Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF. It is beautifully written. She had been playing on a beach not far from home, enjoying the warmth of the waning sun with her mother. Tap ‘Menu’ and then ‘Times Radio’ to listen to the latest well-informed debate, expert analysis and breaking news. It seems remarkable that the location of the traumatic kidnapping goes on to feature so hugely in the family records. And perhaps a few figures and events may turn out to be restored through the telling. She disappeared too fast for her to have run into the sea. When Cumming’s mother sat down in the 1980s to write the memoir for her daughter, ‘she still knew nothing about the kidnap, or her existence before it, except that she had been born in a mill house in 1926… She and I used to make up stories to fill those empty years.’. On Chapel Sands - review. In Brueghel’s Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus, a ploughman carries on tilling the fields while a shepherd glances towards the sky, idly curious on hearing some unfamiliar sound. Even the baker’s boy, watched on the street every day by the young Betty, avoids their house. No charges are brought, although Betty was found at an address 12 miles away.

We looked at it by night and by day; by chance and on purpose; on the way to and from school, over meals, on our way upstairs to bed … it hung directly above the old table shoved against the damp wall in the kitchen where we could stare at it while eating Heinz tomato soup and Marmite on toast. Laura Cumming is appearing at the Edinburgh International book Festival on 11 August at 10.15am, This website and its associated newspaper are members of Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). And at its heart is Cumming’s belief in interpretation as a process of understanding, not just of art but of our lives and actions. She alone invented herself. On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming review — the day my mother vanished The tale of a curious disappearance is often stranger than fiction, says Leaf Arbuthnot. Betty’s childhood is insular; friends are cut off without explanation by her parents and neighbours shunned. Police records of the subsequent search reveal no witnesses among the neighbours. She was 56 when she wrote the following: At this point, admirers of Cumming’s work may experience a frisson of déjà vu, for these are sentiments Cumming herself could have expressed, and in similar style. The chapter devoted to this picture is the product of a lifetime’s study: For Cumming, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ is ‘an object as well as an image’; she situates the painting both in her critical gaze and the real, or remembered, world. Veda’s attention wanders; when she looks back the toddler has disappeared. 894646. Every family is a mystery to outsiders, some more than others. Her name is Betty Elston and she is three years old. Her parents, Veda and George, products of Victorian childhoods, never mention it. A search proved inconclusive. As far as he is concerned, the subject is closed forever. But it is a snapshot of Betty as a very young child, found tucked away at the back of an album and captioned with a different name, which holds the key to solving the mystery. Betty wasn’t reported missing until the day after she was taken.

She has not been harmed but she has no memory of where she has been or who took her off the sands. Betty Elston, aged three, is playing on the huge empty beach called Chapel Sands that stretches beyond the tiny Lincolnshire village where she and her parents A few days later, however, the little girl is found safe and well in a neighbouring village, wearing a different set of clothes. In time, her cloistered existence in the village turns claustrophobic; father and daughter grow increasingly estranged; as soon as Betty can escape she does, to faraway Edinburgh and art college. But the investigation by Cumming and her elderly mother throw up more intriguing oddities. And he forbids her to talk to the stranger again or to ask any more questions. Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF. But it is when Cumming turns her acute gaze on pictures from the family photo album that On Chapel Sands unites the strands of her work in earnest. He does not reveal who Betty’s birth parents are, nor how she came to live with him and Veda. In short, a masterpiece-- John Carey, Sunday Times Cumming skilfully withholds key twists in the tale, revealing them at just the right moment. The sketchy details only emerge 50 years later, but it is finding the answer to who was responsible and what happened in those missing days which drives the book. Two narratives run through it: the mother's childhood tale; and Cumming's own pursuit of the truth.

It is a warm October evening in 1929. It is a moving tribute from a daughter to her parents and grandparents.

