Thirty-nine years ago, in 1978, when I was 11 years old, my nine-year-old brother Nicholas drowned in the Atlantic off the north Cornwall coast. In the family, he was rarely mentioned again, but last week I published a book – The Day That Went Missing – that tries to recapture as much as possible of the day we as a family deleted. I finally spoke up.
Now I’m faced with the question of what happens next. What is a memoir actually for? There seems to be a lot of memoir about, but I can only speak for myself and wordsearching the typescript I discover the book contains 434 instances of the word Nicholas or variants. I have filled the pages with Nicky, with Nick-Nack, Nickelpin, Pinwin, all my brother’s various rescued nicknames. His solo photograph in beach-tinted Kodacolor is bold on a hardback cover in bookshops across the land. Nicky is back, he is definitely back, and that was part of the intention. I’ve set him free from the silence and darkness of our never-expressed grief.
About time too. The trouble with denial is that it’s not a precision tool. All those years ago, we closed our eyes against Nicky’s death. But in resisting grief we shut out other stuff too, like the joy Nicky brought us and the characteristics that made him an individual human being. Before long, he had no birthday, no date of death, no fears, no dreams. It took me nearly four decades to realise, with horror, that our epic denial had almost done its work. Nicky was about to escape us, fading not just from me but from everyone who’d ever known him.
That’s a traditional reason for writing anything, to bear witness to our lives on Earth, as evidence of existence. Personally, I find writing easier than talking. This is my 10th book and in retrospect I can identify passages in my novels that stalk this specific autobiographical story. Writing is what I know and it seemed a natural continuation to recover my nonfiction past in writing. I now learn that readers will assume this kind of memoir is hard to write, as if telling an honest, true story entails some special level ordeal. I’m not sure for me it did, because I was ready. For 20 years, I’d been assembling the skills to approach this material and the words were there for the feelings when out they came in a flood (but the novels, the preparatory work, ah what utter torture!).
I hear from readers who trust that memoir has therapeutic value and will offer a measure of peace. But no, I wouldn’t call the outcome peace, not exactly. It isn’t so peaceful to have unearthed the avoidable series of coincidences that led to a small boy’s death. At the time, we defied the sheer rotten luck by refusing to acknowledge our bereavement, but something healthier might have happened if we’d been able to admit that life is sometimes sad and a death in the family is a legitimate reason to feel miserable. Peace would suggest I’d put Nicky’s drowning behind me and moved on, when moving on too efficiently was part of the original problem.
In any case, the potential therapeutic benefit would need to contend with the censure that occasionally itches in my inner ear, as I pick up frequencies of disapproval from distant family, from strangers, from myself. A memoir is self-absorbed, necessarily partial – one specific objection is that I should have waited until my mum was dead. I can only reply that no living person was harmed in the writing of this memoir. Others call the book “brave”, but mean it as a warning, “brave” as in “not something I would do” and, by extension, “misguided”. Nicky and I were very brave, in this sense, when we ran unsupervised into the sea in 1978.
Brave is also tough and it was worth toughing out the doubts to discover that a book could bring my immediate family closer. I speak more often to my brothers and the response of my children reassures me that emotional dumbness needn’t pass glumly from one generation to the next. Mum sends me frequent postcards, dotted with exclamation marks, to say that at last she feels a weight has been lifted, though she also laments the waste of time, our long, ungiving silence.
A family that now speaks to each other might be reason enough, but still not quite. The Day That Went Missing describes a checked emotional state that I’d come to accept as desirable. After Nicky’s death, our extreme embrace of denial had a clear objective – we wanted everything to revert to normal, meaning undramatic weeks into which no strong emotion would intrude. In flight from grief, we found shelter inside a muted, emotionally constrained version of normal and, faithful to this template, I reacted to life’s subsequent complications by closing them off or buttoning them up. The pattern was set and it took a long time to break it.
A memoir gave me the opportunity to look back at one version of normal from the perspective of another. Time has to pass and then a memoir will find its point and its point of view. The miracle of memoir is then that the episode of greatest difference I recall from my life will connect me to something universal in other lives, to readers who recognise my instinctive retreats and later regrets. My emotional experience is by no means unique and this book allows others to consider their exposure to the disappointments and displacements of emotional repression.
Time, as promised, did move on. Since the 1970s, the English language has accommodated a wider vocabulary for sharing and healing. The language of love is more readily available, allowing us to consider who we once were with the openness of what we’ve become. By writing a memoir, I’m speaking for myself, which is most of what a memoirist can hope to do. In return, other voices speak back to me. Memoir, as part of the more general artistic project, reminds us that we’re not alone.
Richard Beard’s book The Day That Went Missing is published by Harvill Secker
