On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  Exactly how my mother achieved this modicum of freedom is a marvel in another way, for she came from a house as lacking in books as images. Her parents read no further than a daily paper and the church magazine. The oak shelf in the parlour remained empty except for the Bible, a romantic novel from 1921 and a school prize awarded by Miss Turney that seemed even more hopeless to Betty than the Bible, although its author was another first-line genius. ‘Marley was dead, to begin with’ – six chilling words which put her off Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for years. ‘Ghostly Marley and wretched Scrooge haunted my Decembers all the same; their chains clanked and their voices spooled over the ether, as my parents listened in with relish to this annual treat on the wireless.’ My own childhood was exhilaratingly haunted in turn, as my mother dramatised the story so that everyone in our family had several roles. The last theatre performance she saw before deafness set in was Simon Callow’s magnificent adaptation in which he plays all the parts. No show has ever meant more to me because it meant so much to her, bringing her life full circle.

  In one of his photographs, taken for a Christmas card, George posed Betty in the crook of a tree holding up a book called Happy Days. ‘I remember hating it all, the artificial smile, the sitting quite still for an eternity, eyes watering in the sunlight, while my father got his picture. How amazed he would have been to have known my feelings running so contrary to the slogan.’ So much of her young life involved these sustained and gallant performances.

  Happy Days was an anthology of short stories and verse, mostly trite, but it did include a few extracts from Shakespeare, which is how my mother was able to recognise A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the source of the proclamation written above the arch to Butlin’s first holiday camp on the Skegness road. It is still there: ‘Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight’. She had, moreover, played the part of Mustardseed at Miss Turney’s. Like so many children, her whole education seems to have been ignited by one inspirational teacher from early childhood, Miss Turney’s assistant, who lent her books, and even helped her to send off for them by post; they came in brown paper parcels all the way from Lincoln County Library.

  George seems to have believed that books were an impediment to learning – ‘Got your nose in a book again,’ he would complain. But the possibilities of Skegness Grammar were not lost upon him and the Chapel dressmaker was commissioned to turn out a thrifty semblance of the school uniform in yellow and green. And off my mother went, one year younger than her fellow pupils and exceedingly nervous, to this historic red-brick school.

  Skegness in 1936 was a lively and elegant resort. The wide yellow beach was as flat as the bowling green and the ornamental gardens, with their scented roses and winding pergola paths. The grandly named shorefront hotels – Chatsworth, Park Lane, the Savoy – opened their doors to Midlands bankers and lawyers. Boarding houses with cheerful striped awnings welcomed Derby miners, Liverpool dockers and young secretaries up from London for the sun. As the railways got faster, the tickets cheaper and the workers’ holidays longer, following the 1926 General Strike, more and more visitors returned each year to the so-called Garden City by the Sea, so that the population swelled sixfold every summer for the promise of ‘a champagne bath to re-energise the body, and champagne air to fill the lungs’. The Suncastle pleasure palace, with its faux-medieval turrets, opened for tea dances; the big wheel ground into action, its swings fashioned to look like brightly coloured hot-air balloons. The putting green, miniature railway and fairy dell pool for infants appeared and are all still there, just as traces of Edwardian grandeur survive in the wide avenues and balconied houses.

  On the beachfront, now, the blue paintwork fades to white and a sudden shaft of winter sun strikes the dun sea, emphasising the fine silver brushline that divides the monochrome sky from the monochrome water. Glowing light bulbs sway uneasily along the front. People walk their dogs miles away, as it seems, at the sea’s edge while the big wheel slowly turns. Skegness, off-season, still has the power to enchant, a period piece of the pleasurable past. And on hoardings all over town, the fat figure of the Jolly Fisherman still jaunts along the beach in his wellington boots, arms merrily outflung, in John Hassall’s imperishable 1908 poster. There he goes, skipping over a starfish, beneath the slogan that helped to make the resort popular: ‘Skegness is SO bracing!’ He will be here forever, long after the visitors have dwindled away, lured abroad by cheaper and less bracing weather.

