On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  This is almost the only way that I can think, in fact. And I have thought of this day on Chapel Sands all these years, trying to imagine who took Betty – ‘presumed stolen’ is the police phrase – and how it could have happened, to gauge the force of it, the effect on her and on everyone involved. I picture Veda, bewildered, afraid, inexperienced, not long in charge of this child who is suddenly lost, perhaps never in charge of her again on the sands; George, trying to control the situation at a distance, rushing home to take charge; Betty, an inkling in blue, moving about the beach in the last of the light, and then gone. The more I have discovered, the more I realise that there was a life before the kidnap, and a life afterwards, and they were not the same for anyone.

  2

  The House

  The character of Lincolnshire as it meets the sea is level and low, a great plane of clay-ploughed fields and bare-branched willows that spreads into the distance like a Dutch winter landscape. Every modest haystack and spire seems a mile high as you pass beneath the wheeling arc of bright sky. In the north, the land is reclaimed from the sea; in the south, the fens give way to briny marshes. The flattest of all English counties, Lincolnshire is also the least altered by time, or mankind, and still appears nearly medieval in its ancient maze of dykes and paths. It faces the Netherlands across the water and on a tranquil day it sometimes feels as if you could walk straight across to the rival flatness of Holland.

  Chapel, at the time of the kidnap, was a hamlet of some three hundred souls, mostly living in red-brick farm cottages before the advent of electricity or cars, when paraffin lamps lit the dim windows at night and potatoes were still lugged to market on carts. A few dozen houses, three shops, a church dwarfed by a large vicarage: the whole community was arranged along a narrow strip between the brown farmland and the sandy shore. But Betty lived some way outside this huddle in the first of four terraced houses built in 1918 by an uncle (rich) and humbly rented by her grateful parents (poor) at what may have been a charitable rate, given George’s modest salary. I have seen this terrace in old photographs, marooned in the outlying fields like a folly. Each house had an attic and a false balcony on the first floor, as if its occupants were likely to step out in evening dress to admire the view. Even the name, St Leonard’s Villas, feels too grandiose for such a rural spot, rather like its architect, Uncle Hugh, who had made his fortune during the Raj. But the interiors were much the same as every other two-up two-down of the time: a pair of cramped bedrooms, an outside privy and a mothballed parlour too expensive to heat, working families living in the kitchen instead.

  George and Veda were forty-nine years old when Betty entered their life. Victorian children, Edwardian newly-weds, they had been married for more than two decades. As late as 1929, there was an antique atmosphere to their home, even though it was comparatively new. They shared one dark bedroom, into which an iron cot was now placed; the other, painted in mauve and black distemper, was occupied by Veda’s elderly mother Rebecca, otherwise known as Granny Crawford. She at least knew something about small children, having raised six of her own.

  Into this gloom came a little blue-eyed child from the present, laughing and smiling and enlivening their days. I know her from the family album. My mother and I used to turn the pages together when I too was a child, marvelling at the black-and-white lives condensed in these diminutive images. Betty cradles a stuffed rabbit, plays at laundry with a washboard and a cake of carbolic, beams back at her father George. His camera works best outdoors, where the light is not so hard to control. So here she is bathing her doll by the outside privy, standing among spring tulips, trying out her new fairy bicycle in a photograph exactly as small as it appears on this page.

  There is no obvious sorrow, at least not yet. Who could afford to photograph long faces on a salesman’s salary? Betty at three always looks as buoyant as a skylark through the lens of George’s Box Brownie. And there is so much for his new little child to play with: an aviary for songbirds in the garden, built by George; a ball attached to a length of elastic for her to bash with a bat; a miniature washing line for the doll’s garments. Life is sunlit out there in the garden. The camera requires it, but so does George. My mother recalls his abrupt orders to turn to the light, pose this way or that, stand still, keep smiling, show her hands. ‘The photographer’s tyranny,’ as she has written. The older she gets in these photographs, the more the effort to obey becomes visible in the strained fixity of her expression. I see what she remembers.

