The Day That Went Missing: A Family's Story

"This is the story: In midlife, he has some sort of crisis—I don’t think he explains what the crisis is but I don’t think it really matters—and he decides to go back and try to understand something terrible that happened when he was a little boy. When he was 11 years old, his family went on vacation to the Cornish coast and he and his little brother Nicky, who was nine, were playing in the waves. And then this big wave comes along with an undertow and it sucks them both out to sea. He tries to save his brother, he’s not able to and there’s a point where he has to make a decision to abandon Nicky and save himself. He manages to get back to shore but Nicky dies. That’s how the book opens. From there, he tries to remember what happened after that. He has few memories. He doesn’t even know the date this happened because his family never talked about it. They buried Nicky and they went back and finished their holiday in this place on the Cornish coast and Beard went back to school and as he recalls it, no one ever spoke about it again. So he starts interrogating this terrible thing. His father has since died, but he talks to his mother, and he talks to the first responders, and he reads the newspaper stories, and he talks to his other brothers, and he talks to the headmaster at his school, and he starts piecing together what happened. He goes back and revisits where this took place. Walks the coastal path, finds the cove where they were dragged out to sea. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He’s filled with guilt—guilt for surviving, for not saving Nicky, for coaxing Nicky into the water in the first place. And he’s filled with rage at his father for not trying to rescue his son, and for never speaking about the incident again. But he also discovers that many of his memories are not accurate. In his memory, he just went back to school and everything carried on as though nothing had happened. But when he talks to the school headmaster all these years later, the headmaster says, ‘No, don’t you remember? You lay in bed and screamed every night and my wife went in to comfort you.’ So Beard’s book is about the fallibility of memory. It’s about how crippling silence can be. It’s about guilt. And it’s about revisionist history—for instance, the way that his mother remembers things differently and in a way that . . . almost makes the death easier for her to accept. She remembers that Nicky wasn’t that smart of a kid, and he wasn’t that great of an athlete, neither of which is true. But memories change, perhaps to help you protect yourself. It’s a really angry book too, though written with such restraint. I just found that tone so admirable. Yes, he talks about that a lot. I’m trying to imagine how awful it must have been for him to broach this with his mother. I mean, no one in the family had talked about this for 30 years. There’s a really interesting scene when his mother tells him that all of Nicky’s things were packed away in a little red trunk in the attic. Richard Beard went up into the attic and there was no little red trunk. There were some of Nicky’s things scattered around in various boxes, but no little red trunk. It just seemed so symbolic to me that she had put everything away in this mythical trunk and locked it in the attic, never to be thought of again."