  Coming into school on the bus from Chapel, Betty travelled through the flatlands of brassica fields and shining dykes, past roadside cherry stalls and the gradual blossoming of Ingoldmells from hamlet to early caravan village. In that same year, 1936, Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, cut the red ribbon for Butlin’s new holiday camp, with its neat avenues of chalets, its amateur dramatics and cockcrow gymnastics. The iron traceries of Butlin’s roller coasters still rise in towering corkscrews above the landscape, dark ink sketches scribbled against the marine sky. The bus sees them long in advance, and draws in at the gate every morning for chefs, entertainers and ice-cream sellers to alight for the day’s work. These passengers come from Anderby, Coningsby, Hundleby, Firsby, even Tennyson’s Somersby: the village names are pure Viking. Children from these places, so romantic to my mother’s mind, also streamed into Skegness Grammar.

  In summer, the sky is almost blindingly bright, arcing high above the green crops. In winter, voluminous clouds scud blue-black over bare claggy soil. Even now the nameless roads are only just wide enough for tractors and hay carts, twisting around the boundaries of ancient fields, barely any distance between sharp right-angled bends. Sugar beet alternates with potatoes – the Second World War victory crop – Brussels sprouts with beans, sending out their beautiful fragrance into the summer air. Dykes cross with drains, black soil abounds when the level fields lie fallow. Even the hedges are low, and in my mother’s part of the county, there are not even any woods for a poet to praise.

  Gradually Betty began to draw what she saw from the bus, trying hard to get down the peculiar geography. ‘I faced the obvious pitfalls: how to express the vastness of the plain stretching away to the horizon, unfeatured almost, and the nebulous over-circling hemisphere, to make it all breathe, make the space limitlessly airy and never inert.’ At school, the art teacher, who would later become a decisive figure in my mother’s life, showed her Rembrandt’s etchings. ‘He could do this with the Dutch landscape in such a few deft lines incised on the copper plate. I wondered why we had no Rembrandt. One quarter of Lincolnshire, after all, was even named Holland.’ She never saw Joseph Crawhall’s paintings of dykes and drains reflecting the wintry Lincolnshire light, or John Sell Cotman’s windmills rising like dark giants against the clouds, with their cutting-shafting-whirring sails, tiny figures below sometimes gazing up at the spectacle. British art was scarcely mentioned at school, and never, of course, at home.

  With the exception of art classes, embarrassment coloured most of my mother’s schooldays. She felt shy, by far the youngest in any class, and could never answer a question without turning red, a display unkindly remarked upon by the science teacher to explain the meaning of the term properties to his pupils. ‘That girl’s property,’ he would say, pointing at her, ‘is the property of continuous blushing.’ Blushing begets blushing, of course; like insomnia, or self-consciousness, it catches itself happening, and keeps reproducing itself.

  The teachers from those times are more vivid than my own through her telling. The wonderful English mistress Anne Brackenridge, ending long discussions of Tennyson’s poetry with her rousing catchphrase ‘On then!’ We say it still, when stalled or tired. Annie Brack taught her class Dickens’s Bleak House, in which Lincolnshire itself makes an appearance, rare in the work of any other English novelist. Lady Dedlock lives in Lincolnshire, or one might say is slowly dying of misery there, in this dank countryside ‘of low-lying ground, with stagnant rivers and melancholy trees for islands in them, and a surface punct
ured all over, all day long, with falling rain’.

  Much later in life, in a letter to me, my mother wondered whether Lincolnshire could in fact be fertile ground for creativity.

  I believe that the land upon which one lives influences one’s character. Tennyson is always aware of its multitude of possibilities for mood analogies: the opposing character, for instance, of the static plain and the never-still waters.

  The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea,

  gray sand banks and pale sunset – dreary wind

  dim shores, dense rains and heavy clouded sea.

  But I’m a prose person, so I plod on – or plough on. Instantly I see the flat brown fields and the heavy cart horses, it’s always blowing – the sea and the land level and like-coloured. But Tennyson made poetry of it. I delight in his poems rather than the reality; this, art can do.