  Because you have asked me, dear daughter, here are my earliest recollections. It is an English domestic genre canvas of the 20s and 30s, layered over with decades of fading and darkening, but your curiosity has begun to make all glow a little. And perhaps a few figures and events may turn out to be restored through the telling. Straightaway, however, there is a dilemma; for without invention I can say nothing about the first three years. They leave no imprint on my conscious memory.

  For my twenty-first birthday, my mother gave me the gift I most wanted: the tale of her early life. This memoir is short, ending with her teenage years, but its writing carries so much of her grace, her truthful eloquence and witness, her artist’s way of looking at the world. She was fifty-six when she sat down to write and still knew nothing about the kidnap, or her existence before it, except that she had been born in a mill house in 1926; or rather, as it seemed to her, that some other baby had arrived there. ‘I am Betty, she was Grace; she was not the real me.’ She imagines this stranger’s advent in the summer’s heat, ‘in a room probably made even hotter by the bread-baking, for milling and making went together in those days, and on the wall, huge shadows turning and returning as the mill sails glide round the huge Lincolnshire sky outside. But of course nothing of this seems ever to have happened, and instead I go back only to St Leonard’s Villas, and the one name and person I know, which is three-year-old Betty.’

  She and I used to make up stories to fill those empty years. Because she was fair, as am I, we imagined a Viking heritage, with visions of the open water between Lincolnshire and Norway. Unafraid of the sea, a fine swimmer, she must be a Scandinavian child who had somehow fetched up on an English shore. Or perhaps she had origins in Holland; didn’t we love tulips, cheese and Vermeer, whose silent girls, with their absorbing letters and their pearls, she gave me as postcard distractions during a bout of mumps at eight? This version became especially popular after our only trip abroad as a family, when a Dutch patron invited my father to Amsterdam. We saw the ingenious dykes and polders, just like their Lincolnshire equivalents; visited, and ate, Edam and Gouda and returned home with golden-brown memories of Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum. Rembrandt, who is said to have made the reverse journey to Lincolnshire in the 1650s, taking a quick ship across the North Sea to escape personal chaos, and make some money painting ‘sea-faring men’s pictures’. So says the antiquary George Vertue, and nobody has ever been able to disprove him.

  The smiling child of the family album had a different life indoors. Until the age of five, she slept in her parents’ crepuscular bedroom. ‘My first recollection: the dread hour of bedtime, the dark and sleepless solitude. Whole nights seemed to be spent restlessly awake, listening to their downstairs voices, and falling asleep only when they came up and I was safe. One night I vividly recall being held up to the window, seeing nothing but fearful blackness, while the house shook to the sound of a terrifying rumble. The word earthquake entered my language.’

  Betty was four when the Dogger Bank earthquake shook England, and chimneys, walls and spires collapsed all across the country. But a stronger memory by far, from this age, is of an incident concerning her grandmother.

  Granny Crawford is in floor length black frocks, a quiet pale face beneath white hair with severe centre parting coiled at the back. Very deaf, frail, and alarmingly given to nose-bleeds, she was a great irritation to my father. One day during a meal, he shouted angrily at her for incorrectly holding her knife and fork. I had never before witnessed such ill-tem
per, so unjust; and I can feel now the moment of stunned terror between grandmother, mother and I, as this abuse shook the very plates it seemed; and little grandmother sat stock still, looking down with folded hands. In subsequent years I was to hear the same anger often directed against mother and myself, and I must truthfully say that I never forgave him any of it. Probably because of that first time, when straight away I saw the indefensible docility of the old lady attacked on so trivial a matter by his great sledgehammer of rage, I began to turn resentfully silent – this being the only weapon I could muster. Fortunately it was the acceptable characteristic: little children should be seen and not heard being THE great maxim.

  Granny Crawford died at the age of eighty-five, just after Betty’s fifth birthday. Veda dreamed that her mother was moving around the bedroom in an upright coffin, gently reassuring everyone that she was happy. This transfiguration was a gift to poor bereaved Veda, the vacated room Betty’s inheritance. But it was full of the ghost of the departed. She became newly fearful.

