On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons
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On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons
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In Stephen Poliakoff’s 1999 television drama Shooting the Past, a prestigious British photographic library is threatened by American property developers. Its staff seek to convince the new owners not to break up the incomparable collection it houses by using its rare photographs, in a sequence of improvised yet powerfully orchestrated displays, to tell the extraordinary stories of apparently ordinary lives. Because you have asked me, dear daughter, here are my earliest recollections. It is an English domestic genre canvas of the 1920s and 1930s, layered over with decades of fading and darkening, but your curiosity has begun to make all glow a little. And perhaps a few figures and events may turn out to be restored through the telling. The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent; so writes St Augustine. We carry their influence, their attitudes, their genes. Their behaviour may form or deform our own. The actions of all these villagers have affected my mother right up to this day, most particularly the behaviour of her parents and those who took her. 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 30 years ago. Then it seemed to me that all we needed was more evidence to solve it, more knowledge in the form of documents, letters, hard facts. But to my surprise the truth turns out to pivot on images as much as words. To discover it has involved looking harder, looking closer, paying more attention to the smallest of visual details – the clues in a dress, the distinctive slant of a copperplate hand, the miniature faces in the family album. I try not to give away spoilers, but after reading this I can say that although I was sad at times while reading the book I was angry at only one person in the narrative and even then not to the point where I thought the person shouldn’t have walked the face of the earth. I finished the book 1) glad that I had made acquaintances with Elizabeth and her ancestors (and with her daughter Laura Cumming the author of the memoir), and 2) appreciative that I had just read a most enjoyable and hopefully unforgettable memoir. I give this my highest rating gladly. This was an outstanding memoir by Laura Cumming about her mother, Elizabeth (other names: Grace, Betty). I only became aware of it from the Briefly Noted section of The New Yorker (September 16, 2019 issue). I hope if you have not read it that you do.
On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Reading Agency
In any case, no amount of research-effort devoted to the mystery is likely to reduce its mysteriousness. In fact every anecdote told by another, every photograph, and every letter creates more mysteries. These we resolve with stories... or not, just as we could have done at the outset. Searching for oneself is ultimately like searching for the fossil of the first human being. Even holding such a thing in our hands, we wouldn’t know we had it. So after such an extensive trip through Cumming’s family life what is there but another imaginative story? Laura Cumming - art critic for The Guardian newspaper tells in this memoir how her illusions and ideas about her mother and her mother's early life were changed during the course of her researches. 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. Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours. 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.These paragraphs show how Cummings meticulously sees things, how ordinary objects become a thread that connects three generations of women, and how a photograph can reveal something of the relationship between its subject and its creator. On Chapel Sands is a sensitive reconstruction of a terrifying event, and of a writer's drive to fill in the blanks in her own mother's story. It's a love letter to family, to forgiveness, and to the little girl playing with her spade on the shore. In her new book, the art critic Laura Cumming unravels the mystery of her mother's disappearance one day in late 1929. Five days went by before she was found unharmed, but she remembered nothing of these events and the silence about what happened remained for fifty years when the circumstances of her kidnap came to light. Laura finds clues in everyday objects and crucially the family photo album, and her search for the truth uncovers a series of secrets, betrayals and heartache. Read by Laura Cumming and Susan Jameson. I see the scene again and again, always trying to grasp the unfathomable moment in which she vanished and everything changed. The place where she was playing empties into air; the tide freezes; the beach turns blank. Time stands still on the shore. How many minutes before her absence begins to register, before Veda becomes uneasy and then fearful, before the silence is broken by shouting and rushing to the spot where the spade lies fallen? The waves continue their impervious lapping, gulls drifting on the surface as the afternoon fades. How long before anybody missed my mother?
On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming review - The Guardian
This is a moving memoir, by Laura Cumming, about her mother’s early life. Her mother, Elizabeth, was known as Betty as a child, but, before that, she was Grace. She lived in a seaside village, Chapel St Leonards, where, one day in 1929, she was abducted from the beach. One moment she played on the sand, with her adopted mother, Veda, the next she was snatched away and was missing for some days. 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.Cumming arrives by stages at the truth of Betty’s parentage and the tangles of her first three years’ … I’d go up to the Beacon and I went to the house where my mother lived and I’d have a drink in the Vine. I went round and round. I did the walk from Chapel to Mablethorpe. I did the walk from Chapel to Skegness and I thought about this period in time. And local historians in and around Chapel have done a wonderful job of publishing a lot of beautifully written local history. In Skegness Library you can look up old copies of the Skegness Times. It was very evocative. The little girl, Betty, was found five days later and returned to her family. Laura Cumming learns about this event in her mother's life many years later, something her mother has no recollection of, a mystery unsolved, yet it is a turning point in her life explaining why she never went to the beach or left the front yard of their house or played with other children from school. 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.’ 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.
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