Thomas Harding: 'I was unprepared for losing my son'

Thomas Harding's 14-year-old son Kadian was killed in a cycling accident two years ago. Now he has written an astonishing book about the incident and the unprocessable grief that followed

I am greeted at the garden gate by a greyandblack german shepherd, Duke, who barks half-heartedly at me. It seems incomprehensible, says Thomas Harding, halfway through the afternoon we spend together, that the dog is alive and the boy who loved him so much, his 14-year-old owner, has gone. He died on 25 July 2012 on an idyllic summer day. He'd been cycling with his father, his aunt, his cousin and some friends on the Wiltshire Downs on a bicycle that (although it had just been at a bike shop to be mended) had faulty brakes. They were on an off-road path, they'd taken a wrong turn. Thomas, who was cycling behind him, watched his son hurtling downhill, at unaccountable speed, towards the A4. He saw the flash of the white van, registering helplessly only that it was "in the wrong place". His son was killed instantly, dying of brain trauma. It is the sort of story that, if you were lucky enough not to have been involved, you hope to acknowledge at agonised speed and move on. And you might assume that any book describing what happened and the unprocessable grief that followed would be unreadable. But Harding's remarkable memoir is written with transparent emotional intelligence. It makes one understand how it was for a father to lose a boy unique in his eyes and loved by everyone who knew him: Kadian.

It is a sultry June afternoon and we sit in a garden under a scarlet sunshade. We are in Steep, Hampshire, where the countryside lives up and down to the village's name. The family moved here in April 2012, two-and-a-half months before Kadian's death. It is a stone's throw from Bedales, where he went to school. It was in this garden that he and his cousin built a treehouse in the last weeks of his life. Kadian emerges as someone who spent his life inspiring the opposite of grief: super-smart, compassionate, with an ace sense of humour. There is a secure look in the eyes that smile from the dust-jacket photograph. I have to confess to Thomas that Kadian Journal made me feel, alongside the empathy and heightened sense of life's fragility and I'm hoping this is not a shabby reflex overwhelming gratitude at not having been dealt such a cruel hand.

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