On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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Much of the interest of On Chapel Sands is in the incidental details of rural Lincolnshire in the 1930s. Cumming’s new book, On Chapel Sands, was described last week by the critic John Carey as “a modern masterpiece of a memoir”.

On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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. I’ve stayed in farmhouses, coastal cottages and even, one year, in couple of rooms in a 19th-century windmill.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. Betty has no recollection of the kidnap, or indeed of any of the complicated events of her earliest years. They spoke of her deep blue eyes and soft voice, and the courage it took to leave England for Australia. Her evocative descriptions sing throughout On Chapel Sands, a descant to Cumming’s deliberately measured prose.

BBC Radio 4 - On Chapel Sands

The Blanchards used to watch the child at village events to see how she was getting on, but never made themselves known to her. A ship running guns lost its dangerous cargo at Chapel and soldiers had to be brought in to handle the live ammunition.A duplicate photo, with “We Love You” written on it, helps solve the deeper mystery of what it cost those involved when Betty was given up for adoption – a great deal, emotionally, though as it turns out the adoption agreement had no legal standing.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | Waterstones On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | Waterstones

That aside, this is a most compelling piece of personal history, as rich in psychological, social and period insight as in biographical fact, and all the more memorable for that. Eventually Betty will become Elizabeth, escape to Edinburgh and art college, marriage and her own family, which will finally help her feel that she belongs somewhere and to someone. Yet what comes most powerfully from these is how the anchoring of Betty’s life came late, not from her debated upbringing but from her own experience as a parent: “I never belonged to anyone,” she tells Cumming, “until I belonged to you. 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. This photograph, too, is fraught with mystery: it shows George on a beach, holding the very young Grace, before she became Betty; before she became his daughter.You can also download icebreaker questions to help get your discussion started, and a social media guide to show how you can share your reading with others online. A bullied child, Franklin once ran all the way from Spilsby to the beach at Ingoldmells, a mile away from Chapel: trying to get to freedom, and the open shore. On a still day they become one vast continuous expanse, an optical illusion only dispelled when a chink of reflected blue sky spangles the water or a sudden gust troubles the surface. After she became Betty, all she remembered of her earliest years was the smell of warm strawberry jam.

In Brief: On Chapel Sands; Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

In her sixties Betty makes contact with her great-aunt Fanny, who tells her that when Hilda told her family she was having a baby, her father said she should have an abortion but Hilda insisted that the baby would live and that her parents must ‘rear it’ at the mill. The Elstons shared their house with Veda’s decrepit mother, Granny Crawford, who was very deaf and frail, and dressed in ‘floor-length black frocks’. The perfect daughter whom he photographed so obsessively at the age of three had only just been adopted by him and Veda and had only just been given the name Betty. This shifting sense of her own identity, as mutable as the vast, flat expanses of the Lincolnshire coast where she grew up, is partly anchored by a series of photographs of her as a child: she is always smiling, and usually alone, apart from the unseen presence of the photographer, her father, George. Bell was a fiercely devoted grandparent, flying weekly from Palm Beach, Florida, to New York to babysit.More to the point, George cared enough about Betty to make some lovely toys for her, including a miniature theatre. It is capable of obfuscating and deceiving every bit as much as the people who compose, take and edit the photos.