On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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For Cumming’s 21st birthday, “my mother gave me the gift I most wanted: the tale of her early life”. Not only was she forced by George never to see her mother and grandparents and uncles and aunts again but she was required to look blissfully happy about it. The Vanishing Man was a New York Times bestseller [1] and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2016.

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

Her clever and artistic character is repressed and her potential cut short by an overbearing father. This picture shows my mother as a young child on Chapel Sands, but with a different name on the reverse in an unknown hand.We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse. Laura Cumming’s new book, On Chapel Sands, also uses photographs, paintings and everyday objects in an attempt to resolve a 90-year family mystery: the kidnapping of her mother, then aged three, from a deserted Lincolnshire beach one warm October afternoon in 1929. The book is a love letter to her mother, whose warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through.

BBC Radio 4 - On Chapel Sands - Available now BBC Radio 4 - On Chapel Sands - Available now

Cumming is an art critic and the text is peppered with paintings which teach us how to interpret images. I see the scene again and again, always trying to grasp the unfathomable moment in which she vanished and everything changed. For the first three years of her life, Grace grew up in a mill in the nearby village of Hogsthorpe, surrounded by a large extended family who were usually hard at work baking bread and cakes for the Blanchard bakery. Towards the end of the book, she discusses, and disagrees with, Susan Sontag’s claim in On Photography that images, unlike narration, cannot offer truths because they give a fragmented version of reality. It is perfectly balanced between the requirements of its narrative and the expression of its author's passions.He photographs his daughter on the shore, laughing in a swimming costume I remember as pale lilac, embroidered with a butterfly, though of course I neither saw nor wore it. They keep on coming right to the end, with each new surprise forcing Cumming to reappraise the story and to modify her views of the protagonists, not least George.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | Waterstones

Cumming uncovers dark truths and difficult stories that have been written out of the family's history, but this is an uplifting book, a loving gift from daughter to mother, that also speaks of wider issues of secrets, hidden truths and the different ways we construct our lives as we grow older. Tennyson, the Victorian poet born and raised not far from Chapel, was drawn back to it all through his life. At its heart is a deeply loved little girl, who grew into a self-deprecating artist, wife and mother. In Laura Cumming’s previous book, The Vanishing Man, about the art of Velázquez and a Victorian bookseller who fell under its spell, she examined the idea of the figure at the margins of a picture, the person who goes unnoticed while the main action happens elsewhere. And then Betty was discovered, unharmed and dressed in brand-new clothes – now red, as if through some curious Doppler shift – in a house not 12 miles from the shore.A memoir based on her mother's disappearance as a child, On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons, was published in July 2019 by Chatto. Amassing the evidence and sifting through it has taken her half a lifetime and the book’s structure mirrors that process. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.