On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  When we went to Amsterdam, we were both amazed to see the shops and houses densely tiled with blue-and-white images of the world in every degree from the widest landscape to the smallest daisy, from the windmill to the fiddler, the ice skate and the butter pat. My mother rejoiced in this: no Dutch child could have grown up without these modest wall-to-wall depictions.

  Pictures hold thoughts, ideas and memories like the pockets of a coat. Our sense of other people’s lives, as they describe them, or we read about them, often coalesce in the mind’s eye this way. So when I think of Chapel St Leonards in the 1930s, and the Elstons’ lives there, it is partly through my mother’s words but also through the work of an English artist of that period, Eric Ravilious. I picture the kettle singing on its hearth at Number 1 exactly like this:

  Heavy to lift, its handle too hot to hold except wrapped in a cloth, the great vessel builds to its projectile steam. Ravilious moves it to the side of the flames, otherwise it might whistle all day. This will do perfectly for Veda’s kitchen, this emblematic object, ready for washing-up water and steady cups of tea. Put the kettle on: the unspoken caption. And when it’s taken off, thick encrustations of soot will have to be scraped from its sides and the iron polished all over again, another of her Sisyphean duties.

  The kettle comes from Ravilious’s graphic alphabet, designed for Wedgwood in 1936, when my mother was ten. It is a fantastical lexicon, from the eerie D for diver down among the fishes to the N for a new moon bright as an eye at midnight. These tiny images ran around the mugs from which my brother and I drank tea as children decades later and they still spell out Chapel to me. Here is the flat fish with its glinting scales, caught on Chapel beach; the eggs, snug in their Lincolnshire nest. Here is a geranium leaf from the pots in Veda’s garden and flowers picked from the hedgerows for her spotted jug. The box of matches is half open, revealing its blue-tipped contents, an object shaking its familiar music in George’s pocket as he walks home with a cigarette on Fridays. A quince dangles from a branch, ready to be plucked for Lizzie Cornell’s jelly. Y and Z, separated by a brief sand-coloured strip, show a yacht on the sea at Chapel and the German Zeppelin my mother saw above the church steeple one night: ‘a huge dark shape, no wings or propellers, just a slow looming body as unbelievable as if the moon itself had descended’.

  The alphabet could also be seen as a self-portrait. It shows what Ravilious loved: the secret door in the kitchen-garden wall, the scrubbed table bearing a fresh new loaf for tea, the rolling Wiltshire hills with pictures of horses cut into the chalk. It looks at first like the enchanted world of childhood. But there is an enigmatic singularity to every image. His pictures ask you to pay attention to ordinary beauty, to look at the overlooked once more, and they chime with our folk knowledge of blue-and-white china, cold linoleum, the hoed rows of vegetable gardens, the beach hut and the twisting weathervane: Chapel St Leonards, for me.

  My mother first saw the works of Ravilious when she got away to college and passed through the looking glass into the land of art. She has exactly his attentiveness. And we have looked at his work so often together and found in it the picture of our lives. In Edinburgh, where I grew up, we would go to the botanical gardens every Sunday, loving the regimental drills of pansies that came up bright even in winter, peering into the glass houses where the gardeners raised the new plants. Ravilious’s Greenhouse revives the recollections every time, and seems to carry in itself the atmosphere of memory. Everything is in perfect order, and yet there is no sign of a gardener, unless perhaps divine? Door opens on to door on to door. The perspective is pristine, the painting so clear, light and symmetrical in both form and content, the white paper burning through the foliage like sunshine. It is the greenhouse from paradise.

  Ravilious has been criticised for the joyousness of his art, as if he ought to find more anguish in life, especially with the approach of the Second World War. But there is mystery in that joy, a kind of surprise that the plain, scrubbed world could be quite so beautiful. When the war came, he served as both pilot and official war artist, posted to missions off the coast of Iceland. In his Arctic watercolours, magnificent white light ricochets across shivering waters beneath a sky streaked with silvery vapour trails and planes. On an autumn day in 1942, he himself went up in one of those aircraft and vanished, his fate another disappearance at sea. He was not yet forty; the lost genius of British art.

