Two small boys in the sea

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.