“Spellbinding, terrifying, deeply moving” — an unflinching portrait of a family’s silent grief, and the tragic death of a brother not spoken about for forty years (Joanna Rakoff). On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he’s there, the next he’s gone. Richard and his … gone.
Richard and his other brothers don’t attend the funeral, and incredibly the family returns immediately to the same cottage — to complete the holiday, to carry on, in the best British tradition. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory.
Nearly forty years later, Richard, an acclaimed novelist, is haunted by the missing piece of his childhood, the unexpressed and unacknowledged grief at his core. He doesn’t even know the date of his brother’s death or the name of the beach where the tragedy occurred. So he sets out on a painstaking investigation to rebuild Nicky’s life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident.
The Day That Went Missing is a transcendent story of guilt and forgiveness, of reckoning with unspeakable loss. But, above all, it is a brother’s most tender act of remembrance, and a man’s brave act of survival.
Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize 2018
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** spoiler alert ** Richard Beard was eleven years old when his nine-year-old brother Nicky drowned in the sea on a family holiday. The rest of his family never spoke of the incident or discussed it among themselves. Decades later, Richard finds himself asking why. So begins a quest to uncover the events of that summer, to turn his eye on them for the first time – and this time, to not look away.
I found this book to be a rich experience, written in plain, precise, intelligent language that examines difficult emotions in unsparing clarity. Richard’s his quest throws up many unexpected problems for him. First of all, it’s difficult to persuade his mother to talk about her memories, but when she does he finds they don’t match his own. For instance, she had always sworn that Nicky’s things were in a red suitcase in the attic. In fact, when Richard goes searching he finds they were not; they were scattered through all the other family possessions.
This unsettles him profoundly. ‘If I’m wrong about what I remember, what else might I always be wrong about?’ And there’s much more for him to examine here than just a few mistaken facts.
He talks about Nicky as he remembers him, which becomes an examination of the nature of sibling relationships. He remembers Nicky being fiercely competitive, and how it was a matter of honour to do better than him. Ultimately, Richard has to confront the fact that he beat Nicky once and for all – they were both in the sea that day, and Richard outswam the wave that claimed Nicky’s life. He returns many times to this, trying to strip away the pecking order of family life that stops you seeing a sibling for who they truly are, trying to understand who Nicky might really have been. There are frequent references to Lord of the Flies, and the feral rivalries of youth.
Part of Richard’s quest is an attempt to understand why Nicky’s death became a subject the family never shared or talked about. He wants to unravel how that happened and whether it might have been possible to handle it differently. This was before the days when counselling was routine. We get a portrait of an ordinary family in the late 1970s, trying to do their best in a situation that nobody is ever really equipped to handle.
With so many unreliable memories, every detail takes on a totemic quality; the exact location of the beach, the exact time of death, the coroner’s findings. All are part of Richard’s journey to confront the events – and not just the sequential facts, but deeper and perhaps unpalatable emotional truths.
Every step of the search gives him a new emotion to assimilate. For the most part, I found the narrative riveting, although I did think it slow in some of the later sections. Nevertheless, I feel privileged to have been taken on such an honest journey and I’ll be thinking about it for some considerable time. Moving and memorable.
** spoiler alert ** Richard Beard was eleven years old when his nine-year-old brother Nicky drowned in the sea on a family holiday. The rest of his family never spoke of the incident or discussed it among themselves. Decades later, Richard finds himself asking why. So begins a quest to uncover the events of that summer, to turn his eye on them for the first time – and this time, to not look away.
I found this book to be a rich experience, written in plain, precise, intelligent language that examines difficult emotions in unsparing clarity. Richard’s his quest throws up many unexpected problems for him. First of all, it’s difficult to persuade his mother to talk about her memories, but when she does he finds they don’t match his own. For instance, she had always sworn that Nicky’s things were in a red suitcase in the attic. In fact, when Richard goes searching he finds they were not; they were scattered through all the other family possessions.
This unsettles him profoundly. ‘If I’m wrong about what I remember, what else might I always be wrong about?’ And there’s much more for him to examine here than just a few mistaken facts.
He talks about Nicky as he remembers him, which becomes an examination of the nature of sibling relationships. He remembers Nicky being fiercely competitive, and how it was a matter of honour to do better than him. Ultimately, Richard has to confront the fact that he beat Nicky once and for all – they were both in the sea that day, and Richard outswam the wave that claimed Nicky’s life. He returns many times to this, trying to strip away the pecking order of family life that stops you seeing a sibling for who they truly are, trying to understand who Nicky might really have been. There are frequent references to Lord of the Flies, and the feral rivalries of youth.
Part of Richard’s quest is an attempt to understand why Nicky’s death became a subject the family never shared or talked about. He wants to unravel how that happened and whether it might have been possible to handle it differently. This was before the days when counselling was routine. We get a portrait of an ordinary family in the late 1970s, trying to do their best in a situation that nobody is ever really equipped to handle.
With so many unreliable memories, every detail takes on a totemic quality; the exact location of the beach, the exact time of death, the coroner’s findings. All are part of Richard’s journey to confront the events – and not just the sequential facts, but deeper and perhaps unpalatable emotional truths.
Every step of the search gives him a new emotion to assimilate. For the most part, I found the narrative riveting, although I did think it slow in some of the later sections. Nevertheless, I feel privileged to have been taken on such an honest journey and I’ll be thinking about it for some considerable time. Moving and memorable.