Nicholas Shakespeare

Two small boys in the sea

Richard Beard is still haunted by the unspeakable sorrow that has ruined his family’s life for the past 40 years

An estimated 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 per cent of them children. Roughly 150 drownings occur in the UK. In the 1970s, the RNLI station at Port Isaac on the north Cornish coast responded to ‘about 30 shouts a year’, reckons the novelist Richard Beard. On 18 August 1978 at 2.30 p.m. a maroon rocket went up with a great whoosh 800 feet into the summer sky to summon the coastguard. In the language of the rescue services, there was a ‘swimmer in the water’.

Ninety minutes earlier, Beard, then aged 11, was on a nearby beach with his brother Nicky, aged nine. On holiday from Swindon, the Beard family had had a picnic and had finished playing a game of beach cricket and were packing up to leave.

One of us, Nicky or I, asks for a last swim… On the far side of a big rock is a patch of sand with better waves. Come on, hurry because the tide’s coming in and the sand will soon be gone. A last tilt at the waves, since we’re here. Come on, hurry up, before it’s too late.

What happened next is the subject of this book: a ‘sad story of two small boys in the sea — one survives, one dies’, but also a monument to the power of literature to turn back the tide, which, in Beard’s case, rushed in and covered the truth almost at once. On that afternoon, Richard regained the shore and hared along the beach, reporting to his mother: ‘He’s in the sea, he’s in the sea, I tried to save him.’ This was a lie.

Beard’s mother makes the following confession in a heart-stopping letter that she writes shortly after ‘it’, as Nicky’s drowning is referred to: ‘to have had the joy of giving birth to a child, to have shared the delights and sadnesses with them, only to have them snatched away without warning, must leave a gap, never wholly understood’.

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