There is very real social history; there is a willingness to learn and to understand; and there is exactly the right amount of restraint – lives and families and communities are illuminated but there is no intrusion and no assumption about things that could not be known. Betty had already known that she was adopted. The “truth” had been revealed at a moment of crisis – on the eve of the Second World War, 10 years after the abduction on Chapel Sands. Betty, always a lonely child – inexplicably not allowed to play outdoors or even with other children, always kept within the confines of her parents’ tiny cottage – had at last been allowed to go away to school. A clever girl, she had won a scholarship to Skegness Grammar, a bus ride up the coast. Aged 13, travelling home at the end of the school day, she is approached by a stranger, a middle-aged woman, who states that “your grandmother wants to see you”. Betty is confused, and terrified: her grandmother, Veda’s mother, who had lived with them, died when she was five. To know that one is the product of a general culture is not news. And I doubt that it has much therapeutic import. It may be important in relativising one’s opinions and presumptions. But its unlikely to provide an explanation, and therefore a ‘cure,’ for specific neuroses. It’s not even very personally satisfying except as history (or poetry, such as Jung’s archetypes). As Cumming’s mother realises, “We hide behind other people’s words, lose our self-consciousness in playing someone else.” Whatever the individual is, she is not to be found in generalities.

On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Reading Agency

Betty’s warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through.’ Photograph: courtesy of Penguin Random House Cumming, Laura (2019). On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 9781784742478. OCLC 1103978861. All the beach photographs in the Elston family album were taken by George. He would not yield his Box Brownie to anyone else, which is why he never appears on the shore with his daughter. But on the other hand, neither does Veda. I did not notice these absences as a child, leafing through the illuminated treasury of my mother’s early life, images to go with the stories she told, but of course they strike me every time I look as an adult. George Elston is there, recording the moment, but his wife is not. My mother has not a single memory of going to the beach again with Veda.To get here from London, I will drive the A1 as far as Peterborough, and then peel off via Spalding, Boston and Wainfleet. Along the way, there will be the names of the fabled horticulturalists from whom I buy tulip bulbs every year. There will be potato and brassica farms, one after another, and roadside stalls selling ripe cherries. Scudding through the flatlands – like a ship on water, as my mother used to say – the towns get smaller the closer we get to the sea and signs direct visitors to parks for caravans and tents. I’ve stayed in farmhouses, coastal cottages and even, one year, in couple of rooms in a 19th-century windmill. I guess there are hotels, but the Lincolnshire coast is not devoted to luxury.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming - Penguin Books Australia On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming - Penguin Books Australia

The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Laura Cumming found the inspiration to write this memoir in a story of a 3-year-old girl who was abducted in 1929 from a beach, and was found safe and sound after five days. This story had a happy end, even a double one, as the little girl had no memories of the event as she grew older. This all sounds like a plot of a good thriller, however, it is even better than that, since the little girl was Ms Cumming’s mother. After years of silence, secrets and allusions, Laura Cumming decided to investigate what really had happened on the beach in Chapel, a small sea-side village, and this was the beginning of unravelling incredibly complicated family history. The story in which voices from the past and pictures gradually complete the puzzle that consists of hundreds of pieces. I went to Chapel St Leonards. I took a room in a farm nearby and I spent a long time on the beach. Every day I’d go to the beach and I’d think about this scene. In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. It was another fifty years before she even learned of the kidnap. The girl became an artist and had a daughter, Laura, who grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet in the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community.

Upcoming Events

I suppose my book, quite apart from being a memoir about my mother and what happened to her and this mystery - it's also a campaign against collective silence because these people who knew - they knew. The mystery that unravels is cleverly structured and the revelations are judged and timed perfectly. Some are unsurprising but others made me stop and re-evaluate what I knew and what I thought I knew. It reveals a remarkable human story, aspects of which I know will resonate with many readers, and firmly rooted in its place and time. For my twenty-first birthday, my mother gave me the gift I most wanted: the tale of her early life. This memoir is short, ending with her teenage years, but its writing carries so much of her grace, her truthful eloquence and witness, her artist's way of looking at the world. Laura Cumming is the art critic for the Observer. Previously, she was a presenter of Nightwaves on Radio 3, arts producer for the BBC World Service and arts editor of the New Statesman. Her previous books include A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits and The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez, which both received widespread critical acclaim. Laura Cumming is Betty Elson’s daughter, and as she grew up she came to realise that her mother never spoke about her own childhood. When Elizabeth (who modified her name, as she had always hated being called Betty) asked what she would most like for her 21st birthday, Laura answered the tale of her mother’s early life.

Laura Cumming - Wikipedia Laura Cumming - Wikipedia

I’m trying not to say too much, because I was told more that I wanted to know about this book before I started to read.For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. Her life began with a false start and continued with a long chain of deceptions, abetted by acts of communal silence so determined they have continued into my life too. The mystery of what happened, how it changed her, and her own children, has run through my days ever since I first heard of the incident on the beach thirty years ago. Cumming's book On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons, published in 2019, was shortlisted for the Costa Book award in the Biography and Memoir category, 2019. [13] Cumming's 2023 book Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death, was said by a reviewer to be "an autobiography in images that doubles as a tour through the art of the [17th-century] Dutch Golden Age" and to be "first and foremost a biography. Its elegiac meanderings return time and time again to the figure of Carel Fabritius", who has been "[t]axonomized by art historians as the 'missing link' between Rembrandt (in whose workshop he apprenticed) and Vermeer...." [14] Selected publications [ edit ]

On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

For along time I thought those lines were written by Alexander Pope, but the internet tells me that their author was in fact Walter Scott, so much for my innocent illusions. Here is the dilemma for the adopted child: how to love and respect both mothers, the one unknown as well as the one who is here every day.” This is how it began, and how it would end, on the long pale strand of a Lincolnshire beach in the last hour of sun, the daylight moon small as a kite in the sky. Far below, a child of three was playing by herself with a new tin spade. It was still strangely warm in that autumn of 1929, and she had taken off her plimsolls to feel the day’s heat lingering in the sand beneath her feet. Short fair hair, no coat, blue eyes and dress to match: that was the description later given to the police. She had come out of the house that afternoon and along the short path to the beach with her mother, Mrs Veda Elston. They had already been there for some time, with biscuits in an old tartan tin, digging and sieving the sand. The tide was receding when they arrived, the concussion of waves on the shore gradually quietening as the day wore on; by now the sea was almost half a mile in the distance. In this lull, on their own familiar beach, and so comfortingly close to home, Veda must have let her daughter wander free for a moment. For she did not see what happened next.Cummings’s mother writes what she knows to help in her daughter’s quest (which takes many years to complete): My mother has no memory of these events. Nobody ever spoke of them at home, in Chapel St Leonards or anywhere else. It was another half-century and more before she even learned of the kidnap. The book came into the form it’s in simply from being in the landscape in Lincolnshire. I’d stand on those sands and she was there, my grandfather was there, the Vikings were there. The compression of time was a great advantage for me.”