  It never occurs to her that there might be art in her own words. She sees herself as gloomy as the land; and yet to strangers, friends and children, above all her own, she is as celebratory as summer, appreciative of every image and word, of every encounter and conversation. The inner and the outer do not match.

  At school my mother found freedom in the lessons, with all their news of elsewhere and their intellectual independence from home. In her first school reports, the teachers were mildly surprised to find that she seemed to have ‘an unusual aptitude for art’. She was allowed to use the art room at lunchtime and encouraged to enter competitions. In her third year there, she won a national prize for a poster promoting Lincolnshire, like John Hassall before her. It must have featured the landscape, she believes, though the memory has since dissolved. In her fourth year, she appeared in the school play alongside the very same science teacher who had mocked her for blushing.

  I had been chosen, inexplicably, for a part in a very Lincolnshire production named El Dorado. This was the name of a potato newly introduced into the county and notable for its prolific tenacity. My role was to be a feckless farmer’s daughter who inadvertently cooks the very precious, first seed El Dorados. I remember crossing the stage with a large pan full of bones for the farm dog. I was to lift the latch and throw them outside. Opening the door I found Mr Porter crouched down below giving very large barks. I couldn’t suppress my laughter at this ludicrous reversal. It was strange that he had cast me in that role at all, on the grounds that I was the only one who could project loud enough to be heard at the furthest end of the school hall, in contrast to my inaudible mumbles in class.

  We hide behind other people’s words, lose our self-consciousness in playing someone else. The stage, at that time, was less anxious than real life.

  She made lasting friendships at Skegness Grammar, discovered that other people’s family lives could be quite different from her own, occasionally even went to stay in their houses at weekends and visit the cinema with them to watch Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Hitchcock’s Rebecca. She stitched a calico sunsuit based on a poster of the film star Deanna Durbin; I have it still: yellow, the colour of hope. She must have worn it on the beach in summer, on those smooth flat sands that run all the way from Chapel to Skegness, no shelving, no sudden undertow, the beach huts beginning to gather in parades along the Skegness foreshore, twenty shillings a week with gas rings, drop tables and the fresh spray of the waves. Edna White’s Ladies Orchestra played thés dansants daily at the Suncastle. A lioness escaped from the zoo, briefly marauding Molly’s Beach Cafe. Billy Butlin released an Indian elephant on to the sands where it walked along in a glittering howdah, a colossus visible for miles along the shore.

  At school they were taught Tennyson without ever learning that he came from nearby Somersby and walked these same beaches. There was even a Tennyson House, to which Betty belonged, and another named after Isaac Newton. The hockey team went to play matches in Spilsby without ever being told that this was the birthplace of the great explorer Sir John Franklin, who set off to discover the North-West Passage in 1845 and disappeared without trace. Betty did not know that Franklin was from Lincolnshire, any more than Newton, or the revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine. In later life, she longed for someone to have come from her county besides the boatmen and brassica farmers, and there were so many more than she realised. Captain Smith of Willoughby, a hamlet on the furthest edge of the circuit she was allowed to cycle, left that tiny spot on the globe to became an explorer, founded the state of Virginia and mapped the New England coast. Smith sailed the high seas as both captain and pirate; was sold as a slave but later knighted by the Prince of Transylvania. His life was saved by Pocahontas, but then nearly lost to French pirates on the way home from the Americas. His remains lie buried in St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in London, where a stained-glass window was installed to his memory in 1968. It proposes, with bathetic understatement, that he was the most notable person to have come out of Willoughby. Smith was educated at the grammar school in Louth, a few miles from Chapel; so were Tennyson and Franklin.

  Franklin was a bullied child, constantly abused by his father for being too dreamy and slow. The boy longed always to be somewhere else. Repeatedly, he tried to get away from the strict confines of home to reach the sea, running all the way from Spilsby to the coast. He once got as far as the beach at Ingoldmells, a mile from Chapel, only to be discovered and severely beaten. Betty often passed this spot on her bicycle, knowing it only because this was where a crazy man lurked who liked to put his stick between the spokes of children’s wheels. Franklin’s niece Emily married Tennyson, who would in turn write an epitaph for the lost explorer, long after he disappeared.

