On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  Veda had briefly been a governess in Leeds, only ten miles from Bradford. But she is otherwise sunk in an unlettered past. Not a single document survives; all that remains is her cookery book, containing fifty recipes for cakes based on exactly the same few meagre ingredients, ingenious variations made from slightly different tinctures. She won every cake prize at the Chapel village show, concocting these delights entirely on a primitive paraffin stove.

  The photograph of the country walk shows Veda as I can hardly imagine her but as she once was: a young wife, sociable, exquisitely dressed (more so than Hilda, I delightedly note), stepping out in the world. Images are all I have of the early Veda and George, these fragments of time held intact down the century in tiny sepia rectangles, so public and yet so intimate. Of course, there is something trapping about the shot, pinning us to a particular moment’s veracity, suffusing our knowledge of a person or persons with this one circumstantial vision: this frozen instant. After all, my grandparents did not always go down that road, take those walks, dress up for such occasions. There was not always freedom or time; Hilda would not always be with them.

  But there is another image, infinitely more valuable to me, that shows a moment which did happen over and again, that kept occurring all through the years the Elstons lived in Bradford. It is a photograph of everyday truth – but what a picture.

  Here is Veda in that neat little house, photographed by her husband George in the first year of marriage. She stands stock-still in their modest kitchen. The exact size of this room is standard for its time and place – ten feet by eight. Their home is the end of the terrace. At the front of the building is the parlour, customarily shut up, partly because it would mean another fire to light and another room to dust, partly to preserve its status and decorum. The parlour gives straight onto the street through the front door. Behind it is this back room, which serves as scullery, kitchen and living room all in one. A single water pipe runs down the wall to what looks like a tap in the darkened corner. A kitchen cloth and another apron are tucked into it. Behind Veda is the stove, such as it is. Before her is the side window that looks onto the narrow passage separating the house from the churchyard.

  This window is open. It is late spring or summer. Veda’s dress is light cotton, striped, the sleeves rolled up. On the table before her is a small theatre of objects; some bowls, a brown glazed teapot and a rectangular pie dish. She is peeling apples for this pie and the dish is the white enamel type that eventually chips, exposing a thumbnail of black tin. I have it still, as I have the teapot, which came from India; and I used to have the knife, so sharp it could skin a pepper, never mind an apple, lost to customs on my first flight abroad, foolishly unwitting that the blade could be considered dangerous. These objects connect both ends of a century.

  The sunlight coming through the window is strong and clear, responsible for making everything visible in that room on that day, but also (literally) for creating this photograph. It is diffused through the rectangle of white muslin so that the image is evenly focused and lit. This is an unusual feat to begin with. Most family photographs at this time were taken outdoors, because the light is so much easier to handle. But not this one; George is fascinated by the sunlight and has thought hard how to use it in this cramped back room.

  The radiance of his new bride is to be matched by the gracious light flowing through the window: that is the point, and the poetry of his picture. It is a beautiful image by any standard, carefully considered, exquisitely lit and composed. Almost a wedding gift from husband to wife. And they are both there together, united, breathing the same warm air.

  The photograph implies the photographer.

  George is not quite in the same room though. To take his picture, he has opened the door that separates the parlour from the kitchen – there is the elliptical shape of the brass knob on the right – and positioned himself just over the threshold into the front room. The kitchen has three doors: this one, the one on the left that leads to the staircase and the one at the back that gives onto the yard. George has opened one and shut two to arrange the light perfectly – or so he has to hope; for he has no certain idea how the picture will turn out until it returns from the printer. All he has is judgement and sight, and the natural light stealing through the Victorian window. But when the image is developed it looks like a painting; specifically, it looks like a Vermeer.

  Think of Vermeer’s woman reading a letter in seventeenth-century Delft, or the painting of a milkmaid at a table illuminated by a side window, the filtered light bathing the figure in gentle purity; a condensed sonnet of absorption, solitude and slow time. Veda stands in the same session of silent thought, three hundred years later. But my grandfather had never seen a Vermeer; he had never even heard of this Dutch artist who languished in obscurity for centuries after his death. Vermeer was still a minor obsession as late as 1912, when Proust has his character Swann plead an essay he is supposed to be writing on the revelation of Vermeer to get out of tea with Odette. And later in the sequence of novels, when the fictional writer Bergotte suffers his fatal heart attack while contemplating the famous patch of yellow wall in View of Delft, Proust still could not assume that any of his readers knew the painter’s work. George had no access to art magazines, and no illustrated monographs on Vermeer had yet been published. None of his paintings were in British museums.

  George is a travelling salesman who would like to have been an artist. I think of the technical drawings that won him that award of distinction as a soldier. The lives of even quite recent generations might almost disappear from our understanding if we did not think of their aspirations. He yearned to be something other than what he was, at a time before free education, when people had to make themselves up from what was available – the dance school, the local factory where his father had worked (and where George first started out as an apprentice). Then came the Boer War in South Africa, robbing him of more youthful chances. Reality suppressed the dreams. He had to make money to look after Veda, to provide for the clothes she sewed, the apples she peeled, the children to come. His drawings are all gone to dust. But here, in this photograph, in this redemptive moment, George Elston is an artist.

