On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) 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. For my twenty-first birthday, my mother gave me the gift I most wanted: the tale of her early life. This memoir is short, ending with her teenage years, but its writing carries so much of her grace, her truthful eloquence and witness, her artist's way of looking at the world. Cumming arrives by stages at the truth of Betty’s parentage and the tangles of her first three years’ … You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Laura Cumming - Wikipedia Laura Cumming - Wikipedia

Much of the interest of On Chapel Sands is in the incidental details of rural Lincolnshire in the 1930s. As Cumming depicts it, the landscape was almost Dutch in its flatness and ‘ancient maze of dykes and paths’. At moments, the book becomes a social history, showing that a household such as the Elstons’ benefited from a salesman’s income, which placed them one notch above the Blanchards, both in terms of resources and status. Cumming makes it seem a narrow, pinched world. Chapel St Leonards is dominated by just a few families and there is much intermarriage. There is one hotel, the Vine, a ‘couthy establishment’ where George goes to drink and where Veda’s father was the innkeeper when she was growing up and where Betty is taken for a celebratory tea after she wins an essay prize. The main excitement is provided by the occasional consignment of strange things washing up on the beach, such as a crate of grapefruits, ‘odd yellow globes never seen before by anyone except Mr Stow, proprietor of Stow’s Stores by the Pulley’. By the standards of Chapel St Leonards, the quiet seaside town of Skegness seems like a distant and racy metropolis. ‘At the age of ten,’ Cumming writes, ‘my mother won a scholarship to Skegness Grammar and the radius of her life suddenly became seven miles wider.’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. I’m not so sure. To be of therapeutic benefit, I presume any story we tell ourselves about the void has to be coherent. We are, after all, engaging in a kind of personal theology in which the creator-spirit must provide some rationale for the way we are. Even if that creator-spirit turns out to be a less than benign demon, therapy only works if that demon is rational according to its own lights.

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

I loved the way that she used words to paint vivid pictures of her mother and the world that spun around her; and the way that she scrutinised images – both paintings and photographs from the family album – and gained understanding of both the subject and the creator. The simple mystery with which the book opens is the kidnapping of three-year-old Betty from the beach near Chapel St Leonards on a warm autumn day in 1929 at 4.30 in the afternoon. Betty was sitting on the sand playing with a new tin spade in the company of Veda, who was sitting on a blanket knitting, when someone took her. Veda suddenly noticed that she was gone and that her little spade was lying on the sand. Veda telegrammed George – who was working in another part of the country – to return home. The police were informed and a frantic search went out, but for days, there was no sign or news of Betty. ‘Presumed stolen,’ the police report said. Laura Cumming is Betty Elson’s daughter, and as she grew up she came to realise that her mother never spoke about her own childhood. When Elizabeth (who modified her name, as she had always hated being called Betty) asked what she would most like for her 21st birthday, Laura answered the tale of her mother’s early life. This is a many-layered account of one singularly dramatic event in Betty Elston’s life, from which everything else flowed. At the age of three, while on the beach with her newly adoptive mother Veda, Betty was stolen away. This kidnap, by person or persons unknown, lasted three days, until the police made a visit to a house in the next village, and the child was returned, unharmed, and dressed in bright new clothes. It was not an event the adult Elizabeth remembers, but as her daughter writes, “The more I have discovered, the more I realise that there was a life before the kidnap, and a life afterwards, and they were never the same for anyone.”Could it be that the mystery of one’s origin is actually meant to be a secret? That that period of infantile unconsciousness is meant as a sort of buffer between the individual and what is essentially an unbearable legacy of human suffering? Without the void, would many of us maintain the burden of consciousness; or would we choose to end its reign? 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.