On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming
Laura Cumming opens her book with the mystery of her mother’s disappearance as a three-year-old in 1929. Leaving that an open question she precedes with a family history. Moving back and forth in time, she examines in turn, her mother’s childhood, her own childhood and what she can of grandparents and other relations. Frustrated, especially regarding her maternal grandparents, by a paucity of information and an unwillingness of some witnesses to this past to talk. She, and the reader, is helped immeasurably by the memoir her mother wrote out for her on the occasion of the author’s 21 birthday. It is an eloquent recounting of what she could remember of her life, with the first three years a blank, up to her teenage years. With this, along with some psychologically acute portraits drawn by her artistically talented mother and a trove of old photographs, she manages construct a vivid and compelling picture of a childhood in rural Lincolnshire between the wars.
And what a childhood. There is something of Dickens or Hardy in the awfulness of it. It reminded me of Alan Johnson’s auto-biography, This Boy, in as much as there were lives lived in 1930s and 1950s Britain in conditions that would have not been out of place in the 18th or 19th centuries.
Laura Cumming’s mother, Betty Elston, survives this to go on to have a notable career in the arts, a marriage (to artist James Cumming) and children. Laura Cumming herself is an art critic and the visual arts embroider this reconstruction of her mother’s life. At times this illustration is illuminating, as with the Edouard Vuillard Interior, other times less so as, for example, with the rather random use of a Wayne Thiebaud cake painting. Even so, the expertise with which the author’s art critic honed eye brings to the discussion of the wide range of artworks referenced in this book is an added bonus.
That the author is focused on solving the mystery surrounding her mother’s early childhood is, outside of the obvious drama of a kidnapping, in keeping with a theme evident in her previous books. Her 2009 A Face to the World examines self-portraiture from a forensic stand point and the title of her 2016 The Vanishing Man, In Pursuit of Velazquez, says it all.
As discussed previously in the 18 April 2020 What I Am Reading Now… posting regarding Hadley Freeman’s, House of Glass, it always helps in these ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ forays into personal family histories that one’s ancestors led genuinely interesting lives.
On Chapel Sands certainly delivers on that.