  And the picture was not made with an ordinary Box Brownie. The image measures 3 inches by 4¾; it does not fit any film format for the Brownie. There are various possibilities for the camera and processing method he might have used, but most likely is either a glass-plate camera, or a folding bellows camera with a roll of film. He sets it up on the back of a chair, perhaps, to keep its perfect steadiness (nothing is out of focus), a camera presumably borrowed, for there is scarcely another image from this time in his life, and George could hardly afford such equipment.

  A photograph is a body of knowledge as an image but also as an object. How it was made tells so much. There they are together, man and wife, and the exposure time must be quite long, especially if transmitting light onto a glass plate. Almost impossible to imagine in our era of instantaneous images, this duration somehow makes the scene more poignant. They breathe; and they hold their breath.

  Veda looks slightly down and away, diffidently self-conscious as she is in every photograph. I have the recipe she used for this apple pie in her handwritten book with its slow copperplate. It is not complex, just a bit of pastry and fruit. I have seen the pattern from which she made this shirtwaist suit, stitching the cloth by hand, the pleats on the sleeves surely her own flourish, like the many dozens of buttons on that dress in the picnic photograph. The picture is like a painting, but more than any painting it is shot through with the actual shadow of life – the momentary essence of Veda.

  It is extraordinary to me that George and Veda can have had earlier lives in Hull, Selby or Bradford, these chill northern cities. They exist to me entirely as figures rooted in a diminutive seaside landscape. But of course George is a rover, always on the move. He learns how to fix industrial boilers (exactly the same job as my other grandfather in Scotland, who progressed to super
intendent of a Victorian swimming pool). From Hull to Selby, Yorkshire to South Africa and two years at the front of the Boer War. And then somehow he meanders back to Bradford, presumably for work, where he meets Veda. And then he will go to Lincolnshire, and circulate around England for another thirty years until his retirement.

  His suitcase: the sight of its appearance, long ago, used to make Betty cry because it heralded George’s Monday departure. There is a curious moment in the birthday memoir where she writes of the week dragging slowly by, of waiting for his Friday return from her lookout upstairs. ‘There was a long view to the bend in the road along which he would at last appear, walking with heavy leather case. I would rush out to meet him, helping with five-year-old ardour to carry the suitcase. There might be a pencil box or purse or some other trinket from the utterly foreign shops away in the abroad of Nottingham or Bradford. I used to assist in the packing and unpacking of that case. It is sorrowful to think that my ready and willing pleasure in being an integral part of his affairs, and his in mine, not only came to an end but dramatically reversed.’

  Of George’s travelling career I have only a dim shot of a Jack Russell outside a Macclesfield pub; my mother has no impressions beyond this age. Nor did she ask any questions. I can imagine the lonely life, trying to make a home of a rented room, reading newspapers in weak gaslight, eating with some fellow traveller in the station hotel, and then returning home as if the weekend was more real than the road – as if Chapel was his true existence. One day his daughter stops running up the road to greet him; after their schism, the Friday arrivals are as joyless for George, perhaps, as the Monday departures once were for Betty.

  In the same year that George and Veda were born, 1880, the house where I grew up was built. It had a hidden staircase that led to a balcony between two narrow attics. You stood there beneath a cupola flooded with silvery Edinburgh light looking down through the stairwell, painted many times over by my father on scaffolding with long poles until he got it exactly the right yellow. I thought, and still think, these high places are the best in the world. Round lunette windows high above the boulevards of European cities, where someone is lucky enough to live, secret attics above department stores, narrow rooms perched on top of nineteenth-century brownstones in New York. Nobody need know you are there. I loved being up in the attic, reading, free, out of the way, my father painting in the studio below, my mother weaving her tapestries. Some of my dreams are still set in that house: running up the winding staircase, lying on the bed in the bare attic, seeing the green sea from its high window. I used to look across to the lights of Fife, spread out along the shore at dusk, and think it was like the French Riviera. The attic bred in me a taste for empty rooms. On that bed, where I slept, were the cotton sheets brought back from India by Captain Green.

  Unlike her sisters Daisy and Hilda, Veda never travelled to India or anywhere else overseas. The furthest journey she ever made was the translation from Lincolnshire to Edinburgh to live with my parents in the 1960s. She never returned to Chapel, but somehow made a second life for herself in Scotland. I look at the photograph of her in the Bradford kitchen seeing the same grace that was always there even in the deafness and frailty of age. She is no blood relation to me, but I wish I had inherited some of her traits, instead of the Indian teapot.

  Perhaps it was Daisy’s departure from their Bradford home to join her husband in India that sent Veda back home to Chapel St Leonards and her mother Rebecca. Perhaps she was lonely with George away all week. Of those two decades and more before Betty came to live with them there is very little news, except for a few details sieved from the local papers. Veda plays whist with some success for charity, wins various village competitions, sits loyally on the church council for many years (as does Miss Moore, not incidentally: she features in the leaked minutes, gossiping and complaining). George conducts a small band at fundraising dances at the village hall or the Vine. He also plays the drums, his services required at festivities in surrounding towns and villages.

