hiding behind a rock.”
Despite that, Jem can almost believe he wasn’t at the beach at all. “I couldn’t tell you where I was. I feel really empty, but I had to be there somewhere. I wasn’t with a childminder.”
We obscure the calamity in our different ways. Jem has turned to logic to explain the wasteland of his memory—if he doesn’t remember, then he can’t have been there. And if he wasn’t there, aged six, logic invents the services of a childminder to explain his absence. Jem constructs a narrative that makes sense, its only weakness being a total lack of truth. I track back to where I started the inquest, my barometer for measuring levels of denial, and ask Jem if the date is something he has in his head.
“I know it’s the summer, and where it happened, Port Isaac. I don’t know where it fits in my life. I don’t know what happened. Do you know what happened?”
I find I’d prefer not to say. I’m jealous of my knowledge of Nicky in the water that day, and I like being the only one to know. I’ve resisted and repressed the memory, but by doing so I’ve protected my status as the person most intimately involved. This information is mine, and makes me special.
Jem repeats the question three or four times. “Do you know what happened?”
“I was in the water with him.”
That’s the story I tell.
“You were swimming?”
This matters to Jem. His gray-green eyes are unblinking, and I realize he genuinely doesn’t know—that no one does but me.
“Were you in the sea swimming?” he asks again. Now he’s the one cold with curiosity and I’m the brother who’s flustered.
“We were.”
But I don’t want to tell that story now, of what I know. As if I don’t yet know enough to be certain. I worry that each retelling might soften the edge of the memory, when the sharpness needs safeguarding for the emotional awakening I thought I wanted.
I say: “Just tell me about the day.” I never know what I’m going to get, first from Jem and now from Tim. “The actual day when he died.”
“Was it the second year we’d been there?” Tim isn’t sure.
“Maybe. There was a holiday when a dog fell off a wall.”
Until the summer of 1978, the worst we’d suffered on holiday was a dazed dog. On the morning of 18th August, as he remembers it, Tim wakes up and tries to clench his fists. We’re having this chat midafternoon on an outside bench, no Internet, no quick way of checking the facts about fists, but for Tim in his bed that early August morning, in The Mill near Port Isaac, nothing bad has yet taken place. The day moves on. Next he remembers sitting on the beach at Tregardock, watching people come down the steps cut into the rock at the end of the path. To no one in particular he says: “Those people haven’t read their tide tables.”
The tide must have been coming in, as it was when Nicky drowned. Tim’s mind has preserved a moment from not long before. He is thirteen and the tide table is important to him—he likes to understand the workings of the world. He wants to get life right, but the value of knowing stuff is about to diminish. He nails the truth about tides, of when it is good and right to arrive at the beach and when it is not. His command of the facts will make no difference.
“One of the boys is in trouble.”
Tim’s first contact with the catastrophe.
Someone says, “One of the boys is in trouble.” I press him on this quoted line of direct speech, but he doesn’t know who said it, when or where—the words exist unattached, isolated.
“One of the boys is in trouble.”
In reply, back on the beach, Tim says: “Guy can help. He’s a very strong swimmer.”
At Pinewood School, Guy Hake is Captain of the Greys and Captain of the School, information verified by the school magazine. He has blue trunks and proper muscles, but I’ve looked up his sports-day results and Tim is wrong. Hake places third in the senior s
prints and second in throwing a cricket ball, but is absent from the podium at the swimming gala. Swimming isn’t his thing.
“Did you know I was in the water?”
“I knew you were together.”
He can’t say how he knows this. I suppose I could have told him on some earlier occasion, but our project of denial has been a lifetime’s work, a going concern. He could just as easily have remembered it, but never have said so.
“Why did we never talk about this? We never have, have we?”
“I try to give Mum a phone call near his birthday,” Tim says. “Around March the twenty-third.”
I’m surprised—Tim never forgot Nicky’s birthday. Briefly, I worry that the hard-core denial has been mostly mine. The others chat about Nicky behind my back, at least once a year. I test Tim out with my pivotal original question, but no, he can’t date with certainty the day of Nicky’s death. You too, Tim. Nor can he recall the name of the beach.
