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On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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The story sounded more interesting when I heard the author interviewed on NPR. Unfortunately, the book rambled with endless and tedious art history tangents that did not move the story along at all. Towards the end, it was just a slog to get through it in the hopes that the resolution would be compelling. It was not. Cumming arrives by stages at the truth of Betty’s parentage and the tangles of her first three years’ …

Secrets, lies and the girl who disappeared from a British

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? A deeply moving story of family and community that is striking and unforgettable, 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. Betty in a sand hole on Chapel Sands, taken by her father with his Box Brownie camera. Photograph: Courtesy Laura Cumming She poses many unanswered questions about the events that occurred and seeks answers in the photos she possesses, assembling evidence with the assurity of a forensic expert. Her mother was an artist and taught her how to notice and remember images seen in a museum long before telephones could record them. It has become the way she thinks.One for readers of The Hare with Amber Eyes (Edmund de Waal) and Rosie (Rose Tremain): a family memoir whose tone of emotional detachment is in keeping with the mores of the time it writes about. Cumming’s mother, Betty, was raised by adoptive parents, George and Veda Elston. But in 1929 something strange happened: three-year-old Betty was kidnapped from a beach in Lincolnshire and found five days later. Even stranger: at that time she was known as Grace. Cumming and her mother only learned the truth of her parentage and upbringing in the 1980s: George was her biological father, but her mother was Hilda Blanchard, a young woman from a local mill-owning and baking family. She was forced to sign a contract permanently giving Grace to George and his wife, and moved to Australia, where she bore two more children but always kept a photograph of Grace beside her bed. It seems George did genuinely love Hilda: he continued to send her photos of their daughter, all the way to Australia. The lives of our parents before we were born is surely our first great mystery,” writes Cumming. Her mother, Betty Elston, was the only child of much older parents, George and Veda, living in the village of Chapel St Leonards on the Lincolnshire coast. Cumming uses this local landscape with relish. An acclaimed art writer, she describes an isolated, almost other-worldly place: “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.”

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | Baillie Gifford Prize On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | Baillie Gifford Prize

Cummings’s mother writes what she knows to help in her daughter’s quest (which takes many years to complete): 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. I think about ¾ of the way through the book, in realizing what I was reading, a sense of sadness came upon me…not just for Elizabeth but for several other people who knew her. At the time of the writing of the memoir (2019) Laura Cumming’s mother Elizabeth was still alive but getting up there in years and ailing. The mother gave her permission for the story to be told. 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.

Cumming, Laura (2019). On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 9781784742478. OCLC 1103978861. 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.

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

Betty’s warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through.’ Photograph: courtesy of Penguin Random House Cumming was literary editor of the BBC's The Listener, assistant editor of the New Statesman, and the presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3. [6] [7] Cumming is careful not to intrude on the narrative; it’s her mother’s story, not her own. But she owns up to certain inherited traits. And though her mother could never forgive George, Cumming does, finding his better nature and letting her anger with him wash out to sea.

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Cumming, Laura (25 June 2023). "Fabritius, my father and me: how art has shaped my life". The Guardian . Retrieved 11 July 2023. (Extract from Thunderclap) Perhaps all family photographs have an element of sun-dappled propaganda. Events are presented selectively, with rows and tears and moments of dullness and depression edited out. Family albums are disproportionately about celebration. If George Elston took the propaganda element of the family snapshot to greater lengths than most, that was probably because there was a giant secret about his family that he was trying to conceal, both from his daughter and from the outside world. 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. 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! 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.

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