On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  On the beach, occasionally, were some sinister figures called the Caprons who lived beyond the village precincts and were more than once referred to in the press. ‘Their voices come back to me; they spoke “posh”, she in particular, very high and rapid. They were regarded with suspicion, reputedly (hushed whispering) spies for the Germans in the First World War, sending lantern signals from the coast out to sea.’ They seem archetypes straight out of Miss Marple, and are mentioned in connection with the Hindenburg. When that dark Zeppelin crossed the coastline at Chapel in 1936, people at the Vine were able to read the tiny German words on the side of the massive grey balloon. One witness said that it loomed larger than the whole of Chapel; another that the figures looking down from the windows were clearly spies. Were the Caprons signalling up from the beach?

  Veda and George wanted Betty to play the piano. Not having one of their own, they took her to practise on the old upright belonging to a church friend and neighbour called Mrs Simpson. The idea was that Betty should keep the music in her head, returning home to repeat whatever she had just played on a paper keyboard drawn by George. The minor keys were blacked in with graphite; he made a cardboard chess board the same way that survived into my own childhood. I have the stub of pencil I believe he might have used. Our house in Edinburgh was full of pencils, sharpened to perfection by my father. But this one was not Faber or Staedtler or any brand name I had ever heard of, and was of a finer bore altogether: a thin wooden tube, carved with a blade and narrowing to a long bayonet of black lead. A century old, and so worn down with work there is scarcely an inch of it left.

  If only there were photographs of George’s other indoor creations, legendary to me through my mother’s telling: the miniature replica he made of their own home, complete with one-inch balconies and cutlery soldered out of hairpins. The toy theatre with changeable scenery and gliding velvet curtains that he fitted with footlights in four different colours: white for daylight, yellow for gaslight, green for storms, red for sunset and the Great Fire of London. In the birthday memoir, she eulogises these wondrous creations with a gratitude I find intensely moving, remembering every good thing that she can, a measure of her grace. For this generosity towards her very soon ceased and she doesn’t quite understand why it was shown in the first place. ‘Perhaps it is possible George made so much of me when I was very young because he had no other family.’ Might it not have been because he loved her?

  Nobody ever used that word in their house. This is easy to imagine from the clipped speech of English films in that ‘low, dishonest decade’, as W. H. Auden called the 1930s. My mother remembers the laconic briskness of household communications. Fetch the coal, sit up straight, close the curtains, for heaven’s sake oil your machine (George’s name, ever the engineer, for his daughter’s bicycle). Off to the work then, back on Friday. Best wishes written in block caps on her birthday card. Veda spoke in very short phrases, when she did speak. Keep yourself to yourself, George’s terse refrain. Nobody was expansive, nobody ventured much into dialogue.

  My mother, when she met my Scottish father, felt the immense relief of his talking. He was conversational with all, zany in his humour, precise in his eloquence. Tongue-tied even then, she could at last stop worrying about what to say because he would now do the job. She did not really learn to speak, she once confided, until she was nearly forty.

  My own childhood memories tell the opposite: that she always had the words, that she could talk to anyone. I distinctly remember sitting on her knee at the age of two or three, down from bed, unable to sleep during one of my parents’ parties. She is wearing a dress of sky-blue wool, white stockings and green shoes. Round her neck is a long silver necklace set with turquoises that one of her friends has sent from Tehran. I am aware, somehow, of the elegance of these slender knees – elegant still, in old age – and the aura of Chanel No. 5 which my father has saved up to buy her. She still treasures this bottle, fifty years later, with its dying scent of what we imagined to be Paris in the 1930s. I am jingling the fragile bells on this necklace, and she is somehow managing to talk over the top of my head, and this noise, to half a dozen artists laughing in a blue haze of postprandial smoke. She will be giving everything she has to this double act, comforting me, while putting them at their ease, always torn between home and the outside world.

