On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  The cold news in the parlour shattered her stability, the whole basis of her identity gone in an instant. She lost her footing completely. And my mother felt this way – nameless, unmoored, apart – all through her life until her own children were born; it seems to me that she still feels this in relation to other people. She has had a hundred friends, loved and cherished them all, and almost forty years of marriage to my father until his death, but it is her children that matter. ‘I never belonged to anyone,’ she once wrote to me, ‘until I belonged to you.’ And also, ‘you are my most precious possession’. For years I did not understand this last phrase, straining away from its connotations of objects and ownership; until I learned her story.

  It is incredible that George managed to deliver this devastating news in the form of a never-ending threat. The woman in black was often on the bus. Betty had noticed her before, and would likely see her again. How was she to avoid the situation, and in any case why was she reproached for speaking to this lady when she had remained entirely mute? The Elstons’ rule could not possibly be enforced, and yet it hung over her always. This woman who had been watching her might come down the aisle again.

  The Elstons lived near a significant little construction called Tyler’s Bridge. It crossed what the Dutch call a sluice and the English a drain – a narrow muddy wash that meandered down to the sea past her house. It is typical of the coastal fens. The drain itself already held past horror because of the night that Veda’s friend Mrs Ailsby had gone out of her house in the darkness, tripped into the drain and drowned.

  Tyler’s was the place where Betty escaped to hurtle home. This place that had once been such a simple stop on the trundling single-decker route now seemed ringed with menace. She might have to brush past the woman to get out. No other way home – no cars, no possible lifts: the one-and-only bus now held other terrors.

  My mother at last had a friend, Pat Richardson, who also travelled back and forth to Skegness Grammar. Pat said nothing during or after this incident. Inadequate as this seems to me – how could she possibly fail to come up with some words, some kind of response? – what is worse is that she actually understood what was happening. Pat had heard of Betty’s grandmother, knew where she lived and who she was. And Pat was not the only one. I see that scene on the bus, the faces all around Betty, the people of Chapel, many of them just children; decades later, we learned that most of them knew of her origins, as did their parents, and quite probably the proverbial dogs in the street. Nobody hinted, or broke down and told, yet each knew far more about Betty than she knew herself. The irony is dramatic, the tiny travelling community like a chorus to the forthcoming tragedy.

  Also on this fateful bus was a legal secretary called Miss Moore, returning from her job in Skegness. She knew my mother somewhat, being the niece of the Chapel seamstress who stitched her school clothes. Veda, in her kindness, had once paid for identical summer dresses to be made for Betty and her doll. Standing on a chair for fittings, Betty would occasionally see Miss Moore slipping past through the corridors in the seamstress’s house. She had an impression of pinched and premature age. Half a century on, we discovered that Kathleen Moore knew all about it, too – indeed she knew very intimately why this woman had approached Betty Elston on the bus, and precisely who her grandmother was, for in her previous job, she had personally handled the adoption document.

  When my mother managed to acquire this heavy piece of parchment many years later, in the 1960s, she was chilled to see the secretary’s signature there as a witness. Miss Moore had known all about her origins and turned away in the seat where she generally sat, next to the woman in black.

  Betty’s life changed in an instant. But it need not have turned out as it did. George and Veda could have reacted differently, as kinder parents might. Instead of casting Betty as a waif and stray charitably rescued, they could have told her that she was their daughter and they loved her; that her arrival had turned them into a family. They could have told her that adoption was common, that they had been hoping and praying for her to come; that she did have a grandmother who also loved her, but lived somewhere else, and that this particular situation was complicated. They could even have told her that there was an adopted child living two doors away, that it was quite normal and indeed known to the boy himself. But the conversation in the parlour was over in moments. It was followed by an iron silence.

  Veda and George were noticeably older than all the other parents. Betty had always wondered why; now she understood. And this knowledge became a kind of shield against them. ‘I moved away from my parents at this point. Nobody had anything to say to me, so I said nothing to them. I had spent much of my life feeling frightened of my father, now I felt cut off from all feeling connected with him. I had a complete loss of affection, perhaps to protect myself in some way from these people who scarcely seemed to want to own me. I was not of them.’

  Something of this was perhaps a typical teenage reaction. We are nothing like our parents; how can we even be related to them – perhaps we are secretly adopted? And so it strangely turns out, almost by way of explanation for the absence of feeling on both sides. Betty began to dislike George intensely. It was a full stop to innocence.

  Much later, when I was myself a teenager, my mother was in an Edinburgh department store taking a lift to the top floor when the mechanism jammed. The passengers were stuck for almost two hours. Afterwards, she became acutely claustrophobic, and for years could not bear to be in any small space. A specialist at the Royal Infirmary eventually broke the spell with much gentle practice in and out of lifts. He also identified the cause of her panic – not the intelligent fear of being trapped, fainting, the air running out, and so on, but my mother’s reaction to the other people in the lift, a group of blue-rinse Edinburgh matrons who maintained a rigid silence throughout. She wanted to scream, to appeal to them, to have the comfort of a mutual response that never came, but was increasingly afraid of breaching the decorum. For the lift, read the green bus.

