She herself was sitting on a blanket, knitting or staring dreamily out to sea in the mild afternoon sun, as I imagine it, with one eye on the child, occasionally plying her with biscuits – until she just slipped out of view. Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story. We honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' continuous connection to Country, waters, skies and communities. It is capable of obfuscating and deceiving every bit as much as the people who compose, take and edit the photos.

On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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. We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. The more that is known about the kidnapping on Chapel Sands, the more puzzling and complex the motivations become. Footsteps muffled by the sand, voices dispersed on the mellow sea air, all it took was a prolonged moment of parental inattention.Laura Cumming’s new book, On Chapel Sands, also uses photographs, paintings and everyday objects in an attempt to resolve a 90-year family mystery: the kidnapping of her mother, then aged three, from a deserted Lincolnshire beach one warm October afternoon in 1929. The man’s name is Frank, and he is a friend of George, who is in his customary position behind the camera. She sits in front of a bell tent with a kettle brewing on a portable stove, its meagre flame the result of the purple methylated spirits that fuelled it, and I scent that sharp stinging reek.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming review - The Guardian

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.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 person who may have seen Betty most often was Harold Blanchard – one of Hilda’s brothers – whose job it was to deliver bread door to door in Chapel, arriving in a cream-coloured baker’s van. This picture shows my mother as a young child on Chapel Sands, but with a different name on the reverse in an unknown hand.

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

They spoke of her deep blue eyes and soft voice, and the courage it took to leave England for Australia. The repercussions are interrogated by Cumming with a hungry precision up to her last, revelatory pages. truth is apparent in the way people choose to present themselves to the lens, their recoil and shyness, their directness and élan; in the accidental image and the propaganda shot where people hold fast to staged poses; above all in the billions of self-portraits in which each photographer shows time and again how she or he wishes to be seen and known to the world.

The girl’s mother, Veda, is happy to let Betty play on Chapel Sands, not far from the family’s cottage, keeping an eye on her from a distance. 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. He sells industrial textile soaps, setting off by train every Monday morning with a suitcase of samples to extol to factory managers across England all the way through until Friday.