On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  Like many ex-officers, Captain Green stayed on, running a trading business in the Raj. Its legacy survives in our family even today. The Indian cotton sheets he brought back as a present for Veda in 1920 became my parents’ wedding linen thirty years later; they have lasted into the twenty-first century with only the slightest mending. My daughter has a seal carved from the tusk of an Indian elephant dead a century ago. A cabin trunk somehow came down to my mother. With its wooden hoops and striped Madras interior, it looks like a prop from A Passage to India. I had it as a student, and it held everything I owned for several years afterwards. Such are the vagaries of family memory that only now does it strike me that the initials HG painted on its side must have signified Captain Green.

  Unless of course the trunk belonged to Hugh Green, the Captain’s young son. The Greens had two children, Hugh and Rebe, older than Betty by eight and ten years respectively. Perhaps this was the luggage of a boarding-school boy, so rarely home that my mother doesn’t remember her big cousin at all. There was very little chance to get to know him, moreover, for his life was appallingly short. Hugh left school at eighteen and immediately volunteered for the navy in the Second World War. He was assigned to a fleet and sailed away to war; or so it was said. For a long time there was no news of him; and the months eventually turned to years without a single word or sighting. His is the final name at the foot of the Chapel church cross: Hugh Green – Navy. Another soul who went to sea and never came back.

  Captain Green was a restless man. He had barely returned to the Beacon before the view from the panoramic windows would lure him straight back overseas. I have inherited an album of postcards he sent to the very young Rebe casually remarking, as if it were quite insignificant, that her parents are yet again elsewhere. One from Selfridges Hotel on Oxford Street says, ‘Dear little baby, we are going to visit friends. We shall come back on Saturday, or perhaps Tuesday. Hoping you are a good girl.’ ‘Helping Daddy’, as it is captioned, shows a ribboned moppet doing up the laces of her adored father’s boots before he sets off; apt, since the Captain is now in India. A puppy from 1919 bears this message: ‘Dear Baby, Daddy leaves in a Big Ship tomorrow. Look after Mummy.’ He is on his way to Egypt and Palestine. Business is booming. In the summer of 1920 he writes from Delhi to his four-year-old daughter, ‘I hope you are having a jolly time each day on the beach, but not paddling like the little girl on the other side of this card!’ This vulgar child is showing her sunburnt knees.

  Granny Crawford must be looking after Rebe, as practically every other postcard in the album is a covert message to her. Occasionally the news is worrying. Hilda writes from London: ‘I have not heard from Daddy. Indian Cavalry in action it says in today’s Mirror, tell Granny.’ But the Captain lived to see another deal; and Rebe gained a shiny new spade for Chapel Sands from the generosity born of relief.

  As she got older, Rebe accompanied Hilda to London to buy clothes from the distant sophistication of Marshall & Snelgrove on Oxford Street. Their purchases were a great focus of my mother’s longing.

  Aunt Hilda’s impeccably matched ensembles were unequalled, pure Country House couture, and she wore the finest triple pearls that made me long for a little glamour. But it was all complicated by class and money, and by the refusal of my mother to compete, even if she could ever have afforded it. Hilda would occasionally hand over a dress-box containing some discarded gown in many sheets of tissue paper to poor sister Veda, and my mother would be incensed and refuse the costly contents. I remember the rejection scenes when they were examined and discovered to be totally useless, grand finery, often in black silk, a colour Veda never wore and I expect regarded by her and the village as funeral garments. I was not so proud and begged my cousin once to lend me an exquisite pair of green velvet shoes for an evening, merely to totter about in high heels to feel exotic. They were fit for a princess, and hard to give back. I was eight to Rebe’s eighteen.

  Once, much later in the 1960s, when my father sold a painting and was temporarily flush, he urged my mother to buy some new shoes. They became a family legend: the most expensive things she ever owned, worn for every special occasion for forty years until they disappeared, stolen from her hotel room the day after my wedding. The lost shoes were, of course, green.