  For some time after that journey she suffered from a recurrent nightmare. ‘I was once again in a bus, once again fearful, once again desperate to escape. This time my way was barred by a woman seated in the only doorway, immovable, shelling a basket of peas. There may be something symbolic in the splitting of peas, the revealing of concealed contents in the dream. But my memory reveals much more – that I am once again trapped and frightened by a person unknown.’

  My mother has written this episode several times, over the years, turning it over as if to discover some new meaning within it. Only once, in the birthday memoir, does she mention the small photograph of herself as a child. It seems to me that she both saw it and did not see it, remembering only the shock of recognition for a fraction of a second before looking away. But it is significant that she registered her own face in that instant; it cannot have been a family photograph, in which she would have had to pick herself out of a crowd. It must have been a solo portrait, black and white. This photograph was decisive proof, the single clearest way that the woman in black could demonstrate the truth of what she was saying – that there was an earlier life and another family elsewhere, that Betty had another grandmother before Chapel, and before Granny Crawford.

  The birthday memoir does not go many years beyond the age of thirteen, the age my mother was when the woman approached her with the picture and the shattering news. Indeed this was almost all she knew when she sat down to write the memoir for me in her fifties, still in a state of ignorance about the kidnap, her first mother, or any other family. These revelations were all yet to come.

  The woman on the bus turned out to be one of her own relatives. I have always respected her wisdom in coming down the aisle with the photograph as ocular proof of Betty’s early life. She needed documentary evidence to gain her attention; and how else could she back up this unthinkable claim? But she never again approached my mother, always continuing her journey to the next and final stop on the route, the nearby village of Ho
gsthorpe.

  ‘Your grandmother wants to see you.’ About this forebear, my mother seems to have been numbly incurious at the time. And in the many years of returning to this moment, she has never wondered why it was the grandmother and not the mother whose proxy approached her on the bus. When she became a grandmother herself, however, she began to think how much hurt was suffered by the one who wanted to see her and how much anguish could have been spared if only it had come to pass. To the thirteen-year-old Betty, however, this grandmother was horrifyingly surreal, ‘a kind of living ghost’.

  And who was this woman? My mother would not discover her identity for another thirty years. All she knew now was that George and Veda were not her father and mother as she had always thought. Except that even this was not the truth.

  7

  George and Veda

  A photograph exists of the Elstons swinging along on a country walk. Veda wears an Edwardian dress, lace at collar and cuffs, many covered buttons running all down the bodice and skirt; George is in a silk tie and boater, marshalling a dapper cane. She looks shyly down and away, he is vigorous and direct, heading straight towards the camera. The third figure is Veda’s youngest sister Hilda. She is visiting them in Bradford, where they live. The year is 1913.

  It is a warm day in the Yorkshire fields. Hilda’s furled parasol speaks of intermittent sunshine. Veda’s bag is light; perhaps a picnic has already been eaten. George cocks a cigarette between two fingers as he approaches the lens. The shutter speed must be very quick, for there is no hint of a blur in their split-second motion; and what a mobile image it is too, so natural it looks as if this moment has been skimmed directly from life with something more sophisticated than a cheap Box Brownie. Two women, one man: the implication is that the photographer is Hilda’s beau, and that this is a quartet on a double date. How large Hilda seems by comparison to Veda, who is thirty-three years old in this photograph – how large and how confident, looking enthusiastically back at her suitor, presumably none other than Captain Green. But I want to hold fast to my grandmother, the delicate feather in her hat, the fine chains of pale buttons – sixty that I can make out – which seem almost avant-garde, her gentle expression, the fascination of her unusual name.

  The Elstons live in St Paul’s Road, Bradford. The house is a neat two-up two-down right next to St Paul’s Church, so close that only a small patch of green grass separates them from the door, aisle and altar. George, also thirty-three, is the head of this little household. He is a commercial traveller selling lubricating oils to factories. Veda has been married to him for six years; they were late to marriage. Living with them is another of Veda’s sisters, Daisy, younger by six years, who is working for the new National Telephone Company. She has a lively time of it, up and out every morning to connect one caller to another; but soon she will leave all this behind to join her husband who is making a new life in India.

  These facts emerge from the latest census. George signs himself George Maybrook Elston, always claiming to have been born in the month of May by a brook. My mother never quite believed in the brook, and it turns out that she was right. Only recently have I seen the narrow house in the industrial port of Hull where he was born in May 1880 into an atmosphere of death. Walter Elston had died very suddenly in February, on the stroke of his fortieth birthday, leaving his wife Lauretta a pregnant widow of thirty-four. She already had two sons to raise and was taking in lodgers even before George’s birth. It pleases me, irrationally, unjustifiably, that her real name was Laura; it pleases me even more that she twirled it into the professional sobriquet Lauretta. For George’s mother was a dancing teacher, who also gave music lessons to young ladies and gentlemen. Almost the only dragonfly memory we have ever been able to net from his unspoken past, however, is that her business came to a sudden end, and Lauretta was forced to leave Hull with her sons for a cottage a few miles away in the village of Kirk Ella.