  The headmaster of Skegness Grammar was a dignified man named K. G. Spendlove, revered by all, including the local newspapers where he appears as the voice of reason and paragon of academic authority. In the course of my mother’s first year at the school, he sent a letter home asking all parents to produce their children’s birth certificates in relation to a new polio vaccine. She dutifully handed the letter to George, knowing exactly what it contained. But nothing was given for her to take back in return. No birth certificate was produced; and nobody explained why. In fact, the Elstons did not have it. To his daughter’s embarrassment, George had to take the bus into Skegness for a private interview with Mr Spendlove in order to maintain some kind of strange secrecy. Betty was filled with shame.

  The school day at Skegness Grammar ended at 4 p.m. In summer, my mother was sometimes allowed to cycle back home, but never in any other season. Nor was she allowed to linger in Skegness after classes, walk on the sands with friends, or eat sundaes at Molly’s cafe. There was only one bus back to Chapel on weekday afternoons and no second chance if she missed it. Towards the end of the day’s lessons, she would grow tense, worrying that the teachers might go on talking after the bell, that the corridors would be impassably crammed, that someone might intervene between the school gate and the rush to the bus stop. Her exit from Skegness had to be swift, prompt and decisive, contributing to a lifetime’s dread of being late. Except for school, the town was a no-go zone, visited only for the dentist or the one department store where regulation shoes were bought in Veda’s company. But at least Betty could run through the streets between school and bus on her own without encountering any kind of danger, without anyone spying or interfering, or so George believed; in fact people were watching her all the time. Worse still was the green country bus, where she was both vulnerable to the public and trapped in close confines. George does not seem to have considered this risk. But it was on this bus that Betty’s life divided.

  6

  The Bus

  ‘Your grandmother wants to see you.’

  I sat there in numb disbelief on hearing these words. The surrounding buzz of boys and girls fell suddenly silent. I was the focus of everyone’s attention. The children around me on the bus were about as amazed as I was to hear this bewildering statement. For I had no grandmother.

  The woman had come down the aisle towards the seat where I was sitting with my schoolfr
iend Pat – an elderly woman, as it seemed to me, dressed in black with a squashed felt hat and hair pinned in a bun beneath it. A villager on her way home from town with her cumbersome shopping, a countrywoman I had seen many times – and she clearly me – but who had never before addressed me. She held up a small shadowy photograph of my infant self. How could she possibly have it?

  I said nothing and turned immediately away, as one turns from great shame or madness. It was a moment of pure shock, of such stunning silent force that I felt only panic, a need to get out of that place and run home, shutting the door behind me and never more emerge to a world that could terrify me with sudden crazy confrontations. I do not know what she did next, I only remember being desperate to get away from this terrible moment, to get free and rush home to my mother.

  But when I did get to the house, my mother – my only mother – was standing at the stove as usual and continued to stir the pot while I repeated the mad woman’s words. She remained calm while I cried and questioned. Veda said nothing, did nothing, in no way tried to comfort me. All she proposed was that I should go out and ride my bicycle. I was thirteen years old.

  My mother remembers nothing of the bicycle ride, has no idea how long she was gone. But when she returns, George has somehow arrived on the scene. They take her into the little parlour, with its Willow pattern china and its unused fireplace, sit her down and take up their position on the opposite sofa.

  To her amazement, they did not begin with the grandmother who wanted to see her, or the woman on the bus, or her relationship to Betty. They said nothing at all about the photograph (now or ever). They did not try to reassure their daughter, or give any kind of rational understanding of what has occurred. All George offers is that they ‘took her in’ as a small child long ago, and that they are in fact her adopted parents. But the main thrust of his instruction, which stayed with her forever, was a renewed emphasis on isolation – with the onus on Betty. She must not speak to this woman ever again.