I don't read too many memoirs but it was an interesting read about navigating grief and how that looks different for everyone. A very sad loss for their family.

This was a great book dealing with a summer holiday family tragedy for Richard Beard and how the family dealt with it. At the time, the grief seems to have been repressed, and the whole incident not discussed, to the detriment of some of the family members.

40 Years later, he wants to take the lid off the bottle and delve into what actually happened that day and the days that followed, and find out more about his brother Nicholas, his young life and the memories of the family.

A really heart wrenching book in places, but a great advertisement for how grief can eat away at a life or a whole family until it is finally acknowledged, and everyone can take a deep breath and carry on.

I do think that there are some deciding factors in liking/rating this memoir - first is a fact of it being a personal book. Also, a book written about the death of a child and all the (non-existent, even) aftereffects of this death. Thirdly, it is a memoir writen by a Brit and a man.

Nicky's unfortunate drowning had prompted very defiant reaction of his family - they put on a "stiff upper lip" face and moved on, never visibly grieving, never talking about their son and brother. But, the untold stories have very real effect on us. So, some 40 years later, Richard - the one who has been near Nicky in the sea when the tragedy had occurred - starts a personal inquest about his brother's death, whom Nicky had been and how/if had the Beards (both as a family and as individuals) moved on. Also - he is trying to confront his own survivor's guilt, pain and shame. Because he did not save his brother. Had be even try?

What we have here reads as a very personal protocol of police/medical/psychological investigation. More technicalities than feelings - but Richard is a man, a Brit, and most importantly a son of a family in which the feelings were not expressed well. I think that he feels deeply (after all, some emotions are visible, like his anger is very recognizable here (mostly his anger towards his father)), but he is not good with recognizing and working with his emotions. In some aspects this is a start of being true to his own soul and emotions. If Mr Beard was my friend, I would recommend a therapy (not to diminish his journey, but to deepen it), as there is much guilt and shame suppressed (and not totally recognized). But this is also a quite brave act of a hard look into the mirror of him and his family, a remarkabble attempt to finally and really free himself of Nicky's dark, shaming shadow lurking somewhere deep in his subconscious mind.

I'd say that for the author personally, this was an act of bravery. For a reader - well, here comes your personal interest in topic, your triggers, your decision to spend time with the unknown guy vivisecting his very personal drama. Some might get influenced more than others. I personally recognize the effort and the pain, but there are deeper books on the subject. What I take from this novel is the recognition of the pain as a cruel currency we get paid for our silence. An important lesson to take.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Sadly this book was not for me. Thank you for my copy of this book and I wish the author well.. Nothing to do with the author and his writing, just not for me

I read the first 28 pages and gave the rest a quick swim. Bereavement memoirs are among my favorite things to read, so I thought I couldn’t fail to love this, but the writing is so flat and emotionless that it’s hard to care very much about what happened. In August 1978, the Beard family was on holiday in Cornwall when eleven-year-old Richard and his younger brother, nine-year-old Nicholas, split off from the others to jump from rocks in a cove. Both boys were soon out of their depth; Richard was able to swim back to shore, but Nicky was taken by the undertow and drowned. Beard refers to the incident as “an annexe to our lives that as a family we pretend isn’t there.” In this book he digs up documentary evidence and stories of who Nicky was in his brief life and what exactly happened on that fateful August day, interviewing his remaining family members, the lifeguard who brought in the body, and so on. “I want to find the missing emotional content in a lost true event,” he writes in the early pages, before confessing to his mother, “I’m not feeling emotions very deeply.” That’s the main problem with the memoir: the matter-of-fact, even cavalier, tone detracts from any potential emotional power. The other problem is simply that there’s not very much to say about a nine-year-old and his rather average English family.

A deeply touching book as the author comes to terms with a family tragedy that happened when he was a child. Gentle, subtle and heartfelt. An excellent non-fiction read. Highly recommended.