  When Betty finally reached school age, George could contain his growing daughter no longer. But he sent her only as far as the house next door, to a little dame school run by a neighbour. There were ten pupils at Miss Turney’s establishment, most of them arriving through fields and lanes from outlying farms on bicycles. Whereas Betty merely went down one front path and up the next into an identical parlour on the other side of the wall.

  ‘At Miss Turney’s we sat jammed up all day in small desks poring over exercises with pens and ink, the sort of treatment that would be considered practically mental cruelty to infants these days. One afternoon the whole school was kept in detention while she waited for somebody to admit to drawing on the wall. Nobody said anything and minute after minute passed, until eventually the silent tension produced a false confession from me, simply so that I could escape the cramped classroom.’ Excoriated by Miss Turney, Betty was punished all over again at home, quite unjustly, for telling lies. Only much later did it dawn upon her that she really had been the culprit after all, inadvertently scraping the wall, pen in hand, as she raised the lid of her desk in that narrow parlour.

  The roots of claustrophobia began to grow.

  Among the other pupils next door were the two daughters of Bert Parrish, who ran a dairy on the other side of the road. George photographed Mary and Esther with Betty in the garden, all three got up in St Trinian’s gymslips and panama hats. She would never forget these girls, the first friends she was ever allowed to have, tolerated for playing schools or hospitals as long as they stayed clearly in Veda’s sight and did not try to entice her across the road. Their image is almost invisible now: two gangly girls of seven and nine in a couple of inches of blanched sepia. Their shadows linger, just, but the real girls were gone in a moment. One afternoon, they came round asking for Betty and were told that she wouldn’t be playing with them that day, or ever again. She was forbidden to speak to them in the street or even in the parlour at Miss Turney’s. When another pupil, a cheerful little lad called Murray, came looking for her on his bike, Betty was only allowed to communicate with him through the tangled thicket of hedge.

  The Parrish photograph appears in the family album with a note about their friendship in my mother’s adult hand. Without her inscriptions, I would have no idea that the villagers sitting at a long table in a hazy orchard, like a summer gathering out of Chekhov, include the young George and Veda Elston in 1914. No idea that the apron Veda is wearing in 1935 was cross-stitched by nine-year-old Betty; that the new bicycle she is receiving for that year’s birthday is a gift from George, suspiciously given around the time that Mary and Esther were banned, with the promise of limited trips down the lane. She puts names to faces wherever she can, fishing people from the sea of oblivion, and even trying to identify the most baffling situations, as when four people are gathered ceremonially around a piece of driftwood on the shore. But there is one image that has no caption or comment, no date or explanation, and that is the one tucked inside the back cover of the album. I have sometimes wondered if it was meant to be hidden there.

  It shows George holding a child on the ridge at Chapel Sands. She can only be a couple of years old, dressed in what looks like a knitted frock with matching bloomers and her feet are probably bare, though they are not in the image. Nor are his, for his legs are tucked beneath him and he is trying hard to hold her close and still for the lens. She isn’t moving, although there is a slight blur about her face.

  Scene, pose, relationship: all are uncomfortable. His right hand clasps her tight; his left hand pinions hers on his leg. Her fingernails ar
e a trio of white dots. She is not paying attention to the camera, not looking at the photographer or relating to the man in whose grip she is held. You might say she looked depressed.

  George is in his Sunday best: good blazer, light trousers, silk bow tie. What colour? Not black, like his double-breasted blazer, perhaps dark crimson or navy. His panama hat lies carefully placed on the sand beside him. Its ribbon matches the blazer.

  Behind them a fraction of sea is visible. Before them is the photographer. Together they make a trio.

  But what kind of trio, and who is in charge? It may be that the child wants to wriggle away from the man, return to the photographer, or be free of them both to head off and play on the sands. She wants to be out of the picture.

  This photograph shows George with Grace. Her name is written on the back in another hand. She is not called Betty, and she has not yet come to live with the Elstons, an event that is still in the future. So how can they already have met, how can Grace be appearing with George now, and who is taking the shot? I have never yet known the strange circumstances in which this photograph came to be taken, and neither has my mother.