“I wouldn’t even recognize a picture,” he says. “It’s black.”
“Blank? You mean the rest is a blank.”
“Not blank,” Tim says. “Black. It’s black.”
We invest faith in the facts of the world so as not to be fooled by fictions. We crave the news, daily, to be sure of what’s happening—to know is to feel prepared, and protected. This is the way things really are.
From some deep BBC archive I had hoped to unearth the TV news bulletin that brought the fact of Nicky’s death to the people of Swindon. Several of the commiseration letters dated 19th August refer to a news bulletin—The evening news tells us of this terrible tragedy, and the local angle makes it perfect content for Points West, the regional roundup that follows the News at Six. I contact Points West, still going strong, to ask if they have archive material from August 1978.
No one can tell me. The interns on the phones have trouble understanding the year 1978 as a believable concept, because Points West is a news program, exclusively concerned with what’s new. Do I have anything new to tell them? I do not, or not in the sense they mean. I have plenty of old news, discovered for the first time.
The death was also covered extensively in print, which led to the shock we all felt in reading of the tragic death of Nicholas. The soonest a newspaper could have carried the story was the early edition of Saturday, 19th August, and I can check who said what at the British Library in London. Newspapers is on the second floor, round the corner from Humanities 2. Anyone with a reader’s card can drop by the library on Euston Road and ask the helpful staff (Alice, in this instance) to call up the printed news of any single day. The press will have taken a view, producing material I can try to align with memory and interviews and formal documentation.
At the same time, as I’m waiting for my requests to emerge from the vault, I worry about the consequences of doing too much research. The information I’ve gathered so far has prized open memories grown closed, but other people’s opinions soon pile up. I don’t want to crush my personal and precious connection to an afternoon in 1978 under the weight of dusty paperwork. I have memories that exist independent of the public record, but I’m still pleased that newspaper editors seized on our family disaster. N. P. Beard was famous for a day—he made it into the papers.
The Evening Advertiser, Swindon, Saturday, August 19, 1978, Final Edition. The Swindon Adver leads with the story, a front-page headline in full-caps lock:
Holiday Horror
BOY, 9
SWEPT
TO HIS
DEATH
After a hard week’s work, readers of the Swindon Evening Advertiser want full-on sentiment. A nine-year-old Swindon boy has been drowned in a holiday tragedy. Little Nicholas Beard was knocked over by four-feet waves, then dragged into the surf at low tide—while his parents were relaxing nearby on the Cornish beach.
The disinformation begins, for the sake of a dramatic story—the waves and the low tide are wrong; the little plucks at Swindon heartstrings while the tragically unaware parents—the pathos—are relaxing nearby. This is the news, today and every day: do not dare relax.
Nicholas was playing with a group of children at the water’s edge. No he was not, and I should know. Nicholas was knocked over by waves and lost in the surf. His body was later spotted floating in the sea.
Nicky’s death, as news, is ridiculous. He’s lost in the surf, in some way his playmates from that useless group of imaginary children don’t notice. Plot hole, a pause, then he’s floating and dramatically spotted. Now here come the belated uniformed heroes: Port Isaac inshore lifeboatmen rescued Nicholas and gave the kiss of life, but he apparently was already dead.
The Western Evening Herald (Saturday, 19th August) isn’t more reliable—The Port Isaac inshore lifeboat was on the scene within minutes. On Monday, the Western Daily Press identifies the grieving family as residents of Balmoral Crescent, Swindon, an address that doesn’t exist—Holiday boy, 9, drowned by wave.
The newspapers do little to clarify the sequence of events. A later account, in the Sunday Times of 27th August, is an end-of-season review of summer deaths, and the national paper makes more of an attempt to find out why.
“We’re getting many foreign visitors now,” says district councilor Ian McWatt. “Most of them come from inland areas in Europe and have no idea of the danger of the sea.”
