On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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I see the scene again and again, always trying to grasp the unfathomable moment in which she vanished and everything changed. The place where she was playing empties into air; the tide freezes; the beach turns blank. Time stands still on the shore. How many minutes before her absence begins to register, before Veda becomes uneasy and then fearful, before the silence is broken by shouting and rushing to the spot where the spade lies fallen? The waves continue their impervious lapping, gulls drifting on the surface as the afternoon fades. How long before anybody missed my mother? The mystery of consciousness for Laura Cumming’s mother is punctuated by her abduction just as consciousness is forming. The abduction is a public event which makes an entire community involved in what is otherwise a strictly personal process. But both her family and the denizens of her Lincolnshire coastal village conspire to keep her unconscious life from her until middle age. Five Days Gone is a memoir of recovery of that hidden life. The abduction is an awfully good trope upon which to hang the entire tale.

On Chapel Sands - HLSI On Chapel Sands - HLSI

Characters are pondered deeply through photos and family paintings, the author finding inspiration and clues even in more famous works that help us understand the narrative power of an image. By the time I got to reading about Degas's The Bellelli Family, I had to put the book down and seek the painting out to see more clearly the father's revealing hand placement mentioned and the escaping dog. What an incredible painting! Brassica: a genus of plants in the mustard family (Brassicaceae). The members of the genus are informally known as cruciferous vegetables, cabbages, or mustard plants. Crops from this genus are sometimes called cole crops—derived from the Latin caulis, denoting the stem or stalk of a plant. 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. 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 ] 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.

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A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits by Laura Cumming: review". The Telegraph . Retrieved 8 December 2022. 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.

On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Resources | RGfE On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Resources | RGfE

So many puzzles remained to be solved. Laura 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, Cumming’s moving homage to her mother’s achievement, oscillates between the generations: it is the work of a child who is now herself a mother seeking to understand her own mother as the child she once was. 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.She taught me how to remember paintings in those long-ago days before I could take their image home from the museum in the blink of an iPhone: first draw the frame, then summarise the main shapes and volumes in rapid thumbnail. Rembrandt sketched a Titian in just the same way at an Amsterdam auction. Even the picturing of pictures is ingrained. Who was the kidnapper? Veda had been there that day with Betty and the beach had not been crowded. The sands were flat: there was almost nowhere for a child to run off to. Had there been any struggle or violence, Veda would have heard it. We imagine, perhaps, the sudden emergence of a sinister stranger. And we would be quite wrong. This is a story about the mysteries of family.

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

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. All around us our stories that cannot be squared or circled or turned into something so easily defined. Her parents, Veda and George, brought her up thereafter as if determined to prevent the thing happening again, keeping her isolated as long as they could and even, at one point, taking her out of school for two years in her teens. Childhood itself thus became something for Betty to escape and later she forged a life, as a mother to Laura Cumming, that was as removed as possible from what she had experienced.The mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance begins on a beach in Lincolnshire in October 1929. A little girl, aged three, is playing on the sand and, in the flash of a moment when her mother takes her eyes off the child, she is kidnapped. A local search begins and a telegram is sent to tell the girl's father to come home from the business trip he's on. But no-one saw what had happened. Or no-one was willing to speak up. Thankfully, five days later the girl was found safe and well in a house a few miles away. Cumming's mother, now an old woman, has no memory of anything that happened during that strange week. For Cumming the story needs a resolution, and she begins to piece together what may have happened. Which is where I will end this escape from my city: at Gibraltar Point, a magnificent nature reserve that runs along the coast about five miles south of Skegness. Here the salt marshes meet the shore. A big bowl of broth at the cafe, a weary dog and the whistle of curlews in the briny air as the sun goes down on the waters. Laura Cumming, the author of this memoir about her mother, is an art critic and it shows in her writing –fabulously written prose – and her placement of several period pieces of artwork that provide not just illustrations in the novel but illustrations that reinforce or explain parts of the narrative. 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.

Secrets, lies and the girl who disappeared from a British

Laura Cummings, as a late-life gift to her beloved mother, has drawn together the threads of the story of her mother's birth and up-bringing, a story so bizarre and emotionally convoluted that it could easily pass as the outline of a lost novel by Thomas Hardy. 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. The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent; so writes St Augustine. We carry their influence, their attitudes, their genes. Their behaviour may form or deform our own. The actions of all these villagers have affected my mother right up to this day, most particularly the behaviour of her parents and those who took her. 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 30 years ago. Then it seemed to me that all we needed was more evidence to solve it, more knowledge in the form of documents, letters, hard facts. But to my surprise the truth turns out to pivot on images as much as words. To discover it has involved looking harder, looking closer, paying more attention to the smallest of visual details – the clues in a dress, the distinctive slant of a copperplate hand, the miniature faces in the family album. 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 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.