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. She taught me how to remember paintings in those long-ago days before I could take their image home from the museum in the blink of an iPhone: first draw the frame, then summarise the main shapes and volumes in rapid thumbnail. Rembrandt sketched a Titian in just the same way at an Amsterdam auction. Even the picturing of pictures is ingrained. Perhaps all family photographs have an element of sun-dappled propaganda. Events are presented selectively, with rows and tears and moments of dullness and depression edited out. Family albums are disproportionately about celebration. If George Elston took the propaganda element of the family snapshot to greater lengths than most, that was probably because there was a giant secret about his family that he was trying to conceal, both from his daughter and from the outside world. The perfect daughter whom he photographed so obsessively at the age of three had only just been adopted by him and Veda and had only just been given the name Betty. 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.” 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.

On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons - Goodreads On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons - Goodreads

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. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club announced on 24 January that its new home is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. Of course, Cumming’s mother is a living part of the investigation, now in her 90s but ready to share her memories of older childhood. Yet what comes most powerfully from these is how the anchoring of Betty’s life came late, not from her debated upbringing but from her own experience as a parent: “I never belonged to anyone,” she tells Cumming, “until I belonged to you.” Then again, life for George – an orphan at 13 – had been miserable, too. He scraped a living selling industrial soaps and was looked down on by his snooty brother-in-law, Captain Green (husband of Veda’s younger sister), from whom he rented a modest terraced house. The Captain’s own house, a vast mansion overlooking the sea, was just up the road. More to the point, George cared enough about Betty to make some lovely toys for her, including a miniature theatre. He took many photos of her too, and there’s an especially beautiful one of Veda, Vermeer-like in its composition, which shows an artistic side to George that, had his life been less hard, might have been allowed to flourish.

A sense of place is created through references to Dutch painters, there being a resemblance in this landscape to Holland. Betty in a sand hole on Chapel Sands, taken by her father with his Box Brownie camera. Photograph: Courtesy Laura Cumming 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. Cummings’s mother writes what she knows to help in her daughter’s quest (which takes many years to complete): Every beach shot is ecstatic, and almost proverbial: my mother looks happy as a clam. Years of happiness, or so it seems, on Chapel Sands. I particularly love the sight of her perched on the shoulders of a sunbrowned man who bears his load with patient resignation. She is about five, so tanned her eyebrows look white, and the lilac costume is nearly slipping from her thin body as she lifts her arms like a gleeful reveller at a festival. The man’s name is Frank, and he is a friend of George, who is in his customary position behind the camera. But a line of apparently innocuous foam is stealing up behind them. Not many weeks after the picture was taken, Frank fell deeply asleep on an inflatable raft on this beach. The tide stole him away to his fate, a dark disappearance somewhere out in the North Sea.

BBC Radio 4 - On Chapel Sands

I seldom turn to memoirs, but I am happy to have read this one, and a thank-you to the Authoress for all emotions this book stirred in me. To know that one is the product of a general culture is not news. And I doubt that it has much therapeutic import. It may be important in relativising one’s opinions and presumptions. But its unlikely to provide an explanation, and therefore a ‘cure,’ for specific neuroses. It’s not even very personally satisfying except as history (or poetry, such as Jung’s archetypes). As Cumming’s mother realises, “We hide behind other people’s words, lose our self-consciousness in playing someone else.” Whatever the individual is, she is not to be found in generalities. I loved the way that she used words to paint vivid pictures of her mother and the world that spun around her; and the way that she scrutinised images – both paintings and photographs from the family album – and gained understanding of both the subject and the creator. She poses many unanswered questions about the events that occurred and seeks answers in the photos she possesses, assembling evidence with the assurity of a forensic expert. Her mother was an artist and taught her how to notice and remember images seen in a museum long before telephones could record them. It has become the way she thinks.The 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. The simple mystery with which the book opens is the kidnapping of three-year-old Betty from the beach near Chapel St Leonards on a warm autumn day in 1929 at 4.30 in the afternoon. Betty was sitting on the sand playing with a new tin spade in the company of Veda, who was sitting on a blanket knitting, when someone took her. Veda suddenly noticed that she was gone and that her little spade was lying on the sand. Veda telegrammed George – who was working in another part of the country – to return home. The police were informed and a frantic search went out, but for days, there was no sign or news of Betty. ‘Presumed stolen,’ the police report said. In her new book, the art critic Laura Cumming unravels the mystery of her mother's disappearance one day in late 1929. Five days went by before she was found unharmed, but she remembered nothing of these events and the silence about what happened remained for fifty years when the circumstances of her kidnap came to light. Laura finds clues in everyday objects and crucially the family photo album, and her search for the truth uncovers a series of secrets, betrayals and heartache. Read by Laura Cumming and Susan Jameson.