  Betty was in uncomfortable awe of cousin Rebe all her life and appalled when I accidentally shattered a china terrier in Rebe’s (all-green) house as a child. My brother and I were also supposed to creep about in humble respect. Rebe once took us to tea at a grand hotel where we were urged to eat our cake with a knife and fork so that no crumbs would be shed on our clothes, an etiquette we found bizarre. But it stirred some kind of Chapel nostalgia in my mother, which in turn agonised me. I later saved up my wages as a teenage shop assistant to buy her the elegant tea knives she never had.

  In the Elston house, everything about eating seemed rude. ‘Don’t play with it. Don’t push it about. Don’t be slow/leave food/scrape the plate/talk with your mouth full/say you don’t want it/say you want more of it/slump over the table/make eating noises. Sit up straight, elbows down in velvet silence, chew without showing your teeth.’

  I picture Betty pushing miserably at some remaining morsel under her parents’ watchful eye. Or perhaps it is a thick white glue of ground rice known as Aunt Jackson’s pudding. ‘How I despised Aunt Jackson who had originally devised this pulp and written the recipe into my mother’s book in sloping copperplate script, faded sepia now but still ensuring that her culinary dictatorship survived beyond the grave.’

  When she was eight, my mother was required to eat a plate of something noxious with the appetite-choking name of fish custard in front of the whole school at Miss Turney’s. Everyone else had finished; they all waited, and waited. Punishment was threatened. Eventually she forced it down only for the custard to return immediately. Food is fear. One incident leaves its stain over more than eight decades. In a restaurant, a lifetime later, my mother scolded her grandchildren just as sharply as George ever did, I suspect, for not finishing every scrap (and for ordering too much) while failing to eat her own dinner. She apologised profusely to the waiter, to the point of imploring his forgiveness, and even that of the chef, while simultaneously mounting a self-defence to the effect that she had been given too big a portion. She is both George and herself at such moments. I have never left a plate unfinished in my life, no matter what it holds; I have inherited the fear, and the reproaches.

  My daughter Thea, on hearing the fish custard tale around the age of twelve, laughed at the Dickensian scene and its unending consequences. ‘Grandma, I wouldn’t have cared about that for more than a day!’ But she has never feared a tyrant across the dinner table. And perhaps, in another life, my mother would have been just as blithely unabashed. It makes me wonder, once more, what is my mother’s own true nature and what is the life she has been dealt, the tide of daily events that knocked her back and forth, that she swims in, or tries to swim in? If I could discover how she lived in those first unknown years, what her original world was like before the Elstons, perhaps I would find a difference between Grace and Betty.

  Paralysing social anxiety arrived early for both my mother and me. What made her so fearful; did her fearfulness shape mine? My earliest memory of the world outside my childhood home is of being taken to a Christmas party at a church nursery school when I was three. There were the familiar Scottish episcopalian staff. There were the red-haired identical twins who lived up the road. But I knew nobody else and terror coursed through me. I did not know how to speak to strangers, though they were only children; I did not know how to dispose my limbs, carry my person, where or how to stand in the room. Turning to find my mother gone, I felt tears compounding the shame. But there was one saving grace: the door that had been my entrance might also be my exit. I ran out of the church, only to find myself in the alarming darkness of a December afternoon with no idea where I was. Then I saw the beautiful cascades of water that glittered down the inside of the local fish s
hop window, some kind of automatic cleansing that occurred daily at 5 p.m. and which we children always hoped to witness. Goldenacre was the name of this unlovely granite district of Edinburgh, and I confused the name with the shop with the fish, so that somehow the window streams with goldfish in my memory. Extreme fear is amazingly open to these comforting distractions. I don’t know how I got home, except that it did not involve returning to the party.

  My mother, allowed to go nowhere, longing to do so, was eventually rewarded with her first party invitation at the Sunday school where she received strict lessons and the Holy Land stamps to lick for the attendance book. It was a dim and chilly walk along the lanes and over the dark dykes to church; but at least there were other children, among them two siblings called Gabrielle and Michael.