A touching and emotional read about a freak accident with long reaching consequences. I loved this subtle and beautiful reflection on grief and the life altering pathway that Richard Beard embarks upon after that fateful day. I was thoroughly gripped by this terrible beautiful and brave book and have recommended it to so many people who love reading non-fiction that really makes you think deeply and reflect on your own life and what might have been. A five star read.

A fascinating probe into the nature of memory and the painful experiences we forget in order to protect ourselves. I found the tone understandably detached, given the subject - you feel the author's frustration, and this was clearly a painful book to write. Overall I found it a unique take on loss and grief.

Following a tragic accident back in 1978 during which 9 year Nicky Beard is sadly drowned at sea. Richard, his older brother is trying to discover why the accident and Nicky were never spoken about within the family. He takes a journey back to the past in order to try and make sense of the tragic accident. This is a very sad and moving book which reflects on just how families dealt with grief back in the 70's when people just didn't talk of family losses.

Richard Beard has written a highly poignant and uncompromising memoir of a momentous, far-reaching event in his life. When he discovers some long hidden documents among his late father's possessions, he is able to re-evaluate his memories of the past and in particular the devastating and life-defining tragedy that has shaped his sense of self. What he discovers and what he reveals in the process, is often difficult and startling to contemplate. 'The Day That Went Missing' is an intimate and starkly compelling read.

Oh wow what a book, so moving and emotional and yet gripping all the same. Poor Richard having to see his brother drown like that and how the family just carry on and finish the holiday, 40 years later nobody speaks of his brother. It's like he never existed and just crazy and so Richard goes about trying to figure it all out and put the ghosts to bed by himself as an adult. I honestly really enjoyed it though the plot was sad, great little gem of a book.

This is an unusual story and it is emotional, It flows well through thirty years after the author's brother was drowned aged nine. I felt the book related the accident and the impact that had on others very well. The sadness came when I realised that our memories of our loved ones do blur and it seemed hard to find the 'real' ones. As each person was asked to talk about the life and death of this boy I wanted there to be a moment when all would be revealed. but memories are not like that and I thought the author did very well to bring it all together and have such great sensitivity and openness. A good read.

Found this book somewhat depressing, very repectitive

There's no denying the quality of Beard's writing, but this lacks the heft of some of his other books

A very poignant, brutally raw account of the journey the author makes in to his past to uncover the facts surrounding his brother's death, something that his family hadn't spoken of since that day.
It is a heartwrenching, and difficult read, yet one I was compelled to finish, to see the author safely to the end of his journey, to the point where he could finally grieve and feel the loss. The way it is written details a mind trying to make sense of memories, some hazy, some vivid, some secondhand from others completely forgotten until passed on; trying to come to an understanding in graphic detail of what happened before, during and after, of piecing the puzzle back together.
A brilliant insight in to grief, family psychology, siblings, boarding school education and a time before technology, yet universal timeless reminders of how fragile life is and how moments matter.

I didn't know what to expect from this book but I was pleasantly surprised. Richard writes about the tragedy that befell his family when his younger brother Nicholas drowned during a family holiday. The book felt very personal, which I loved, almost like diary entries as Richard spent time talking to his mother, or revisiting the beach where his brother drowned.
Although the topic of the book was very sad, it did not feel like a book full of grief, more that of reflection and understanding.

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.

A very poignant sad book. The author, in adulthood, is trying to address events that happened in the summer of 1978; his younger brother drowned on holiday and, with a mixture of English 'stiff upper lip' upbringing and the absolute horror of this event, it is a cathartic outpouring of trying to piece together what happened. The author believes that he was responsible for his brother's death due to his natural jealousy of his younger brother, the competitiveness between them and that he thought he was unable to do anything about it and only just managed to save himself and so, subsequently, repressed and erased all memory of what happened. He then feels ready to discover what he can of the event and puts it in this book. It is an emotional heart rending tale and in an era where true feelings were expected to be hidden and not acknowledged. Well written and I hope that the acknowledgement of this event and what followed, sharing his emotional roller coaster with family, bystanders and readers, has helped Richard Beard to accept and move on.