On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

Product Information

This book is a love letter to her [Cumming's] mother, whose warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine though. This picture shows my mother as a young child on Chapel Sands, but with a different name on the reverse in an unknown hand. Nobody saw, and perhaps there were few other people there to witness the incident, for it was a weekday afternoon in October. When George – a controlling man with a temper – got his camera out, he expected Betty and his wife, Veda, to pose as he demanded. These drawings took the form of lyrical abstractions of the golden mean, the cuneiform alphabet, the newly revealed wonders of the subatomic particle, occasionally a couple of highwire acrobats for his children.

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

The heroine is Betty – who is now in her nineties and on whom it is evident that Cumming dotes – and the villain is George, who died in 1952. 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. To say any more would be a disservice to Cumming, who’s adept in knowing how much to disclose and when to hold back.The girl became an artist and had a daughter, Laura, who grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet in the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. Uncovering the mystery of her mother’s disappearance as a child, Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic for the Observer, takes a closer look at her family 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. It won the 2017 James Tait Black Biography Prize and was published to critical acclaim (‘A riveting detective story: readers will be spellbound’ Colm Tóibín).

On Chapel Sands - HLSI On Chapel Sands - HLSI

Cumming’s previous work, The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez (2016), was a fascinating art-history-cum-thriller about a Victorian obsessive who risked everything to prove the provenance of a portrait of Charles I. This shifting sense of her own identity, as mutable as the vast, flat expanses of the Lincolnshire coast where she grew up, is partly anchored by a series of photographs of her as a child: she is always smiling, and usually alone, apart from the unseen presence of the photographer, her father, George. A little girl, aged three, is playing on the sand and, in the flash of a moment when her mother takes her eyes off the child, she is kidnapped.But Hilda’s parents were pillars of the local church who, according to a friend, ‘could not stand the shame’ of having an illegitimate child living with them, much as they loved her. Why was her mother, Betty, abducted from a beach in the autumn of 1929 at the age of three, only to be reunited with her parents a few days later? 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. They keep on coming right to the end, with each new surprise forcing Cumming to reappraise the story and to modify her views of the protagonists, not least George. The deep dramas of her mother’s childhood are used as a framework for examining what we can and can’t learn about a family by looking at the photographs it has left behind.