  They were the beautiful people who once had a Christmas party to which I was invited. I had no idea how to behave, and what did I do but bow deeply on shaking hands with Michael, aged about 6 or 7, knowing immediately that it was a huge gaffe. Staring and sniggering faces and my own mortification at having acted on some impulse from goodness knows where … And I have ever since suffered the same awkward embarrassment that another gaffe is about to be performed at every social occasion. The fear is well below the surface of course, for a lifetime of learning that one does not bow, one behaves thus or thus, like everyone else, has gradually been acquired. Yet it is still there.

  Despite – or because of – all this, my mother puts every visitor at their ease, welcomes everyone in. But at such perverse cost: a headache preceded every social gathering at our house, when I was growing up. I can remember her lying down for a day before, and sometimes a day after, the annual dinner at the Royal Scottish Academy. She kept a notebook of food cooked for other people over the years in case she ever committed the solecism of feeding them the same thing twice. To be ready for an event involved – still involves – weeks of anticipation. To avoid being late means being many hours early.

  She threw a momentous party for my seventh birthday. It took place in a garage, transformed into an underwater lagoon with nets of paper fish hanging from the ceiling and tables covered in what looked like shining blue water, a brilliant hand-painted illusion. There were starfish biscuits and jellies in the shape of salmon; these marvels eclipse all the fear of it in my memory. For my brother there was a birthday cake in the form of a football pitch with tiny goals, all the colour ingeniously blended out of the primitive food dyes available in 1970s Edinburgh. Best of all was a Halloween cake made to resemble the barrel of floating apples for which we would later dook, biting them out of the water with hands tied behind our backs. These facsimile fruit were marzipan, made to look exactly like miniature Cox’s orange pippins. My mother worked the colours with a fine hog’s hair brush, just as she did when actually painting. To me, this cake exceeded anything in ‘The Baker’s Daughter’.

  Only imagine how unusual this was in a capital city where you could scarcely buy garlic or peppers and silver balls were the only cake decorations. My English mother, arriving in Edinburgh as an art student in 1948, was staggered to hear the dustmen working on Christmas Day. It was, and remained for her, a closed and puritanical city.

  The salmon jelly was made from a mould that had once belonged to Veda, and Granny Crawford before that. There is a print of the very same object in Mrs Marshall’s Book of Cookery, from 1888, alongside the result turned out, so that I can see exactly what three generations of my family ate as a graphic image. The picture is an opening to that long-ago past when they had to fiddle about with gelatine, boiled water and cochineal to come up with a lifelike salmon. Through it I see Mrs Crawford in the kitchens at the Vine, and Veda working away with her paraffin stove for a special occasion; images once again a prism for life.

  The Elstons and the Greens did not eat together, or even drink tea. They scarcely seem to have encountered each other at all, despite living not half a mile apart. ‘Once I remember Uncle Hugh bringing a sack of mussels and spending an evening with my father, making merry with the sea food and drinking Guinness … the two men sat there working open the shiny black shells. I think there was an air of disapproval from Veda at this Rabelaisian scene. But they were, of course, never friends, and it was plain that we were considered well beneath them.’

  That sense of hierarchy reproduced itself in our rare encounters with Cousin Rebe, my mother’s anxiety transmitting so directly to me that I was too afraid of saying the wrong thing to speak at all. But beneath my cowed speechlessness was a mounting rebellion: why were we to be quite so servile to this woman, a domestic science teacher at a girls’ public school, when my mother was an actual artist? And what was so remarkable about Captain Green, who was a kind of travelling salesman himself, except that he made so much more money than George? Suppression thwarts precision. I have never felt able to represent myself in speech, only through the merciful slowness and forgiving second chances of writing. My mother, on the other hand, both speaks and writes with an enquiring generosity that drew children as well as adults to our house when I was young; they became my friends, I feel, because of her.