  My mother, on the other hand, has no memories from her first three years, only a vague impression of warm strawberry jam. I used to find this astonishing: how could she have no recall of life’s opening gambit? Teenagers, with so little living to remember, are especially impatient of such adult lapses. But when I look back on my own beginnings, I have only a few entirely independent memories: of being in my pram as it was knocked over, watching the sky wheeling over and landing in the soft brown soil of a flower bed that ran along the side of our Edinburgh house; no pain, only the thrill of seeing the world turned upside down. Of the day my brother cut his foot on a cigar tin someone had dropped in a paddling pool: the gashing gold metal, blood blossoming through the shallow water, the long retiring silence before his scream. He and I shared a bedroom with wallpaper of dolls from around the world – an Eskimo, a Cossack, an American Indian, with a disappointing juncture when the pattern repeated, as if there were no more nationalities – but perhaps his recollections help confirm it. Everything else is surely sustained by anecdote, family lore, the evidence of documents and snapshots. And perhaps experience develops into memory like a photograph, its latent imprint invisible to us until gradually fixed by conversation.

  One childhood theory argues that our early recollections are entirely constructed through speech. We don’t really remember events, only what is said about them. Everything that happens exists only in the remotest subconscious. This does not take account of the pictures streaming back and forth through our heads, suddenly slowing, momentarily fixed, or surfacing again through our dreams. But certainly Betty had nobody to reminisce with about her first three years, nobody to recount the events of the day, to answer questions, to establish or repeat anything. Nobody in her house had seen Grace’s first steps or heard her first words; there were no pictures of picnics, paddling pools or birthday parties and no explanation of why this should be. If Betty ever asked any questions, no answers were given. There was just a baffling white gap.

  To accompany the birthday memoir, my mother drew portraits of the people she saw. They are tiny vignettes, little figures surrounded by space as if briefly glimpsed or just returning from memory. Some are in pencil, others watercolour. Bert Parrish came onto the page very readily. ‘I found each detail of his appearance returning quite clearly as I worked: the flat cap, greasy topped from pressing against the cows’ flanks at milking time; dirty flannel shirt worn collarless and with flapping cuffs undone; black waistcoat; no buttons; the perpetual cigarette stub in the greenish-pale face, the smoke forever drifting up into narrowed eyes.’

  Polly Graves had to be in black and white. ‘The contrast between that white face and the worried eyebrows over the small black eyes, the dull hair scraped across a rather high forehead, kirby-gripped without a thought of appearance: it all became clear to my inner eye. She was so resurrected in my thoughts it hardly mattered that fifty years had passed, everything came back, even the hunched shoulders and the high querulous voice always delivering bad news.’

  These little sketches are archetypal, emblematic. They are not based on photographs; my mother had none to support, or to falsify, her memories. Even now, these people still live in her mind’s eye. Her childhood always had the character of myth or fable to me; the butcher, the baker, the bell-ringer and gravedigger: these were the legends of Chapel St Leonards. When I recently came across a book of period photographs, compiled by a local historian, I was amazed to find these people were actually real, and amazed again by my mother’s accuracy. My favourite was the village draper, so tall, thin and pale. Her name was Lily Boddice, significant of both her white face and the undergarments she sold. She was to be see
n, invariably, with her hands flexed upon the counter in an attitude of tense rebuttal.

  Lily Boddice’s little shop was uninviting, colourless as herself. She was always ‘in the back’ – some sort of kitchen, making onion-smelling dinners, and would come hurrying through when the shop bell signalled a customer. Her brownish-grey hair was in looped curtain shapes over her face, finishing up as coiled and plaited earphones. Her sallow skin, blank eyes and small unmoving mouth are perfectly clear in my memory. There she would stand, waiting for me to make some request. I was precocious about wool as a child and yet embarrassed to ask this unresponsive woman for some way-out new kind of yarn, poodle being one such novelty. The answer was always No.

