On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons
Laura Cumming
Chatto & Windus, £18.99
Review by Rosemary Goring

“The lives of our parents before we were born are surely the first great mystery,” writes Laura Cumming in this searching family memoir. The story of her mother Elizabeth’s past, however, was not just a mystery to her children, but also to her. Mrs Cumming is now in her nineties, and it is her daughter, an acclaimed art critic and biographer, raised in Edinburgh, who has set herself the task of filling in the blanks.

As a present for the author’s 21st birthday, Elizabeth wrote an account of her early life in a village called Chapel St Leonards in Lincolnshire, where she lived with her parents George and Veda Elston. At this point in middle-age, she knew only that she had been adopted as a three-year-old, was named Betty, but had formerly been called Grace, though this was relatively recent information. She pictures her birth, in 1926, in a mill house in the village of Hogsthorpe, “in a room probably made even hotter by the bread-baking, for milling and making went together in those days, and on the wall, huge shadows turning and returning as the mill sails glide round the huge Lincolnshire sky outside.”

Betty Elston was a talented artist, which was to prove her passport from a stifling household. Preferring now to being called Elizabeth, she trained at Edinburgh School of Art (where she met Cumming’s father James), but she clearly also shares with her daughter a talent for writing. Her evocative descriptions sing throughout On Chapel Sands, a descant to Cumming’s deliberately measured prose.

This is a many-layered account of one singularly dramatic event in Betty Elston’s life, from which everything else flowed. At the age of three, while on the beach with her newly adoptive mother Veda, Betty was stolen away. This kidnap, by person or persons unknown, lasted three days, until the police made a visit to a house in the next village, and the child was returned, unharmed, and dressed in bright new clothes. It was not an event the adult Elizabeth remembers, but as her daughter writes, “The more I have discovered, the more I realise that there was a life before the kidnap, and a life afterwards, and they were never the same for anyone.”

Searching through old family photos for clues, and interleaving artworks by masters such as Edouard Vuillard and Bruegel to illustrate her themes, Cumming embarks on an intense investigation into where her mother comes from, and what happened that fateful day on the sands. Paced much like a mystery novel, it is filled with sudden twists and revelations that cleverly alter perceptions of events.

Thoughtful, honest and beautifully written, On Chapel Sands is an unvarnished portrait of English village life in the first half of the 20th century, revealing the tides of shame and pride, stoicism and love, that washed through it down the years. At its heart is a deeply loved little girl, who grew into a self-deprecating artist, wife and mother.

Cumming’s day job is evident in the way she seeks answers: “Pictures hold thoughts, ideas and memories like the pockets of a coat,” she writes, and the pages are filled with images, many taken by Betty’s father George with his Box Brownie. A travelling salesman, and a difficult, controlling man, he nevertheless had an artist’s eye. The outstanding image is his photo of his young wife, in their spartan kitchen, sleeves rolled up, peeling knife in hand. An image infused with emotion and light, it is as telling as the Vermeer interiors it recalls, even though, at the date at which it was taken, nobody had heard of Vermeer.

George was to become his child’s bete noir. As Betty grew older, and he began autocratically to confine her to the house, she came to loathe him, and chafed to be gone. Chapter by chapter the unknowable George dominates this story. Cumming’s relationship to him is complicated, comprising resentment, fascination, and incomprehension: “He is as remote to me as some soldier in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we translated at university, unreal, incomprehensible, a figure trudging through the ploughed fields of an illuminated manuscript. It is not just that I never met him, it is that my mother has made of him an absolute stranger.”

Perhaps the least persuasive chapter is where Cumming goes in search of him, propelled by the need to feel something for the prickly grandfather she never knew. Otherwise, On Chapel Sands is a model of clarity and unsentimental, sometimes heart-breaking love. Occasionally the abundance of family detail is a little overwhelming, the storytelling more protracted than necessary. That aside, this is a most compelling piece of personal history, as rich in psychological, social and period insight as in biographical fact, and all the more memorable for that.

Ringing throughout is Elizabeth’s confession to her daughter, many years ago, reflecting the lifelong insecurity she suffered until she had children: “I never belonged to anyone until I belonged to you... you are my most precious possession”. With this powerful detective memoir, Cumming has brought to light all those who shaped Elizabeth’s early years, and set in motion the rest of her life. It is an enthralling and deeply moving act of restoration.