  Lauretta, bereaved, financially ruined, managed to keep going with a few local lessons. She finally moved to the nearby city of Selby, but then she too was gone, dead at forty-eight. George was an orphan at thirteen. I wonder who looked after him. Nobody, presumably; he was within a few months of leaving school and going to work. Perhaps his seventeen-year-old brother Fred was still at home, or maybe George just fended for himself.

  Immediately I picture the toughness required, the instinct for self-preservation, the foreshortened youth and the damaging grief. But I cannot know exactly how far this altered him, whether this is how he came to be the difficult man he is said to have been. My mother knew nothing of George’s early life and she never asked; it was unspoken in Chapel.

  There are two stories, however – or facts that have been rounded into stories. Really they are just fragments, undisputed because there is nobody left to correct or confirm them. The first is that George sang in the choir at Selby Abbey. And why not? His mother taught music and dance, and he was later in a band. I can find no evidence, and neither could my mother when she once enquired at the Abbey. But it matters to me because it mattered to him: evensong in this soaring medieval church was something he was known to be proud of.

  The second is that the small hall where Lauretta taught dancing burned to the ground one night while everyone was asleep. Any proof of this has vanished as completely as ash. But the fire would certainly explain her abrupt removal from Hull. I want to say that this was a disaster too far, that it ruined her, weakened her fatally after raising three children on her own while somehow keeping up the teaching all the way through. But there is no death certificate. She might have died of an accident, or marauding cancer.

  And almost all I know about George’s father is that his whole family life was contained in a single decade. At thirty he was a bachelor. By forty he had married Lauretta and conceived three sons, the last of whom he would never see in this life. Walter Elston was a colour-maker in a Victorian factory, specialising in the new chemical paints. It delights me to think of this great-grandfather of mine – two strangers, now united in one possessive adjective – spending all day surrounded by hues, creating colour.

  But thus have I tucked him up, neat in my understanding, when his life can have been nothing like this simple summary. He walks through windy Hull to work in a factory, he is a boarder in various lodging houses all through his twenties, he marries a woman rather older than himself (either Lauretta or the official documents, which don’t match, lie about her age). He may have been terminally sick for years, or he may have been felled by the sudden jamming of his heart. All I have is the proof of his last will and testament, to which Lauretta was executor, in which he falls into the common legal category of leaving less than £300. Which may mean two hundred and ninety-nine, or one.

  Lauretta had those two older sons, John and Fred. I have no idea where John goes, or what becomes of him beyond his youthful career as a draper’s assistant in Scarborough, a fleeting detail from a census, after which he disappears. And so does Fred. George never saw either of them again. He seems to come from nowhere, solitary and sui generis, and so does my mother. Would it be so different with the advent of telephones and rapid transport? Possibly not; my husband has ten cousins he hasn’t seen for decades; my father and his sister lived two miles apart in Edinburgh but the occasions of meeting were only ever high days and holidays. His Glasgow uncle went away to New York and never returned. During the Second World War, my father was posted to America and tracked Uncle Bob down to the barber’s shop he ran in the Bronx. They talked for a brisk hour, all they could sustain.

  And beside me in one of my own wedding photographs is a man who I have met only once, a distant cousin here to represent a column of dead relatives. I would not be certain of his name were it not on the back. In the great democracy of family albums we all have photographs upon which, disastrously, nothing is written. Identities drift in a sea of unknowing. We have no idea who they were, these people smiling, frowning, or resisting the camera’s tyrannical hold. Each may be somebody,
or nobody, of importance to the past or future story.

  I have a picture of a despondent woman who might be Lauretta, in the usual rustling black silks of a Victorian widow. The card is stamped with the address of a studio near Hull. If it is her, then she certainly needed the gaiety of her assumed name. Lauretta sounds so modern, evocative of vaudeville or the American Wild West, although there is also one in Boccaccio’s Decameron, published in English around this time. There is a certain raffishness in adopting this Italian-sounding name in 1880, as she did. This was the same year that Veda was born.

  Nobody alive knows how George met Veda, daughter of the innkeeper at the Vine. Veda’s father also died when she was young (her mother, no longer able to keep the job, brought up six children by letting out rooms in an old building on St Leonard’s Drive in Chapel). Her history surfaces only through marriage, alas, like so many women in those days. She was born in Hogsthorpe, but I do not know where she went to school, whether there were other suitors before George, why she was given this name Veda – pronounced to rhyme with cedar – with its strange Indian origin (I cannot find an actress, author, dancer, singer or any other star after whom she could be named).

  But I have something more precious, for I remember Veda myself. She came to live with my parents in Edinburgh some time in the 1960s and was with us until I was five. So quiet, her blue eyes gentle, like everything about her. She used to hold a glass jar up to the sun for me to see its radiant cobalt-blue beams on the bedroom wall. When she died, I inherited both her room and the magical jar, which, when opened, turned out to hold the humble menthol scent of Vicks.