On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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Three weeks after the kidnap, he made Hilda sign a contract witnessed and arranged by a solicitor relinquishing all rights as a parent. Although George and Veda claimed to have adopted Betty, the contract was not technically an adoption under English law, but a more idiosyncratic arrangement the gist of which was that the Elstons had all the power and Hilda had none. Under the terms of the contract, the adopters were to have ‘controlled custody’ of the child until she was 21. The child should be ‘held out to the world and in all respects treated as if she were in fact the child of the adopters’. In return, they would finance ‘her maintenance and education’. Meanwhile the parent – Hilda – must agree not to hold ‘any further communication with the child’. If she were found to be in breach of this, she must repay the adopters the full amount they had spent on supporting and educating the child. As Cumming notes, this would have amounted to a huge threat to Hilda as a young woman with no financial resources. The document banned the Blanchard family from coming anywhere near the child or from letting her know that she belonged to them. Shortlisted for both the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, her singular memoir was one of the most critically acclaimed books of 2019. A deeply moving story of family and community, On Chapel Sands is part-true crime narrative, part-investigation into the subjectivity of memory and part-witness to a vanishing provincial way of life. In brief, On Chapel Sands is the story of Laura’s mother, Betty Elston – more specifically, her disappearance as a young child, snatched away from the beach at Chapel St Leonards in 1929. Five days later, Betty was found safe and well in a nearby village. She remembers nothing of the incident, and nobody at home ever mentions it again. Another fifty years pass before Betty l

On Chapel Sands - HLSI On Chapel Sands - HLSI

Five Days Gone' is a memoir of a child who was kidnaped in the fall of 1929 for 5 days in Lincolnshire (a county in eastern England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east). A substantial piece of the book is about Elizabeth (other names: Grace, Betty) after those 5 days when she was returned, and her life with her parents, George and Veda Elston, until she left for school (Nottingham College of Art and then in Scotland at the Edinburgh College of Art) at the age of 18. But an equally substantial part of the book is the author’s and her mother’s (Elizabeth’s) search for the circumstances under which she was kidnapped and who did it and why. Could it be that the mystery of one’s origin is actually meant to be a secret? That that period of infantile unconsciousness is meant as a sort of buffer between the individual and what is essentially an unbearable legacy of human suffering? Without the void, would many of us maintain the burden of consciousness; or would we choose to end its reign? My mother has no memory of these events. Nobody ever spoke of them at home, in Chapel St Leonards or anywhere else. It was another half-century and more before she even learned of the kidnap. Much of the interest of On Chapel Sands is in the incidental details of rural Lincolnshire in the 1930s. As Cumming depicts it, the landscape was almost Dutch in its flatness and ‘ancient maze of dykes and paths’. At moments, the book becomes a social history, showing that a household such as the Elstons’ benefited from a salesman’s income, which placed them one notch above the Blanchards, both in terms of resources and status. Cumming makes it seem a narrow, pinched world. Chapel St Leonards is dominated by just a few families and there is much intermarriage. There is one hotel, the Vine, a ‘couthy establishment’ where George goes to drink and where Veda’s father was the innkeeper when she was growing up and where Betty is taken for a celebratory tea after she wins an essay prize. The main excitement is provided by the occasional consignment of strange things washing up on the beach, such as a crate of grapefruits, ‘odd yellow globes never seen before by anyone except Mr Stow, proprietor of Stow’s Stores by the Pulley’. By the standards of Chapel St Leonards, the quiet seaside town of Skegness seems like a distant and racy metropolis. ‘At the age of ten,’ Cumming writes, ‘my mother won a scholarship to Skegness Grammar and the radius of her life suddenly became seven miles wider.’ The book doesn't advance the narrative so much at the beginning, with lots of descriptions of the areas of Lincolnshire in England and the characters in Laura and her mother's lives. Once the book really starts exploring the mystery of Betty's birth it becomes much more compelling. An encounter on a bus, several found photographs, a finding of some important individuals are the beginnings of Laura being able to piece together her mother's life. There was great secrecy established about Betty's birth and adoption, and the secrets were very well kept. Betty was forced to live a very cloistered, protected life, allusions to being in a prison were presented several times throughout the book. And yet she came out of all this fine, was able to provide a wonderful and loving relationship to her children, and became a loving grandmother. Laura Cumming obviously has a tremendous amount of affection for her mother, and this comes through significantly in this book.To begin with he’s the villain of the piece, because of the loveless regime in which Betty was brought up. After the kidnapping, he kept her on a tight leash. She wasn’t allowed to play with other children or walk the half mile to the shops; by the age of 10, she had travelled no further than Skegness, seven miles away. At home he barked out brisk instructions: sit up straight, don’t play with your food, finish what’s on your plate. He and Veda were already 49 when Betty came to them and, with a short temper made worse by his bronchitis and lumbago, he hadn’t the temperament to give her the love she needed. Nor had the gentle, self-effacing Veda the temperament to withstand his tyranny.

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

As a journalist who specializes in art history and criticism, it's not surprising that Cummings makes skilful use of images: both family photographs, which are revealed to be fraught with hidden meanings and emotional undercurrents, and even classic paintings, which she uses to illustrate some of her points about family relationships, secrets and story-telling.The memoir reflects the depth and complexity of family and village life and seeks to explain. Cummings, in an interview reflects on the process: Which is where I will end this escape from my city: at Gibraltar Point, a magnificent nature reserve that runs along the coast about five miles south of Skegness. Here the salt marshes meet the shore. A big bowl of broth at the cafe, a weary dog and the whistle of curlews in the briny air as the sun goes down on the waters. One minute she was there, barefoot and absorbed, spade in hand, seconds later she was taken off the sands at the village of Chapel St Leonards apparently without anybody noticing at all. Thus my mother was kidnapped. A sense of place is created through references to Dutch painters, there being a resemblance in this landscape to Holland. The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent; so writes St Augustine. We carry their influence, their attitudes, their genes. Their behaviour may form or deform our own. The actions of all these villagers have affected my mother right up to this day, most particularly the behaviour of her parents and those who took her. 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 30 years ago. Then it seemed to me that all we needed was more evidence to solve it, more knowledge in the form of documents, letters, hard facts. But 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.

Secrets, lies and the girl who disappeared from a British

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. 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. Betty had already known that she was adopted. The “truth” had been revealed at a moment of crisis – on the eve of the Second World War, 10 years after the abduction on Chapel Sands. Betty, always a lonely child – inexplicably not allowed to play outdoors or even with other children, always kept within the confines of her parents’ tiny cottage – had at last been allowed to go away to school. A clever girl, she had won a scholarship to Skegness Grammar, a bus ride up the coast. Aged 13, travelling home at the end of the school day, she is approached by a stranger, a middle-aged woman, who states that “your grandmother wants to see you”. Betty is confused, and terrified: her grandmother, Veda’s mother, who had lived with them, died when she was five.Laura Cumming - art critic for The Guardian newspaper tells in this memoir how her illusions and ideas about her mother and her mother's early life were changed during the course of her researches. This is a moving memoir, by Laura Cumming, about her mother’s early life. Her mother, Elizabeth, was known as Betty as a child, but, before that, she was Grace. She lived in a seaside village, Chapel St Leonards, where, one day in 1929, she was abducted from the beach. One moment she played on the sand, with her adopted mother, Veda, the next she was snatched away and was missing for some days.