On reflection, a month after Nicky drowned, the Beard family from inland Swindon acted as naively as foreigners; yes, as stupidly as that. In the Herald the pilot of the rescue helicopter, Flt. Lt. John Mabbot, is less of an anti-European. He blames non-Cornish people, wherever they come from: Most of the incidents are due to holidaymakers just not appreciating how dangerous this stretch of coastline is… Holidaymakers do not seem to realize how quickly the tide advances in this area.
Newspapers love to incriminate, and children die in the waters off Cornwall because their parents are ignorant tourists. But as so often in England, the fault may also lie with Britain’s general bad weather pattern this year.
Surf Boy Is Fourth Victim.
The “Surf Boy” headline in the Western Morning News summons images of a glistening athletic teenager, as the subeditor well knows. The truth is less delectable: Nicky was a scrawny nine-year-old boy in blue trunks that were slightly too big for him. That’s the reality. When it comes to the facts, journalists can be plain wrong: None of the victims was in the sea; all were washed from rocks.
Often newspapers seem informative, unless a reader is familiar with the material, at which point journalism can feel approximate and superficial. With Nicky’s story, some papers are more accurate than others. The boy was playing in the surf when powerful Atlantic waves knocked him down. A fierce undertow swept him out to sea (Western Evening Herald, 19th August 1978).
That description fits most closely with what I remember, perhaps because the local reporters would have interviewed witnesses and taken statements. They’d have asked the people who were there, and I can do the same.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution archive in Poole provides a single-spaced list of Port Isaac lifeboat callouts between 1968 and 1980. A page and a half of them, with the typewriter ribbon fading toward December 1971. During this period the boat launches between five and twelve times a year, and by far the busiest months are July and August, the holiday season. The RNLI typist has bashed each mission onto the page in its shortest possible form:
1975 Oct. 5 Cattle fallen from cliff, stood by.
1977 Jul. 17 Skin diver, saved.
Most callouts end happily. The Inshore Inflatable Lifeboat at Port Isaac saves dinghies and dories and yachts. The volunteer crews stand by for canoes and motorboats, while ensuring that daydreamers cut off by the tide have a scare and not a catastrophe. A surprising number of walkers need assistance after falling from the cliffs. I’m not quite sure how that happens, but it does, or did.
On 14 August 1978, four days before the callout for Nicky, Two persons in the sea, saved. Yet on Friday 18th August, despit
e the valuable experience gained on the Monday, Recovered the body of a bather. Karen Harris, the RNLI archivist, has helpfully highlighted the entry. I read in black and white, and now fluorescent yellow, that the boy has become a body. The body of a bather. A new source, the same information. Denial is futile.
The RNLI station in Port Isaac sits in the hinge of the village’s V, shops and houses mounting the slopes on either side. Facing the slipway to the beach and harbor, with its fishing boats and careening gulls and solid storm walls, the lifeboat station is at the center of what Port Isaac has always been about: the junction of land and sea.
On the day I visit, the lifeboat is secure on its trailer in the station, meaning the seas between Polzeath and Tintagel are currently free of incident. The lifeboat station is effectively a large shed, only a couple of feet wider on either side than the sixteen-foot boat that fills it. I squeeze past, toward the office at the back, and take in the posters pinned to the walls: Swimming—swim at a lifeguarded beach, between the red and yellow flags. The walls also carry plenty of information about the D-class lifeboat itself, and I learn that its inflatable orange sides are called sponsons. This modernized semirigid craft is an update of earlier versions, slightly more powerful, but otherwise similar to the boat in service in 1978. I run my hand along a sponson. The man-made material feels tough, fast, serious. Orange.
The glass-fronted office at the back of the shed is the control room, where I’ve arranged to meet Chris Bolton, the Port Isaac RNLI operations manager. Chris has invited along the volunteer press officer, Bob Bulgin, who lives in the village and does more than promote the lifeboat service—if the news is bad, Bob tells me, he’s on hand to process the information, not the emotion. At last, I think, my dream job. The RNLI is a voluntary organization, reliant on locals, so Chris and Bob both know Ted Childs, who lives round the corner and crewed the lifeboat in 1978.
The Day That Went Missing Page 9