  Sometimes a night-light burned in a saucer beside my bed, but I spent anxious hours watching in case it went out, and of course the matches were not in my care. A later treasure was my first bed-side lamp, made by George, with an opaque glass globe hand-painted with a bright spray of forget-me-nots. It delighted me with the sophistication of its on–off button and I think gave a very dim light, not enough to read by; and in any case one did not dare overstrain the battery, for then would come a night of total darkness.

  My mother once read the birthday memoir to my twelve-year-old twin daughters, who were incredulous that she could not sleep for watching the light, or use the lamp in case it drained the battery. Living in a London that is never dark, they have no idea of night’s obliterating blackness in the middle of nowhere in the days before electricity; and, mercifully, no experience of a home in which you could not call for help. My mother sweetly laughed, but I wonder if she really found this funny or simply treasured their innocence.

  The one happy night was Christmas Eve, when Betty was allowed to stay up to fill the pastry cases with dark spicy mincemeat. Then it was upstairs for the ceremony of pinning up a pillowcase.

  This brought the sleep-defying turbulence felt by all children trying so hard to give Father Christmas the conditions he seems to require: he won’t come unless you go to sleep. At last, opening one’s eyes to Christmas Day, looking unbelievably to see that it has magically happened, and bulky shapes are pushing out last night’s empty bag. Strangely enough I cannot summon up what those things were, except for the sublime and the ridiculous – a pink sugar mouse and a Bible. This latter, brown leather, was pronounced over solemnly by my father: ‘This is the greatest gift you will ever receive.’ I felt the gravity stopping my breath. But the greatest gift was a terrible disappointment, with its hundreds of very thin pages, its thousands of baffling words in the tiniest print, incomprehensible except for a few well loved stories, so that I looked only at the pictures – sepia photographs of the Holy Land, disappointingly stony and bare, with the occasional glum shepherd. It was my least favourite book.

  On Christmas Day there were never any other family or children, only two elderly friends.

  Kate and Tom Stevenson were (I think) a married couple, though they could have been brother and sister, so alike in shortness, stoutness, redness of face and hugeness of appetite. Tom always fell asleep in the afternoon, cigarette in mouth and the ash dropping on to his waistcoat. One had to be subdued for hours in deference to the grown-up needs for digestive recovery, and then later in the evening out would come the carving knife again and everyone would say how much nicer turkey was cold. This went on year after year, Tom’s white walrus moustache growing more nicotined as he became more adept at smoking whole cigarettes without once holding them in his hands. He suffered dreadful coughs and breathlessness and at last came a Christmas without him any more. He left his fascinating pocket-barometer to my mother. Kate once gave me a whole pound-note for neatly cutting the grass on his grave.

  The barometer sits before me now, a sturdy brass prophet for the hand, able to predict the future simply by configuring wind direction, season and barometric pressure. Its fragile needle runs from miserable to fair, although for Betty it always seemed to be blowing and dull. In curlicues on the white dial is the name of its maker, J. Newton, cousin to the great physicist Sir Isaac, whose gravity-confirming apple fell in a Lincolnshire orchard not twenty miles from St Leonard’s Villas, though Betty never heard anything about him. This circular relic lies in a saucer that also came from Chapel, last of a Willow pattern service permanently shelved in the parlour. Once, and only once, Betty persuaded Veda to serve Christmas dinner on these dishes with their blue-and-white pictures. ‘We took them all very carefully down and washed off the dust of ages, and she felt scandalised to be committing this sacrilege, though giving way to my pronouncement that such lovely things were meant to be used.’