  Trying to discover the character of Chapel in those pre-war times, I sifted through years of local newspapers. And it was in the Skegness Times, the biggest publication for miles around, that I came across the tale of a controversial church meeting. ‘Chapel Parish Outrage’ tells of the vicar’s scandalous snobbery at the Christmas party of 1944. The vicar sat at high table with Captain and Mrs Green and the local gentry; much further down the hall were the local children and their mothers, and further still the brass cleaners, including Veda. The article quotes at length from the minutes of the meeting. These record an impressive uprising against the vicar, who had doled out the food with outrageous discrimination – chocolate cakes and cream blancmanges for his table, wartime jelly and plain biscuits for the children. He had also failed to award Sunday-school prizes for the second year running, with the implication that he was pocketing the money. The dialogue is remarkably dramatic, building to a violent crossfire of biblical quotations, and the entire proceedings were leaked to the paper, where they appeared on the front page. Veda took the minutes (her voice is never heard in them). I would like to think that she secretly exposed the vicar’s snobbery to the press.

  I feel mutinous still about the relationship between Hilda and Veda. Their sisterliness, though a fact, did not exist in feeling. How was it possible for Hilda to bypass Veda at church gatherings and even drive right past her without a word in the street? Inexplicable to me, too, is the strange truth that Granny Crawford, in old age, presumably having served her purpose as nanny to Hilda’s children, went to live with Veda in a cramped house with a bullying son-in-law, tight rations and no money, instead of rising up to the elegant Beacon; to that vast house with its views across the water to Europe, where maids came to clean the eight bedrooms, half of them empty, housekeepers kept perfect order and special food was brought up by train from Fortnum & Mason in London. Money and class were apparently what divided these households; and turned me into a raging teenage socialist on Veda’s behalf. I admire her proud rejection of the redundant silk garments. Equally, I wish the Beacon hadn’t set up such a pattern of longing in my mother, for an indoor bathroom or a pair of shoes. A sense of deprivation might never have occurred in her young life if there had not been this house, and this family, hoisted up there on the top of the dunes, condescending to the Elstons with their hand-me-downs.

  I do not know whether Betty was regarded as a proper niece by the Greens, or just a rather sudden and random addition to the Elston household. Betty was excelling at school, which may have softened their attitude and given Veda some protective pride of her own. But life at the Beacon was never as lucky as it looked to the Elstons from St Leonard’s Villas.

  Hugh Green did join the navy, but was soon after dismissed in undisclosed circumstances to the horror of his father. It was then that he vanished. His parents could not believe he was lost at sea. Perhaps
he was still alive and simply somewhere else in the world. His mother watched the beach for his returning figure, and for years left a note for him on the hall table every time she went out. And Rebe, their admired daughter, who had the flouncy dresses, velvet shoes and elaborate cakes from London, who went to birthday parties everywhere, never married as her parents hoped. She taught cookery and games at a school in nearby Horncastle, where my mother occasionally encountered her older cousin during hockey matches. Her chief pleasures, as it seemed to us, lay in fine linen tablecloths, proper scones and the collection of china dogs which came to us after her death, along with the little rabbit fur cloak she had worn to those childhood parties. Rebe retired to a bungalow about ten miles from the great house of her childhood. Captain Green, eventually persuaded that his son was dead, ensured that Hugh’s name was inscribed on the cross, before gradually fading away.

  The cake was cardboard for them all, as it would not be for Betty. She may have been the Carmelita Miggs who longed for the dresses, the shoes and the social poise; but for Rebe, who had everything, they proved inconsequential. Yet she did have one precious possession that her cousin did not, and that was knowledge. Rebe knew who Betty Elston was.

  5

  The Town

  At the age of ten, my mother won a scholarship to Skegness Grammar and the radius of her life suddenly became seven miles wider. George’s pride in her academic gifts trumped his jailer’s instincts and she was allowed to take the bus to school on her own. Perhaps he thought Betty would be safer outside the narrow village circle, that there would be safety in numbers in this venerable institution with its three hundred pupils. He was wrong.