The book is a love letter to her mother, whose warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through. It’s also an intimate portrait of a village community, with its storybook characters (butcher, baker, dairyman, bell-ringer, gravedigger) and their wonderful old-fashioned names (Lily Boddice, Bert Parrish, Polly Graves). The nostalgia is tempered by an awareness of how repressed and small-minded village life could be and, as people drown in dykes or go missing at sea, how prone to calamity; in spirit and setting, On Chapel Sands is more like Graham Swift’s Waterland than Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Still, Cumming’s affection for Lincolnshire runs deep. She knows Chapel St Leonards from childhood holidays and also writes well about Skegness, which by the 1930s, thanks to its pleasure palace, putting green, miniature railway and Butlin’s holiday camp, had become a tourist haven – a “garden city by the sea”. There’s even a rollcall of the county’s famous names, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Isaac Newton and Thomas Paine among them. That was the beginning of the journey that is recorded in this book, a journey that Laura Cumming made in the hope of filling in the gaps in her mother’s memory and allowing them both to understand why her early life played out as it did.

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

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.” The lives of our parents before we were born are surely the first great mystery,” writes Laura Cumming in this searching family memoir. The story of her mother Elizabeth’s past, however, was not just a mystery to her children, but also to her. Mrs Cumming is now in her nineties, and it is her daughter, an acclaimed art critic and biographer, raised in Edinburgh, who has set herself the task of filling in the blanks.

Upcoming Events

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.

Laura Cumming - Wikipedia Laura Cumming - Wikipedia

A memoir based on her mother's disappearance as a child, On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons, was published in July 2019 by Chatto. [4] It was shortlisted for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize. [5] Career [ edit ] Shortlisted for both the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, her singular memoir was one of the most critically acclaimed books of 2019. A deeply moving story of family and community, On Chapel Sands is part-true crime narrative, part-investigation into the subjectivity of memory and part-witness to a vanishing provincial way of life. 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. She was fifty-six when she sat down to write and still knew nothing about the kidnap, or her existence before it, except that she had been born in a mill house in 1926; or rather as it seemed to her, that some other baby had arrived there.The flattest of all English counties, Lincolnshire is also the least altered by time, or mankind, and still appears nearly medieval in its ancient maze of dykes and paths. It faces the Netherlands across the water and on a tranquil day it sometimes feels as if you could walk straight across to the rival flatness of Holland. 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.” 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. Because you have asked me, dear daughter, here are my earliest recollections. It is an English domestic genre canvas of the 1920s and 1930s, layered over with decades of fading and darkening, but your curiosity has begun to make all glow a little. And perhaps a few figures and events may turn out to be restored through the telling.” Then again, life for George – an orphan at 13 – had been miserable, too. He scraped a living selling industrial soaps and was looked down on by his snooty brother-in-law, Captain Green (husband of Veda’s younger sister), from whom he rented a modest terraced house. The Captain’s own house, a vast mansion overlooking the sea, was just up the road. More to the point, George cared enough about Betty to make some lovely toys for her, including a miniature theatre. He took many photos of her too, and there’s an especially beautiful one of Veda, Vermeer-like in its composition, which shows an artistic side to George that, had his life been less hard, might have been allowed to flourish.

On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing Book review: On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing

But she did not feel that way. As an adult she began to call herself Elizabeth, having always hated the name Betty, specifically for its associations with George. It was incredible to me, when young, that this abundantly loving woman could so have loathed her father that she would change her own name to be free of his reach. But I knew very little of her story yet, and neither did she. My mother did not see her own birth certificate until she was 40. She did not know that she was once called Grace, had no sense of her existence before the age of three. The knowledge of her early life came – and went – in waves over the years. Something would be established, believed, and then washed away; then it would happen all over again, the arriving wave disrupting the old in a kind of tidal confusion. Even now, in her 90s, she has no idea precisely how or why she ceased to be Grace, but I know that it was before she ever reached the home of Veda and George. She stopped searching long ago; now I must discover the truth of her story. I defy you to read that, and not want to rush out and grab this book in your hot little hands, immediately. The whole story is a corker, and I won't spoil it for you by revealing any more -- Cummings has done an amazing job of family history research, detective work, reconstruction of time past, and sheer footwork, and you deserve to discover it just as she lays it out. But just to give you an idea of what she was up against, as she embarked on her research-- her mother (now no longer Grace or Betty, but Elizabeth) had no memory of the kidnapping, and knew nothing about it until she was in her 50s. Just one of the pattern of secrets and lies that surrounded this otherwise ordinary little girl. How does consciousness emerge? We are not born with it. We cannot remember being without it. Suddenly it is there. A mystery. There is a before and an after. But there is no way to pinpoint the event. After it occurs we have memories, uncertain but nevertheless our own. Before the event, we rely on other people, external evidence, to confirm our existence. If that evidence is incomplete or contradictory, even greater mysteries arise. Uncovering the mystery of her mother’s disappearance as a child, Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic for the Observer, takes a closer look at her family story.

What unfolds is an extraordinary story, beautifully told. As an art critic, Cumming has an eye for detail and for conjuring stories from pictures. She uses family photographs throughout the book to forensically look for clues about her mother's early years and to try to discover who took her all those years ago. Her mother also contributes her own recollections, in extracts of a memoir she wrote for her daughter. These fragments are poignant and moving, and feel like a driving force behind Cumming's search – as if she wants to fill in the blanks in her mother's memory before it's too late and those stories disappear forever. Cumming uncovers dark truths and difficult stories that have been written out of the family's history, but this is an uplifting book, a loving gift from daughter to mother, that also speaks of wider issues of secrets, hidden truths and the different ways we construct our lives as we grow older.

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

I ’ve​ never mastered the art of smiling for a photo. Like many English people above a certain age, my parents had been brought up to believe that it was, if not quite bad manners, then certainly a little vulgar to smile open-mouthed, revealing any teeth. In a well-meaning way, they passed this rule on to me and my sister. As a result, my camera smile was an odd, forced thing. I worked very hard at it, turning up the corners of my mouth as far as I could over my hidden teeth and gums, but when I looked at the photos in our family albums, I felt I had only succeeded in looking weird. The photo smile I had been taught did not read as happiness to me. The smiles inside my head were the big-toothed beaming grins of 1980s adverts and American sitcoms. But I seldom dared experiment with such a flashy look in front of the camera. According to most schools of psychology, our personalities are fixed during our unconscious first few years. Carl Jung suggested that our conscious selves are merely flotsam on a sea of unconsciousness. Our fears, presumptions about the world, social sensitivities and inhibitions, and perhaps even ambitions are created subtly but decisively in this sea, which affect not only our own lives but is passed along to our progeny. The presumption of therapy is that knowing what happened in the vast void can neutralise its affects. There's so much more I could say and share, but I urge you rather to read it yourself, particularly if you have an interest in memoir, in mother-daughter dynamics and understanding how art reveals life. It's a fantastic read, one I'd actually like to read again. And the NPR radio interview is excellent.The hue and cry ran along the coast from one village to the next, from Chapel to Ingoldmells and Anderby Creek. If the missing child left any footprints in the sand they led nowhere, or faded out too soon. If there were witnesses who could offer something more useful than the colour of Betty’s dress then they never spoke up, even when the policeman called. The first day passed with no news of her, and then another; by which stage the police could surely offer only dwindling reassurance. Three more days of agony followed. And then Betty was discovered, unharmed and dressed in brand-new clothes – now red, as if through some curious Doppler shift – in a house not 12 miles from the shore.