I seldom turn to memoirs, but I am happy to have read this one, and a thank-you to the Authoress for all emotions this book stirred in me.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming LinenMe Bookclub: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

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. To begin with he’s the villain of the piece, because of the loveless regime in which Betty was brought up. After the kidnapping, he kept her on a tight leash. She wasn’t allowed to play with other children or walk the half mile to the shops; by the age of 10, she had travelled no further than Skegness, seven miles away. At home he barked out brisk instructions: sit up straight, don’t play with your food, finish what’s on your plate. He and Veda were already 49 when Betty came to them and, with a short temper made worse by his bronchitis and lumbago, he hadn’t the temperament to give her the love she needed. Nor had the gentle, self-effacing Veda the temperament to withstand his tyranny.There are too many corkscrews and hairpins in Betty’s story to reveal them here, but the depth and range of the concealments and subterfuges leave the reader’s jaw on the floor and verify Alan Bennett’s observation: “All families have a secret: they’re not like other families.” And yet, as Cumming notes, “every act is human here; nothing is beyond imagination or understanding”. 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. But this adoption story was still not quite the truth about the Elston family. Betty uncovered the real story of her childhood by looking at a photograph. As a teenager, she needed to have an official photograph taken. When it was developed, Cumming writes, ‘my mother looked at herself and saw George.’ She realised that George was actually her real father. After that she resolved to be ‘as unlike him as possible’, even though the camera mercilessly showed that they had the same features. For Cumming, this moment provides proof of the power of images to deepen our understanding in unexpected ways. George never told Betty he was her father, and she never confronted him on the subject. It was many decades before she got official written proof that he was her birth father. But her eyes – or rather the camera’s eye – had already proved the truth of her parentage to her. 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: My Mother and Other Missing Persons - Goodreads On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons - Goodreads

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. 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 ] The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. So many puzzles remained to be solved. Cumming 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.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. Of course, Cumming’s mother is a living part of the investigation, now in her 90s but ready to share her memories of older childhood. 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.”

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

One of the principal ways we understand human acts is through art, and one of the great pleasures of On Chapel Sands is the digressions – which are not really digressions – where Cumming writes with fluency and verve on great artworks, from Degas’s painting of the Bellelli family (“a psychological masterpiece, a novel in paint”) to Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting which, more than any other, “has made me feel so keenly alive to the idea that this high, round world, lit by the sun, is the very same place where our ancestors once trudged and ploughed and fished the very same seas”. Cover notes, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits. Harper Press, London, 2009. ISBN 9780007118434As a journalist who specializes in art history and criticism, it's not surprising that Cummings makes skilful use of images: both family photographs, which are revealed to be fraught with hidden meanings and emotional undercurrents, and even classic paintings, which she uses to illustrate some of her points about family relationships, secrets and story-telling. I had her memoir, I had my writings over many years about her, who I love very dearly, and I had many thoughts about this story. And I told the story, a specific aspect of the story, which is the baker’s van, which arrives from the windmill at Hogsthorpe and never stops at her house. I wanted to get to the bottom of this and I saw the thing to do, with my mother’s blessing. Her father, George, a travelling salesman, was called home; the police were summoned; but a few days later, the little girl was found safe and well in a nearby village, completely unharmed but dressed in a brand new set of clothes. She was restored to her parents, her memory of what had happened would fade away, and her life would go on. 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?