On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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After the silence is broken, the fragments pieced together, a void remains at the heart of this exquisitely wrought story of maternal and filial love and loss. They had already been there for some time, with biscuits in an old tartan tin, digging and sieving the sand. This picture shows my mother as a young child on Chapel Sands, but with a different name on the reverse in an unknown hand. It's a love letter to family, to forgiveness, and to the little girl playing with her spade on the shore. Looking closer, and helping her mother look closer, she arrives by stages at the truth of Betty’s parentage and the tangles of her first three years.

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

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club announced on 24 January that its new home is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. Dotted through the book are the few faded black-and-white photographs documenting Betty and her parents’ lives – including a stunning image of Veda taken by George in early marriage, which Cumming rightly compares to the domestic interiors of Vermeer (the person behind the lens, as well as the camera’s subject, will come to be of huge significance as the book progresses).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. Cumming speculates that ‘perhaps she loved George enough to forgive him, or thought it her Christian duty or, like so many other husbands and wives, simply had no choice.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming review - The Guardian

At the age of three, she was passed to George and Veda Elston, given this new name Betty, and taken to live in Chapel St Leonards. Between March and September, gannets, guillemots and puffins are just some of the birds flocking to nest and raise families on these chalk cliffs. After Veda died, Betty arranged for thousands of daffodils to be planted in the grounds of the local primary school for the children to pick on Mothers’ Day. In Stephen Poliakoff’s 1999 television drama Shooting the Past, a prestigious British photographic library is threatened by American property developers. But you can read too much into poses and expressions (Shakespeare: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”).Anderby has a Cloud Bar, a platform with sky-trained movable mirrors (and a wonderful guide, supplied by the Cloud Appreciation Society).

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming - Penguin Books Australia On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming - Penguin Books Australia

In her sixties Betty makes contact with her great-aunt Fanny, who tells her that when Hilda told her family she was having a baby, her father said she should have an abortion but Hilda insisted that the baby would live and that her parents must ‘rear it’ at the mill. When Susan asked her mother who the person in the picture was, she said it was just a little girl she once knew. When she was ten, George made Betty pose in the family garden, for an image to be used as a Christmas card. From the age of three until the age of thirteen, Cumming’s mother, Betty Elston – born in 1926 – was much photographed.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 Elston’s unplanned arrival in the world affected those in her immediate vicinity in a similar way: in this case, a community reacted with a curious mix of shame and detachment. Under the terms of the contract, the adopters were to have ‘controlled custody’ of the child until she was 21. But the subtlety and suspense of the narrative lies in the way Cumming allows details about their relationship to emerge slowly, like a photograph soaking in developing fluid. It is important that we continue to promote these adverts as our local businesses need as much support as possible during these challenging times.