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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 4.30 in the afternoon. Betty was sitting on the sand playing with a new tin spade in the company of Veda, who was sitting on a blanket knitting, when someone took her. Veda suddenly noticed that she was gone and that her little spade was lying on the sand. Veda telegrammed George – who was working in another part of the country – to return home. The police were informed and a frantic search went out, but for days, there was no sign or news of Betty. ‘Presumed stolen,’ the police report said. 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. Cumming, Laura (2019). On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 9781784742478. OCLC 1103978861. 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 by Laura Cumming | Waterstones
At time I got impatient with the slowness of the story, but then something interesting will be discovered, at just the right moment. Plus the outstanding prose kept me reading. The ending was simple, but just perfect and heartening.To get here from London, I will drive the A1 as far as Peterborough, and then peel off via Spalding, Boston and Wainfleet. Along the way, there will be the names of the fabled horticulturalists from whom I buy tulip bulbs every year. There will be potato and brassica farms, one after another, and roadside stalls selling ripe cherries. Scudding through the flatlands – like a ship on water, as my mother used to say – the towns get smaller the closer we get to the sea and signs direct visitors to parks for caravans and tents. I’ve stayed in farmhouses, coastal cottages and even, one year, in couple of rooms in a 19th-century windmill. I guess there are hotels, but the Lincolnshire coast is not devoted to luxury. The hue and cry ran along the coast from one village to the next, from Chapel to Ingoldmells and Anderby Creek. If the missing child left any footprints in the sand they led nowhere, or faded out too soon. If there were witnesses who could offer something more useful than the colour of Betty’s dress then they never spoke up, even when the policeman called. The first day passed with no news of her, and then another; by which stage the police could surely offer only dwindling reassurance. Three more days of agony followed. And then Betty was discovered, unharmed and dressed in brand-new clothes – now red, as if through some curious Doppler shift – in a house not 12 miles from the shore. 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. 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 ]
On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing Book review: On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing
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. I picture each scene, as we all do with puzzles, assembling the evidence in the mind’s eye. But the habit is also involuntary. My mother is an artist, my father was an artist; it is the family profession. Every evening, after teaching at Edinburgh College of Art, my father would draw for hours in his sketchbook. 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. But recollections of the day would materialise too: a student at an easel, a bowl of spaghetti cooked by my mother, and all conceived within frames; just as her doodles during a phone call would appear as finished tableaux. She might even draw the telephone itself, with its spiralling cord, add an elaborate table, then set the table with dahlias, all while hanging on for a dentist’s appointment. As an art critic, Cumming can read an image persuasively, and the book works as a primer on how pictures and paintings inform our existence. She teases out tiny details from old photos about the season and the setting, and uses them to drill deeper into her mother’s childhood. Often an answer hatches a further question – why is there a photograph of Betty and her adopted father George on Chapel Sands at least a year before she was adopted? – but these are the tiny bites through which truth is reached.That was the beginning of the journey that is recorded in this book, a journey that Laura Cumming made in the hope of filling in the gaps in her mother’s memory and allowing them both to understand why her early life played out as it did. Laura Cumming found the inspiration to write this memoir in a story of a 3-year-old girl who was abducted in 1929 from a beach, and was found safe and sound after five days. This story had a happy end, even a double one, as the little girl had no memories of the event as she grew older. This all sounds like a plot of a good thriller, however, it is even better than that, since the little girl was Ms Cumming’s mother. After years of silence, secrets and allusions, Laura Cumming decided to investigate what really had happened on the beach in Chapel, a small sea-side village, and this was the beginning of unravelling incredibly complicated family history. The story in which voices from the past and pictures gradually complete the puzzle that consists of hundreds of pieces.