On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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Thoughtful, honest and beautifully written, On Chapel Sands is an unvarnished portrait of English village life in the first half of the 20th century, revealing the tides of shame and pride, stoicism and love, that washed through it down the years. At its heart is a deeply loved little girl, who grew into a self-deprecating artist, wife and mother. The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. So many puzzles remained to be solved. Cumming began with a few criss-crossing lives in this fraction of English coast – the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker – but soon her search spread right out across the globe as she discovered just how many lives were affected by what happened that day on the beach – including her own.

On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons

I’d go up to the Beacon and I went to the house where my mother lived and I’d have a drink in the Vine. I went round and round. I did the walk from Chapel to Mablethorpe. I did the walk from Chapel to Skegness and I thought about this period in time. And local historians in and around Chapel have done a wonderful job of publishing a lot of beautifully written local history. In Skegness Library you can look up old copies of the Skegness Times. It was very evocative. 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. Laura Cumming’s new book, On Chapel Sands, also uses photographs, paintings and everyday objects in an attempt to resolve a 90-year family mystery: the kidnapping of her mother, then aged three, from a deserted Lincolnshire beach one warm October afternoon in 1929. The result is a deeply felt, forensic yet ultimately empathetic examination of human motivation and its attendant sorrows, which is as much a social history of the early 20th century as it is the story of one family and its secrets. 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.

This is a beautifully written but slowly unraveling story. The tone is wistful, almost haunting as information is discovered and new clues are revealed. Art is discussed, photographs are included, all leading to provide a picture of her mothers life. Although she knew her grandmother Vera, her grandfather was long dead. These were the people said to be her mother's, parents, the people whose past she learns much about and that helps lead to answers. There is a wonderful appreciation of the depth and complexity of family love; and it the loveliest of tributes from a daughter to a mother. But this adoption story was still not quite the truth about the Elston family. Betty uncovered the real story of her childhood by looking at a photograph. As a teenager, she needed to have an official photograph taken. When it was developed, Cumming writes, ‘my mother looked at herself and saw George.’ She realised that George was actually her real father. After that she resolved to be ‘as unlike him as possible’, even though the camera mercilessly showed that they had the same features. For Cumming, this moment provides proof of the power of images to deepen our understanding in unexpected ways. George never told Betty he was her father, and she never confronted him on the subject. It was many decades before she got official written proof that he was her birth father. But her eyes – or rather the camera’s eye – had already proved the truth of her parentage to her.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming LinenMe Bookclub: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

I thought this was going to be more of a memoir. It really isn't. It is more of a tribute to a mother and her mysterious past. And it is very compelling (eventually) and moving. Laura Cumming's mother, Betty, was kidnapped from a beach when she was three years old, later to be found and returned to her adopted parents five days later. There is the mystery of who took her, how she was taken from a very open and barren beach, and why she was returned. And why was she adopted at the age of three to a couple twice her mother's age and what were the circumstances of her birth. Also why was her name changed from Grace to Betty. This is the central mystery explored by the author, and most of the questions are answered, though some with very educated guesses.This book has its origins and setting in Chapel St Leonards, a village on the Lincolnshire coast. Being a Lincolnshire lad I therefore had to read this. Laura Cummings’s mother was brought up there and Cummings has set out to piece together her mother’s upbringing. Her mother was born in 1926, is still living and was adopted at the age of three. It was not until many years later and Cummings and her mother discovered that in 1929 three year old Betty was kidnapped from Chapel Sands and was not found for five days: dressed in entirely different clothes and unharmed. She has no recollection of the event. Cummings in this account pieces together the mystery of her mother’s upbringing from some clues, some accounts from the descendants of those involved and an assortment of photographs. Cummings is an art historian and manages to get more from photographs than most of us would be able to: she takes objects and gives them meaning and pieces together life in an English village in the 1930s. She also examines Betty’s adoptive parents, George and Veda, already in their 40s, trying to isolate Betty from everyone around them and stop her mixing with others. For there are secrets in the village and in the neighbouring village of Hogsthorpe. There is a fine array of local characters and the narrative also stretches to the other side of the globe. Cummings traces Betty’s real mother and father (with a few real twists), the reasons for the kidnapping, Betty’s original name (Grace) and much more. Veda and George are examined closely: Veda is old enough to remember seeing Tennyson striding along Chapel Sands when she was a girl and Tennyson’s poetry crops up periodically. 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.