On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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In On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons, Laura Cumming tells the incredible story of her mother's disappearance as a young girl, and spools back and forward in time to create a compelling narrative that reads like a detective story.

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

When she was small, he also made her models to play with, including a miniature replica of the family home in St Leonard’s Villas ‘complete with one-inch balconies and cutlery soldered out of hairpins’. The sunlight coming through the window is strong and clear, responsible for making everything visible in that room on that day, but also (literally) for creating this photograph. One day, an elderly woman dressed in black whom she had seen many times before, approached her and told her that ‘your grandmother wants to see you. It was incredible to me, when young, that this abundantly loving woman could so have loathed her father that she would change her own name to be free of his reach. Nobody saw, and perhaps there were few other people there to witness the incident, for it was a weekday afternoon in October.They told Betty that on the table by their mother’s bed when they were growing up there was always a black and white photograph of a little blonde girl standing in a garden, smiling in the midst of some tulips.

Sun-Dappled Propaganda: ‘On Chapel Sands’ · LRB Bee Wilson · Sun-Dappled Propaganda: ‘On Chapel Sands’ · LRB

Cumming's mother, now an old woman, has no memory of anything that happened during that strange week. It is a moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life. 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. This all sounds like a plot of a good thriller, however, it is even better than that, since the little girl was Ms Cumming’s mother. Her life began with a false start and continued with a long chain of deceptions, abetted by acts of communal silence so determined they have continued into my life too.

Cumming’s relationship to him is complicated, comprising resentment, fascination, and incomprehension: “He is as remote to me as some soldier in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we translated at university, unreal, incomprehensible, a figure trudging through the ploughed fields of an illuminated manuscript. Bell was a fiercely devoted grandparent, flying weekly from Palm Beach, Florida, to New York to babysit. Cumming became an art critic rather than an artist but, as her writing proves, this gives us something equally worth celebrating: the interpretation of great creativity to make it accessible to a wider audience.