On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

Product Information

In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. It was another fifty years before she even learned of the kidnap. The girl became an artist and had a daughter, Laura, who grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet in the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. 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.

The riddle of Chapel Sands | The Spectator The riddle of Chapel Sands | The Spectator

Andy Miller The riddle of Chapel Sands To understand why an infant was snatched from a Lincolnshire beach 90 years ago, Laura Cumming must face some unhappy home truths 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. 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.Betty in a sand hole on Chapel Sands, taken by her father with his Box Brownie camera. Photograph: Courtesy Laura Cumming

In Brief: On Chapel Sands; Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

Laura Cumming is Betty Elson’s daughter, and as she grew up she came to realise that her mother never spoke about her own childhood. When Elizabeth (who modified her name, as she had always hated being called Betty) asked what she would most like for her 21st birthday, Laura answered the tale of her mother’s early life. 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.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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 Vanishing Man: in Pursuit of Velázquez by Laura Cumming, review". The Independent. 5 January 2016 . Retrieved 8 December 2022.