Revisiting a Cagey Past
On Chapel Sands was a book buried in my Kindle, bought soon after it came out, but lost among the digital detritus that clog my devices. Recently, while combing through an ever-mushrooming to-read list, I had this title resurface as an off-beat nonfiction read. It is. It’s a memoir that reads like a thriller. But more tantalizing than fictional whodunits, because as its disclaimer states: “All the characters and events in this book are real.”
It starts with a gripping premise. A three-year-old girl plays on a beach. Her mother, Veda Elston, watches from a distance. Maybe in an absent or desultory manner, or maybe even with hypervigilance. Because all it took was a momentary distraction, and the child, Betty, was whisked away. “Thus was my mother kidnapped,” writes Laura Cumming, resurrecting the fantastically surreal details of her mother’s childhood. Veda panics, but the world responds with aggravating indifference. “The waves continue their impervious lapping, gulls drifting on the surface as the afternoon fades.”
The kidnapping was a life-changing moment, creating a stir in Chapel St. Leonard, the village that Veda, George and their child Betty lived in. Like in other British villages of that time, family secrets were held back in a complicit tightlipped silence. Which might have been tolerable to the adults, but was baffling and unsettling for children. Betty, as we read on, wasn’t kidnapped by a stranger, but by a relative. And returned soon enough to her parents. A temporary vanishing that was also obliterated from her memory.
She didn’t know this then, but she wasn’t Veda’s biological daughter. She had been adopted by the Elstons, who had signed a contract with her mother, Hilda, to keep her real identity hidden. And also her maternal relatives out of sight.
When a grown-up Laura rummages through her mother’s childhood photographs, she hardly spots images of George and Veda. All pictures are of Betty, taken by her father, George, with his Box Brownie camera. After the kidnapping, Betty was held in a kind of semi-confinement, allowed to wander around her own home and garden, but very sparingly inside the village. And rarely allowed to interact with others.
The family lived slightly outside the village, in a terraced villa rented out from a rich brother-in-law. Moreover, the couple was already 49, when Betty was adopted. Though the child looks rapturous in most photographs, her memories of those times seem dark, claustrophobic and dour. While Veda was constantly burdened by household chores, George was a curmudgeonly salesman, ill-tempered and tyrannical with his family. When Laura examines the pictures with an adult eye, she realizes that Betty’s smile was an act of obedience rather than an expression of joy.
But there was something more sinister, an unspoken black hole in her life. She had no memories whatsoever of her life before she turned three. Where had she lived and with whom? Till her middle-grade years, Betty yearned to escape her trapped gloom, her silent, tiresome and possessive parents.
Fortunately, at 10, she won a scholarship to a school, Skegness Grammar. Skegness itself was a fancy place, a summer resort that attracted lawyers, bankers and other moneyed types. At that school, little Betty relished her art classes, though she remained otherwise shy and reticent with sophisticated peers. Fortunately, the teachers spotted her standout aptitude for art, a talent that was to later rescue her from the humdrum life that George had plotted. It was on a bus back from Skegness that Betty had another unnerving encounter. With a stranger, a woman who showed her a picture of her infant self and said: “Your grandmother wants to see you.” Till then, Betty had no knowledge of any grandmother, or any other parents, besides Veda and George. “It was a moment of pure shock, of such stunning silent force that I felt only panic…”
When she confronted Veda at home, her mother continued with her busy cooking, as if Betty were reporting the weather or some small school skirmish. Later, that evening, the couple told her that they were her adopted parents, and moreover, that she was forbidden from speaking to other people. Though Betty still held a marginal affection for Veda, she “began to dislike George intensely. It was a full stop to innocence.”
Yanking Betty off her academic track at 16, George pinned her to a loathsome job at the post office. Fortunately, some school teachers persuaded him to permit her evening art classes, which eventually led to her college application, and her later admission to the Edinburgh College of Art. Where she not only met her husband, but also forged her freedom from her domineering father.
Much later, as Betty kept returning to the village to unearth details of her childhood, and as her son and daughter, the author Laura, helped with the foraging, it was discovered that George was her real father. Betty was the child of his extramarital fling with Hilda; his bringing the three-year-old home was an unfolding of events similar to the Hindi movie Masoom. Except that George did not exude the sensitivity of a torn and conflicted husband. Even as Betty deliberately distanced herself from George, she was to stay connected with Veda, who lived with her as an affable “grandmother” to her own kids.
The book itself is more than the story of a family. It’s also a homage of sorts to the power of images, to what family photographs can reveal and mask. As Cumming puts it, “A photograph is a body of knowledge as an image but also as an object.” Using words to paint vivid, pointillist scenes, Laura is proof that Betty transcended her wounded childhood to foster a deliberate happiness for her children. While many things in life can be attributed to the vagaries of chance, On Chapel Sands also underlines the power to flee and to exercise choice.
References
Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons, Vintage, 2021