  These drawings are true to the memory of my mother’s youth in Chapel, which she escaped as soon as she could. Looking at them now I see that they are drawings of villagers as viewed by a child – people seen, but not yet understood. I found a school photograph of Lily Boddice from 1922 which does show an anxious white-faced teenager towering above the other pupils. The photographic face seemed to come as living corroboration of the portrait. But Lily is not her face, nor her appearance, any more than the rest of us. When the Second World War came to Chapel, it brought servicemen to the Lincolnshire coast. Lily met one of them and quite suddenly gave up the miserable drapery for married happiness. There is the split-second image; and there is the reality of the whole long life.

  Lily Boddice, Bert Parrish, Polly Graves – they all knew about the kidnap, knew far more about Betty’s story than she did. So did Mrs Simpson, who owned the piano, and whom I would meet fifty years later in a journey back to Chapel to try and find out about my mother’s past. Everything that happened to her depended on the complicity of these villagers, upon their willingness to keep silent for decades, in some cases right up until death. Neither Mrs Simpson nor anybody else would tell us a thing. Even though George and Veda and almost everyone involved had long since died, and Mrs Simpson had more knowledge than practically anybody else, she insisted on keeping their secrets.

  4

  The Baker’s Daughter

  There was a story my mother and I read together many times when I was a child. She even painted a watercolour, years later, to commemorate our mutual fascination. It came from an anthology called The Golden Land, which seemed to us a perfect description of the paradise in which it was set, for although the tale had a severe moral, it took place in a seductive America of sunny sidewalks, soda fountains and towering pineapple sundaes.

  This story told of a small-town baker somewhere out in the Midwest who was famous for his glazed crullers, whatever they might be, but principally for the spectacular artistry of his birthday cakes. Apricot with sugar doves, pistachio with lemon twirls, chocolate with cream and rose layers: these exotic objects glowed in my imagination far away in cold Edinburgh. I never wanted to eat them, only to see them; and eventually I did, not in a bakery but in a museum of modern art, through the works of the American painter Wayne Thiebaud. His radiant cakes with their gleaming cherries and luminous icing, the paint as rich as cream, speak of past joys and the happiness to come in simply looking at ordinary objects, in this case the circular perfection of cakes. These were proper fifties cakes, too, just like the ones in the story, presented on stands in shop windows and in chiller cabinets lit with a misty blue air of nostalgia, as if these confections were already passing out of this world.

  The baker in the story had a beautiful blonde daughter who wore flouncy dresses, gold bracelets and a ring with real gemstones. She would stroll proudly up and down the sidewalk sucking her beads while all the other girls sighed with envy. The next best thing to being this princess, they thought, would surely be to walk up and down with her, burnished in reflected glory.

  One child eventually achieves this dubious promotion. She is called Carmelita Miggs and she owns a pair of bronze shoes, which may be one reason why the baker’s daughter condescends to be seen with her, and even to attend her birthday party. The baker promises to make a special cake for the occasion; but his daughter has her eye on the one in the window, a magnificent creation, famous all over town, which he always refuses to sell. While he is downstairs putting the finishing touches on a less distinguished effort, she steals this trophy and takes it to Carmelita’s party, where everyone is duly overwhelmed. The party games over, the ice cream eaten, it is finally time for the cake. But the birthday girl cannot get her knife through the stiff icing and neither can her mortified mother. They push harder and harder until suddenly the cake overturns – and is revealed to be nothing but an iced cardboard shell. The baker’s daughter retreats in shame at what has proved to be no more than window dressing. Carmelita’s party is over.

  My mother’s watercolour shows the difference between our two interpretations of ‘The Baker’s Daughter’. For me, this is a tale of foolish hopes and false promise; the golden girl is not what she seems, any more than the cake or the supposed friendship. I felt this most keenly in miserabilist adolescence, when the cardboard cake represented relationships and boys and quite probably life itself. I would have illustrated the story with the revelation of the sham cake – the drama of its hollow interior. But for my mother, the story centres entirely on Carmelita Miggs and all the other girls who want to be the baker’s daughter, and crowd around her in the painting. The cake (although enviable too) is a complete irrelevance. This is a tale of yearning.

