The memoir reflects the depth and complexity of family and village life and seeks to explain. Cummings, in an interview reflects on the process: 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.

On Chapel Sands - HLSI On Chapel Sands - HLSI

For my twenty-first birthday, my mother gave me the gift I most wanted: the tale of her early life. This memoir is short, ending with her teenage years, but its writing carries so much of her grace, her truthful eloquence and witness, her artist's way of looking at the world.

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.” 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.

Book review: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | London

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.Cover notes, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits. Harper Press, London, 2009. ISBN 9780007118434 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. I seldom turn to memoirs, but I am happy to have read this one, and a thank-you to the Authoress for all emotions this book stirred in me. Laura Cummings, as a late-life gift to her beloved mother, has drawn together the threads of the story of her mother's birth and up-bringing, a story so bizarre and emotionally convoluted that it could easily pass as the outline of a lost novel by Thomas Hardy.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming, review: kidnapping, lies On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming, review: kidnapping, lies

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.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. 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 has been the Observer’s art critic for 20 years. Previously, she was arts editor of the New Statesman and a presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3. There's so much more I could say and share, but I urge you rather to read it yourself, particularly if you have an interest in memoir, in mother-daughter dynamics and understanding how art reveals life. It's a fantastic read, one I'd actually like to read again. And the NPR radio interview is excellent. I think about ¾ of the way through the book, in realizing what I was reading, a sense of sadness came upon me…not just for Elizabeth but for several other people who knew her. At the time of the writing of the memoir (2019) Laura Cumming’s mother Elizabeth was still alive but getting up there in years and ailing. The mother gave her permission for the story to be told.

sands on the Lincolnshire Sun, sea and perfect crowd-free sands on the Lincolnshire

The next book we will be reading is Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Drop us a comment below if you'd like to be entered into a draw to win a copy. Have you read On Chapel Sands? Let us know what you thought, or if you've got any recommendations for books to feature tell us in the comments and we'll add them to our list of Bookclub titles. Her parents, Veda and George, brought her up thereafter as if determined to prevent the thing happening again, keeping her isolated as long as they could and even, at one point, taking her out of school for two years in her teens. Childhood itself thus became something for Betty to escape and later she forged a life, as a mother to Laura Cumming, that was as removed as possible from what she had experienced. 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. 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 There are too many corkscrews and hairpins in Betty’s story to reveal them here, but the depth and range of the concealments and subterfuges leave the reader’s jaw on the floor and verify Alan Bennett’s observation: “All families have a secret: they’re not like other families.” And yet, as Cumming notes, “every act is human here; nothing is beyond imagination or understanding”.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.