She was not wearing the blue dress that she had vanished in, but a new red one. So it would seem on the day of the kidnapping: a momentous event went almost unremarked but the repercussions ripple down through the generations. Betty Elston is a bright child and wins a place at the local grammar school. Please, Listen to Times Radio for the latest well-informed debate, expert analysis and breaking news. This seemingly happy resolution is actually the starting point of a family mystery that will last for decades; On Chapel Sands represents Cumming’s attempt to solve it. ‘He lived it, and so did my mother in her more reticent way, even from an early age … I see my young mother go forward, making herself up as she goes.’. Five days later she was found in a village near by. At one point she studies an unusual, carefully composed photograph of Veda posed by the kitchen window, peeling apples for a pie: ‘Veda looks slightly down and away, diffidently self-conscious… I have the recipe she used for this apple pie in her handwritten book with its slow copperplate.’ George has gone to great pains to create this image, she observes, comparing the picture to Vermeer: On Chapel Sands is a mystery solved through empathy and interpretation. When she gets home she tells her parents what has happened and George peremptorily informs her that she is adopted. Registered in England No. The girl’s mother, Veda, is happy to let Betty play on Chapel Sands, not far from the family’s cottage, keeping an eye on her from a distance. The effect is both illuminating and deeply touching. ‘The focus shifts, the relationships change, the meaning deepens every time.’ And so it is with On Chapel Sands.

I hardly dared hope that such an old mystery, where most of the protagonists are dead and those that aren’t remain tight-lipped, would be solved. On Chapel Sands is much more than a search for truth. 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. He takes no further photos. Review by: Profile Editorial Team, 13/12/2019 . There are surprises, but no shocks. On the bus one day, she is approached by a stranger, a woman with a summons: ‘Your grandmother wants to see you.’ Betty is both confused and upset by the encounter, not least because she has no grandmother.

On Chapel Sands is a book of mystery and memoir.

Her clever and artistic character is repressed and her potential cut short by an overbearing father. Lea Michele racism allegations: what Samantha Ware and Naya Rivera said about the Glee star after Black Lives Matter tweets - plus her apology, JK Rowling on Twitter: why the Harry Potter author has been accused of transphobia on social media platforms. George peremptorily informs Betty that she is adopted, and forbids her to ask any more questions. Sometimes a family is even a mystery to its own members – secret histories, lost information, differing accounts of the same event. On an autumn evening in 1929, a small child is snatched from a Lincolnshire beach. That was my father’s exhortation,’ she recalls. Because you have asked me, dear daughter, here are my earliest recollections. ‘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.’ Elizabeth (Betty) set it all down for her daughter and extracts from the letter are dotted throughout the book.

As an adult, Betty calls herself Elizabeth, distances herself from her background and for decades knows nothing of the kidnapping. It feels as if this is the book Cumming has been working towards, a deeply personal story but one that also draws on practised skills as a critic and a writer. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. Cumming is an art critic and the text is peppered with paintings which teach us how to interpret images. Humble objects light up the story: a pie dish, a carved box, an old Vick's jar. It is perfectly balanced between the requirements of its narrative and the expression of its author’s passions. Cumming writes: One of Cumming’s achievements in her previous books has been to elide the distinction between how we look at art and how we look at ourselves. The book becomes a meditation on family, art and time.

Faded snapshots are sifted for clues as though they were both paintings and evidence. - Kirsty McLuckie, On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing Persons, by Laura Cumming, Penguin Random House, £18.99. On Chapel Sands is a mystery solved through empathy and interpretation. In fact, the book is the work of two investigators and two authors. ‘For my 21st birthday, my mother gave me the gift I most wanted: the tale of her early life,’ notes Cumming. Leaf Arbuthnot. In the first few pages of On Chapel Sands, Laura Cumming describes the kidnapping of a child from a beach in 1929. Letters, tickets, recipe books, even the particular slant of a copperplate hand give vital clues. She is the chief art critic of the Observer and in her two previous books, A Face to the World and The Vanishing Man, she has brought painting to life with a mixture of sensitivity for the subject, deep erudition and a forensic eye for detail. But my grandfather had never seen a Vermeer; he had never even heard of this Dutch artist who languished in obscurity for centuries after his death… He yearned to be something other than what he was… Here, in this photograph, in this redemptive moment, George Elston is an artist. Several times in On Chapel Sands she focuses on paintings that have meant something to her or her family, beginning with ‘the first image my mother ever owned... Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”,’ a colour plate which Betty detached from an art book and mounted on cardboard.

She was unharmed and returned to her frantic mother, who never took her to that beach again.

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