A little girl’s disappearance investigated by her daughter

In search of truth a story with great depth and tenderness and revelation of how art enriches life.

Betty Elston was three years old when she disappeared  one day in October 1929 from Lincolnshire beach below the house where she lived.  She was found again by police, unharmed, some miles away, a few days later.  Her parents Veda and George, brought her up thereafter determined to prevent the thing happening again, keeping her isolated as long as they could and even at one point taking her out of school for two years I her teens.

On Chapel Sands, Cumming’s moving homage to her mother’s achievement,  and the work of child who is now herself a mother seeking to understand her own mother as the child she once was.

Snapshots of her mother as a little girl at play reveal truths not only about the subject but also about the photographer, her father George. Loath to be photographed himself, he loved taking pictures of his daughter, and the story emerges out of his own efforts to destroy himself.

The image of his wife Veda, at home before the first world war, in a scene and after Betty’s arrival, George seems to lose interest in photographing his wife another telling absence.

 Who was the kidnapper Veda had been there that day with Betty and the beach had not been crowded. The sands were flat  and with struggle or violence, Veda would have heard it, and the emergence of a sinister stranger.

On Chapel Sands  a picture of forgotten England, isolated village communities still rooted in the old agricultural ways, centred upon church, the pub and the local gentry household.

George a mysterious domineering father and Veda the panicked mother on the beach both carry secrets of their own that remain intact.

 

On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons by Laura Cumming, Chatto & Windus  £16.99, 320 pages