  The birthday memoir brims with yearning. My mother longs to escape the house, the garden, the village of Chapel St Leonards. She longs for the slightest hill in the long flat roads of her bicycling youth, or for the chance to catch a two-carriage train from the tiny local station, even just one stop to the next. At the age of ten, she still hasn’t travelled further than the seven miles to Skegness. Allowed to go there once to visit a schoolmate named Anne Scupholm whose parents were veritable potato magnates, in Lincolnshire terms, she was amazed by the dining table, the soup tureen, the enamel bath in its own special room. When they went to the beach, Anne wore coral-coloured bathing shoes to protect her dainty feet (from what, I grimly wonder, for Skegness beach is all sand). My mother longed for such footwear.

  Anne Scupholm is a name as familiar to me as Carmelita Miggs from childhood onwards; Anne and her wretched rubber sandals. I am immune to their charm, inoculated by defensiveness on my mother’s behalf, but also, perhaps, by a kind of sad dismay that she still remembers those shoes.

  Was her longing inevitable, the natural consequence of making do and shutting up, of confinement at home, dreams of escape and the Elstons’ necessarily frugal ethic? Or was it in some sense innate, her very own trait? I prefer to think it was circumstantial, and aggravated moreover by the only relatives she seemed to have known as a child, a family known to everybody in Chapel in fact: the upper-crust Greens.

  Captain Hugh Green was the uncle who let 1 St Leonard’s Villas to George. Mrs Green was Veda’s sister Hilda, younger by almost a decade. Their own vast house stood on the raised bank by the sea’s edge. It had a colonial veranda, tiled hall, library and billiards room, as well as the village’s only private telephone and generator. This was the mansion from the Cluedo floor plan to me, and the Greens were toffs from Agatha Christie.

  In a landscape so flat, a view of the sea might seem commonplace: every villager’s right. But scarcely anyone – the Elstons included – could see the waves from their windows behind the sandy embankment. A sea view at Chapel was, and remains, expensive, available only from a private road that runs up and along a fortified stretch of the ridge.

  Walking humbly past with my mother on the road to the village from our lower lying house, I would gaze up at my uncle’s mansion, called with some elan The Beacon. He had his own tennis court. When I was old enough, some vague invitation was issued to go and play. But when my friend Pat and I had the courage to turn up, it was made mortifyingly clear that we were rather a nuisance, that the court had not yet been marked out with the white roller that day. We were in awe,
too, of the one car in our narrow world, which of course belonged to the Captain. Bicycles were the only wheeled transport in Chapel in the Thirties. It was a suave polished Humber with a curved boot lid, in which I never once rode. As a young nobody I knew my place, and was slowly becoming aware of the resentments between Veda and Hilda.

  A period guidebook to Chapel makes a feature of this gleaming vehicle, pictured in a suitably empty landscape in all its unrivalled glory.

  Veda and Hilda were two of nine children born to John and Rebecca Crawford. Three died young, including the baby before Hilda, who was also named Hilda. Some were born in the nearby village of Hogsthorpe, where John Crawford sold ‘cattle and victuals’, according to the 1881 census; the others were born in Chapel, where the Crawfords managed the Vine until his death at the age of forty-six. A photograph from 1892 of Rebecca in funeral clothes shows her holding John’s photograph, the shadow of one person’s life within that of another, memento inside memento. Veda was her first child, patient and gentle. Hilda was her last, and supposedly the luckiest, with the great good fortune to marry Captain Green. Outwardly respected in Chapel, he was privately regarded as an impossible snob, not least because he never relinquished his officer title. For all his military bearing and matching toothbrush moustache, Green had achieved this rank merely through desk duty in the Indian army, whereas other villagers had seen active service in the trenches of the First World War. A white marble cross outside the church lists the glorious dead of that war and the next. Thirty-seven men died from this hamlet alone. It is well said that no British village was untouched.