  3

  The Village

  Number 1 was generally held to be the best of St Leonard’s Villas because of the enclosed garden that ran down one side. ‘Its chief glory was a sycamore from whose massy branches hung a swing. This was at once a delight and a grief to me, for I loved the glimpses it gave of life over the top of the hedge, then hated their sudden loss.’

  My mother’s first proper painting was of this sycamore. It deserves this pole position in her fledgling career because everything that could be seen from the swing’s zenith became precious entertainment, and without that tree I too would have little sense of the world outside her home. She would watch Old Cade the farmer prodding two cows to pasture, his slow to and fro the measure of each country day; and trailing his sheep in the opposite direction a gaunt shepherd with a long white beard who looked like George Bernard Shaw. Occasionally she might spot Miss Button, in jodhpurs and long woollen socks, flat cap concealing her hair, riding by on a gigantic tricycle. Or Mr Short the gardener passing towards church in his melancholy capacity as bell-ringer for funerals, tolling the age of the deceased out across the fields around Chapel.

  The dairyman Bert Parrish, father of Esther and Mary, never walked an inch if he could ride his bicycle instead, driving his cows along with a defunct stub of cigarette between his lips.

  It was the general opinion that he was the laziest dairyman in the world, and how he ever made a living from the gallon or two of milk that resulted from his tired daily labours nobody knew. Esther and Mary went round neighbouring back doors with a milk-can and two ladles, pint and half-pint, to fill jugs and collect a few pence; while Mrs Parrish managed the dark and dubious dairy, not a cool white-washed chamber with bowls of cream and frothing sweet milk but somewhere one did not peer into closely. Bert spared the cows any inconvenience of hygiene; scrubbing and sterilising were too demanding of energy. Any time I caught a glimpse of either Bert or his wife indoors, they were at repose in a dim kitchen shiftlessly enjoying the ticking of the grandfather clock, spread slackly about on dilapidated armchairs. I have never liked milk ever since.

  As a child, Betty wondered if the Parrish girls were banned because of the state of their parents’ dairy. As a teenager, she thought it might be more to do with class, and a village pecking order so refined that a travelling salesman like George, no matter how unsuccessful, was a man of the world who rode trains compared to a herder of cattle. Later still, it dawned on her that the Parrishes must have presented some kind of threat to the Elstons, sufficient that they had to be blocked. It remained as baffling as the apartheid that put one end of Chapel and all its children out of bounds; or a strange shunning of the Elstons themselves. St Leonard’s Villas received its daily bread each morning by van. Betty would watch from the window as Harold Blanchard, the baker’s son, arrived with a large basket on his arm. He never looked back, and he never came up their path, delivering loaves to every other house in the terrace except Number 1.

  That I did not know the occupants of the other houses is some proof of the narrowness of life up until then, but even my all-powerful father could not put a wall around me forever. The fact is that I was ageing and must be allowed outside his sole jurisdiction. Veda began to take me down the lane on duty visits to Old Cade and his sister Mrs Butler. Cade was slowly dying, raked by bronchitic spasms which he ended with success by spitting into an empty Golden Syrup tin. He was deaf and gruff, his eyes like a weepy bloodhound, bony old hands clasped over a walking stick. Mrs Butler was no more alluring, black dressed and stuffed looking, with a few gray hairs skimped back to a bun no bigger than a marble – not a tooth left in her head and a mouth consequently sunk into a tiny round pucker, which made it impossible to understand a word she lisped.

  Veda’s other duties seemed no less alarming. She was a churchgoer, unlike George, and took her daughter the reluctant mile to St Leonard’s Church each Saturday to do the brasses and flowers. ‘I would carry the bag of stiff gray polishing rags and – well away from me – a bunch of daffodils with oozing stuck stems, or rank smelling marguerites alive with creeping black insects. She would lift the heavy vases and crucifix from the altar into the vestry, where we buffed the dull green film from the brass. I used to nose about in the musty cupboards, where the old vicar kept a chamber pot, and some vinegary communion wine, feeling death-shadowed.’