  Veda never played with Betty. It is an abiding sadness in the memoir, which my mother explains to herself as the result of all the oppressive housework required before electricity and hot water. She remembers much beating of carpets and shovelling of ashes, the salting of mutton to keep it from rotting, the soaking of cucumber slices in dishes of vinegar to make them marginally more luxurious. Perhaps Veda was worn out by her chores, but I wonder if she was also unaccustomed to small children, shy, uncertain, possibly undermined by the kidnap. She had some help in the person of a tiny villager named Lizzie Cornell, who came every Thursday to thump the clothes and turn the mangle. ‘I see her now up to the elbows in a huge tub of suds, going in and out to the washing line with a mouthful of wooden pegs. She was Veda’s great companion and our chief recording angel, bearer of village news.’ A black-clad widow of several decades, Lizzie was not very much younger than Granny Crawford, whose husband had died, leaving her with those six small children, before she was forty. Both of these wise women, bitterly experienced, must surely have known something about Betty’s past before St Leonard’s Villas.

  Chapel news seemed outlandish and rare because she never went there. Around the age of five, Betty started to become aware of the oppressive confines of her existence. She was not allowed to play with village children, or to travel the half-mile to that mecca of forbidden shops. She was only allowed to go to church with Veda; or to the beach with George, who was morose on the sands, denouncing the winds in winter and the feckless sun-seekers in summer. Other than the Stevensons at Christmas, and Lizzie on Thursdays, there were no other visitors to the house. Betty must stay inside the garden, behind a hedge as high (in my mind) as the forest in ‘Rapunzel’; or remain glumly indoors with Veda. Naturally, with hindsight, this must have had something to do with the kidnap; and it may be that Betty had been too young to notice the extreme protectiveness before. But for her it was a cruel imprisonment, and her jailer was the fiercely strict and possessive George. In all the childhood tales that she told, I scarcely heard his name once. He left no letters, diaries or documents through which he could speak for himself, and my mother mainly seemed to mourn the disappearance of a toy theatre and a miniature house he made for her that held better memories of those days when they still knew one another. I had no idea that he fought in the Boer War, was a medalled veteran and a draughtsman of distinction, receiving an award during his time in the army; a possible career that was mysteriously derailed. I only knew that George was angry, bronchitic, dictatorial; and that he was a liar.

  Once, my mother took me out of school to see the paintings of Edouard Vuillard, then on show in Edinburgh. We were enthralled by this master of the muffled interior, of unspoken emotions in Parisian apartments, particularly his scenes of the lamplit flat in Rue Truffaut where Vuillard lived and worked with his seamstress mother for sixty years, hemmed in among the cushions, patterned walls and bales of billowing cloth. One painting instantly stirred memories of her own childhood. It is Interior: Mother and Sister of the Artist. There is the characteristic sen
se of time arrested and the world excluded in Vuillard’s art, of life reduced to an airless room. The old woman sits like Picasso’s Gertrude Stein, hands to splayed knees and quite composed. She at least has some independence. But the girl seems to be tangled in the wallpaper unnoticed, a pale spectre struggling to free herself from – or is it to hide within? – its camouflage. Even the picture appears to be trapping her: she has to bow her head to fit inside the frame.

  This was how it felt to my mother, indoors with Veda among the dark oak furniture and the stifling atmosphere. As the years passed, and George became increasingly tense and bad-tempered, his Friday-night return from work only tightened the ratchet. The curtains in their house were always drawn before dusk. The walls of domesticity closed in.

  There were no pictures in Betty’s house. Writers nearly always seem to have at least one book, but artists so often come from bare walls, from an imageless home where paintings are seen for the first time only in churches or galleries. It is the commonest thing to have grown up with no art at all and still become an artist, as happened to both my mother and father. After all, sight has primacy; the whole visible world is contained in our eyes.

  Instead she pored over the half-inch snapshots of the Holy Land printed on the stamps for her Sunday school attendance book and at the blue bridges crossed by fleeing Chinese lovers on the Willow pattern plates. She wondered at the scarlet thistles, so unnatural, on the packet of Isdale’s eponymous carbolic soap and at the label on the Camp Coffee and Chicory Essence bottle that shows a Gordon Highlander being served a cup of this ersatz stuff by a Sikh soldier who has the very same bottle on his tray, so that the picture within a picture could in theory continue forever.