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.

On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing Book review: On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing

What unfolds is an extraordinary story, beautifully told. As an art critic, Cumming has an eye for detail and for conjuring stories from pictures. She uses family photographs throughout the book to forensically look for clues about her mother's early years and to try to discover who took her all those years ago. Her mother also contributes her own recollections, in extracts of a memoir she wrote for her daughter. These fragments are poignant and moving, and feel like a driving force behind Cumming's search – as if she wants to fill in the blanks in her mother's memory before it's too late and those stories disappear forever. Cumming uncovers dark truths and difficult stories that have been written out of the family's history, but this is an uplifting book, a loving gift from daughter to mother, that also speaks of wider issues of secrets, hidden truths and the different ways we construct our lives as we grow older. This is a beautifully written but slowly unraveling story. The tone is wistful, almost haunting as information is discovered and new clues are revealed. Art is discussed, photographs are included, all leading to provide a picture of her mothers life. Although she knew her grandmother Vera, her grandfather was long dead. These were the people said to be her mother's, parents, the people whose past she learns much about and that helps lead to answers. According to most schools of psychology, our personalities are fixed during our unconscious first few years. Carl Jung suggested that our conscious selves are merely flotsam on a sea of unconsciousness. Our fears, presumptions about the world, social sensitivities and inhibitions, and perhaps even ambitions are created subtly but decisively in this sea, which affect not only our own lives but is passed along to our progeny. The presumption of therapy is that knowing what happened in the vast void can neutralise its affects.Words and images . In life as in art we do not always see what is going on at the edges, or even the foreground, do not notice what seems irrelevant or superfluous to our needs and theories. Perception is guided by our own priorities."

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

Every beach shot is ecstatic, and almost proverbial: my mother looks happy as a clam. Years of happiness, or so it seems, on Chapel Sands. I particularly love the sight of her perched on the shoulders of a sunbrowned man who bears his load with patient resignation. She is about five, so tanned her eyebrows look white, and the lilac costume is nearly slipping from her thin body as she lifts her arms like a gleeful reveller at a festival. The man’s name is Frank, and he is a friend of George, who is in his customary position behind the camera. But a line of apparently innocuous foam is stealing up behind them. Not many weeks after the picture was taken, Frank fell deeply asleep on an inflatable raft on this beach. The tide stole him away to his fate, a dark disappearance somewhere out in the North Sea. All along the sea’s margin, curds of delicate foam arrive on incoming waves. My mother used to hurl them gleefully about, risking her father’s instant reproach. In winter, sea-driven winds direct from Scandinavia skim sand into the air, stinging the eyes and gritting the mouth. There are spring tides when the water feels warmer than the grey rain spattering its surface and blazing summer days when you can swim forever, it feels, along the unchanging shore. This level strand, with its inviting sea, was the great playground of my mother’s youth. She went there with George, paddling in the shallow froth, clambering about the tide pools, digging holes, drawing in the sand. He took photographs of her with his Box Brownie and even in those monochrome days, they show the beach at Chapel exactly as I knew it too, from the holidays of my own childhood.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. So many puzzles remained to be solved. Laura 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. A memoir based on her mother's disappearance as a child, On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons, was published in July 2019 by Chatto. [4] It was shortlisted for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize. [5] Career [ edit ]

On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

Cumming, Laura (2019). On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 9781784742478. OCLC 1103978861. The Vanishing Man: in Pursuit of Velázquez by Laura Cumming, review". The Independent. 5 January 2016 . Retrieved 8 December 2022. 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 result is a deeply felt, forensic yet ultimately empathetic examination of human motivation and its attendant sorrows, which is as much a social history of the early 20th century as it is the story of one family and its secrets.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. 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.” There is a wonderful appreciation of the depth and complexity of family love; and it the loveliest of tributes from a daughter to a mother. Cummings’s mother writes what she knows to help in her daughter’s quest (which takes many years to complete): The book came into the form it’s in simply from being in the landscape in Lincolnshire. I’d stand on those sands and she was there, my grandfather was there, the Vikings were there. The compression of time was a great advantage for me.”

On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Reading Agency

But she did not feel that way. As an adult she began to call herself Elizabeth, having always hated the name Betty, specifically for its associations with George. It was incredible to me, when young, that this abundantly loving woman could so have loathed her father that she would change her own name to be free of his reach. But I knew very little of her story yet, and neither did she. My mother did not see her own birth certificate until she was 40. She did not know that she was once called Grace, had no sense of her existence before the age of three. The knowledge of her early life came – and went – in waves over the years. Something would be established, believed, and then washed away; then it would happen all over again, the arriving wave disrupting the old in a kind of tidal confusion. Even now, in her 90s, she has no idea precisely how or why she ceased to be Grace, but I know that it was before she ever reached the home of Veda and George. She stopped searching long ago; now I must discover the truth of her story. But it is Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c1555) that holds generational and interpretive sway, and which, like Cumming’s story, rewards close attention. This painting, depicting a busy scene of prosaic rural Renaissance life extraordinarily interrupted by a boy plunging from the sky to his death (having, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, flown too close to the sun), was important to Cumming’s mother as an art student; she cut the plate from a book and hung it on her wall. Today the same reproduction adorns Cumming’s own home. Brassica: a genus of plants in the mustard family (Brassicaceae). The members of the genus are informally known as cruciferous vegetables, cabbages, or mustard plants. Crops from this genus are sometimes called cole crops—derived from the Latin caulis, denoting the stem or stalk of a plant. 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. 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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On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons. Chatto & Windus, London, 2019, ISBN 9781784742478; On Chapel Sands: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child. Scriber, New York, 2019, ISBN 9781501198717 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.