  I have been to that church, found Veda’s name in the old parish records, sat where she sat every Sunday beneath the high windows through which the sun’s rays angle down, making fireflies out of the dust motes. In the green grass outside are the headstones of Old Cade and his sister, and so many of the people in this story. Veda used to tend the village graves, replenishing the family flowers, while Betty drained the fetid water from the jam jars. The smell of decay horrified her and she longed to dance home, light-footed, to her doll; a child too much surrounded by age and death.

  Memories calcify over the years; everything grows more extreme – the brightness incandescent, the darkness infinitely worse. For my daughters, the birthday memoir is overwhelmingly concerned with hardship, isolation and horror. Everything is frightening or forbidden. But my sense is that this was my mother’s reality. She did not live with merry or demonstrative people; her parents were fearful of something unknown, something that was never mentioned or explained but which would one day cause a crisis in that very church. Their dread passed straight to her.

  At school, the teachers put her forward for a local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Betty as a fairy in gauzy green wings. A report in the local paper commends her performance and announces that Betty Elston, aged nine and already excelling in English, is the winner of a county-wide essay competition. Veda took her to collect the medal, and afterwards to tea at the Vine Hotel where Veda’s father had once been the innkeeper and she herself had grown up. In those days it was still a couthy establishment, serving the Midlands gentry who came for the fresh air and sea views available from the higher-priced rooms. George took his drinks at the Vine, and my mother once had a seasonal job there as a waitress. Every year, as Chapel metamorphosed from winter silence to summer noise, heat baked the beach and the Vine filled up with customers. The Elstons sometimes crammed in paying guests too, to make ends meet, Veda cooking hot dinners and mangling extra sheets through July and August. A box sat by the door for strangers to shake the sand from their feet.

  Once, somewhere, I glimpsed George’s order book before it disappeared from our home and recollection. Perhaps it was thick with sales; or perhaps not, for there never seems to have been any money. How he paid for the little dame school is an abiding enigma. There was the letting of rooms and the sporadic selling of vegetables; and Veda’s scrimping was an art in itself. But George surfaces in local newspapers trying to sell a crystal wireless, a chair and even his old overcoat.

  I can i
magine more, of course, from their early life together: the long childless decades, Veda’s loneliness as George departs each Monday (or is it relief, given his temper?), the tending of those vegetables and the cleaning of those paraffin lamps. And all of this went on for years and shadowy years before my mother arrived. Whereupon everything passes into living colour, for she remembers it, and writes it all down for me.

  Chapel had a tribal population, the recurring families extensive and intermarried. My mother loved to rhyme their Lincolnshire names:

  Hipkin and Harness, Capron and Stow

  Pimperton, Balding, Budabent, Crow.

  Ailsby and Lenton, Raynor and Kirk,

  Button and Boddice, Meadows and Sirk.

  ‘Mrs Ailsby was a gentle, sweet-faced woman with a teenage daughter called Annie. Her name sounded to me like an apple and to paint her would be to paint a truly apple-cheeked girl, fair curly hair and awesomely old at fourteen. One morning she was clearly upset and whispering to her equally grown-up friend. Her mother had drowned in the dyke outside their house, which also flowed widely past my own. It had happened the night before, but poor Annie was still sent off to school.’

  Some months later, the jovial butcher Mr Lenton was suddenly spoken about by Lizzie Cornell in hushed not-in-front-of-the-children tones. ‘Some dread thing called pneumonia had struck him down. I could hardly imagine it – out one afternoon delivering meat; 48 hours later, dead.’

  Lizzie, who had an exact recall for every one of the Chapel marriages and their outcomes, was friends with the gravedigger who had to bury these poor souls. His name, unbelievably, was Arthur Graves. He and his wife Polly lived in a cottage on that short sandy path between Betty’s house and the beach, so she encountered them many times. ‘Naturally their name was enough to make them fearful. They were always worried and ashen, two gate-leaners watching the world. Looking back, I think what life had they? He earning a pittance for his sad work, she never out of her long apron with scrubbing brush or hard at it in the cabbage patch of a garden. I suppose I had no awareness of the beauty of her cottage-garden flowers in those days, only the sense of anxiety.’