On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

Product Information

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. Laura Cumming’s new book, On Chapel Sands, also uses photographs, paintings and everyday objects in an attempt to resolve a 90-year family mystery: the kidnapping of her mother, then aged three, from a deserted Lincolnshire beach one warm October afternoon in 1929. The result is a deeply felt, forensic yet ultimately empathetic examination of human motivation and its attendant sorrows, which is as much a social history of the early 20th century as it is the story of one family and its secrets.

On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Resources | RGfE On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Resources | RGfE

I’m trying not to say too much, because I was told more that I wanted to know about this book before I started to read. On Chapel Sands, Cumming’s moving homage to her mother’s achievement, oscillates between the generations: it is the work of a child who is now herself a mother seeking to understand her own mother as the child she once was.The book came into the form it’s in simply from being in the landscape in Lincolnshire. I’d stand on those sands and she was there, my grandfather was there, the Vikings were there. The compression of time was a great advantage for me.”

On Chapel Sands - reading group guide | Reading Agency

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death. Chatto & Windus, London, 2023, ISBN 9781982181765; Scribner, New York, 2023, ISBN 9781982181741

Upcoming Events

A sense of place is created through references to Dutch painters, there being a resemblance in this landscape to Holland.

On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing Book review: On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing

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 learns of the kidnapping, by now a wife and mother herself with a rich and fulfilling life of her own. truth is apparent in the way people choose to present themselves to the lens, their recoil and shyness, their directness and élan; in the accidental image and the propaganda shot where people hold fast to staged poses; above all in the billions of self-portraits in which each photographer shows time and again how she or he wishes to be seen and known to the world. Because you have asked me, dear daughter, here are my earliest recollections. It is an English domestic genre canvas of the 1920s and 1930s, layered over with decades of fading and darkening, but your curiosity has begun to make all glow a little. And perhaps a few figures and events may turn out to be restored through the telling.It was a strange, and often unhappy, life for young Betty. Her parents kept her close, barely letting her mix with other children, and they held themselves apart from their neighbours, only keeping in touch with a few old friends. The arc of the story is relatively simple, but this is not a book to read just to learn the story, it is a book to read to appreciate all of the things that are threaded through that story. Because you have asked me, dear daughter, here are my earliest recollections. It is an English domestic genre canvas of the 1920s and 1930s, layered over with decades of fading and darkening, but your curiosity has begun to make all glow a little. And perhaps a few figures and events may turn out to be restored through the telling.” Betty’s warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through.’ Photograph: courtesy of Penguin Random House Serendipitously, that same day, Laura Cumming wrote an article in the Observer about the collective yearning for visiting art exhibitions; for Velázquez in Edinburgh, Monet in Glasgow, Goya in Cambridge, Rembrandt at Kenwood House, Poussin in Dulwich, Gwen John in Sheffield.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming — the mysteries of family On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming — the mysteries of family

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. 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. Cummings’s mother writes what she knows to help in her daughter’s quest (which takes many years to complete): According to most schools of psychology, our personalities are fixed during our unconscious first few years. Carl Jung suggested that our conscious selves are merely flotsam on a sea of unconsciousness. Our fears, presumptions about the world, social sensitivities and inhibitions, and perhaps even ambitions are created subtly but decisively in this sea, which affect not only our own lives but is passed along to our progeny. The presumption of therapy is that knowing what happened in the vast void can neutralise its affects. Cover notes, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits. Harper Press, London, 2009. ISBN 9780007118434The mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance begins on a beach in Lincolnshire in October 1929. 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. A local search begins and a telegram is sent to tell the girl's father to come home from the business trip he's on. But no-one saw what had happened. Or no-one was willing to speak up. Thankfully, five days later the girl was found safe and well in a house a few miles away. Cumming's mother, now an old woman, has no memory of anything that happened during that strange week. For Cumming the story needs a resolution, and she begins to piece together what may have happened. 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. 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. Panic sets in and the police are called; Betty has been kidnapped. A few days later, however, the little girl is found safe and well in a neighbouring village, wearing a different set of clothes. She has not been harmed but she has no memory of where she has been or who took her off the sands. She is restored to her mother and father (George, a travelling salesman) and life goes on. 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.