  Apparently they go to fancy-dress dances in Chapel. One of Veda’s costumes was Eat More Fruit – they had titles – and she was covered all over in pictures of fruit cut from magazines. Another was Mrs Which-Way? in which she dressed back and front exactly the same, with two pairs of kid boots attached to her feet, pointing in different directions. They reveal a humour (although also a pathos, to me) which my mother never seems to have beheld in her parents. But she does recall the great celebrations for the Coronation of George VI in 1937.

  George, ever one for dressing up, decorating, had glorified the front of our house with various emblems of the occasion – royalty, glorious Great Britain, flags winning first prize for his remarkable achievement. But no less theatrical was his creation for children set on a horse-drawn farm cart, suitably be-flagged. There am I the centre figure, as Britannia, helmet and shield just like the figure on the coins, sitting with trident raised, surrounded by every country in the empire, children wearing appropriate outfits for Canada, Australia etc. This talent of George’s, which in another later age may well have taken off professionally into stage design or costume, was surely unique in a very un-lively village of potato growers.

  But Veda was the most astonishing player that day. When the entire village was assembled on the green for the judging of best fancy-dress costume, first prize was awarded to someone who hadn’t been there at all: Mrs Veda Elston.

  Everyone looked around, and then stepped forth a bedraggled old tramp. Gasps of astonishment. What came over that reticent, middle-aged respectable woman, to transform herself in old dirty clothes, head to toe, hair concealed under a bashed up old hat, who had spent the day sitting on the roadside with an old pram full of rubbish; she had even asked the local bobby to pretend to say move along, and most daring of all, had taken an empty beer bottle to the Vine, banged it on the counter and demanded in a gruff voice to have them ‘Fill it up mister!’ Even I wasn’t sure if it really was Veda.

  Hilda, not long after the Bradford photograph, married Captain Green and had her two babies. So did all of Veda’s sisters. But no children ever came for this unassuming woman, until her adopted daughter in 1929. By then Veda and George had been married for over twenty years, during which the temperaments embodied in the walking photograph had become dramatically pronounced. Veda was increasingly self-effacing, peaceable, quiet; George’s vigour had transformed into irritability. My mother remembers his frustration, days of rising anger followed by nights of bronchitic coughing. How could patient Veda stand it?

  George descended from soldier to boiler mender, and then on down to salesman of textile lubricants and eventually soap. On commission, which dwindled dramatically as textile soap itself became a thing of the past. Church meetings at Chapel were full of anxiety about work and the great twenties Depression, the parishioners fretting over the General Strike in 1926, the year my mother was born, and the terrible unemployment that followed. The Jarrow March passed close by through the Midlands; many Chapel villagers were out of work. That George hung on as long as he did seems miraculous now, for he kept working until my mother turned twenty-one, when he was sixty-six and in very poor health. Even from the start of his career, the commission was so slim that they had to make ends meet – or rather Veda did – through summer lettings. For three years, she also took in Daisy’s children.

  Daisy had met and married one of Captain Green’s friends from the Raj; indeed she seems to have been the one who introduced Hilda to her future husband. But unlike Hilda, Daisy actually went out to live in India for many years, coming back and forth to Lincolnshire to leave each of her three sons in Veda’s care as they became old enough to go to school. They boarded with the Elstons at weekends and during all the school holidays, three lads aged between eight and fourteen. This was all well before my mother’s time, and how much she wished it hadn’t been. ‘I used to spend long hours with their photographs, making believe that I had three brothers. I knew their faces so well and was faint
ly jealous of these happy boys playing on the beach with my so much younger mother. She always seemed so terribly old to me. They wore school uniforms of gray with black and white ties, attending Orient College in Skegness – it only now occurs to me that this bizarre name was not so inappropriate, the school being filled with the left-behind children of Raj families.’

  At last came a day when these mythical cousins and their mother materialised. ‘The emotional sequences of the event were so typical of many a later occasion – high expectation and unrestrained excitement beforehand, instant repressed abashment when the visitors appeared, tongue-tied blushings and all sorts of agonies that made the whole thing unbearable and a matter for reactionary sobbing and disappointment afterwards. For the three boys were now grown men, and the eldest, David, was even going thin on top though I fell romantically for the young Pat, a pink-gold-blue paragon in his early twenties.’

  To my horror, among those old Lincolnshire newspapers I recently came across a trial centring on this supposedly happy and convenient boarding arrangement. Veda is forced to sue her own brother-in-law for failing to pay the agreed fees. All this time, she has been looking after the three boys and even when Daisy and her husband have returned from India to live in Harrogate, they still fail to cough up this long-delayed sum, until the judge decrees it.

  What anguish and anxiety this must have caused the Elstons. And perhaps George’s harsh treatment of the eldest boy – he once sent him to bed for failing to return from the village shop with the right brand of cigarette – takes on a slightly different complexion. The intense stress and anxiety of having these three large boys in the small house, and of entertaining them during holidays, and keeping them fed and clothed and their schoolwork done, and all the while the money from the soap commission running out and no fees coming from India. No wonder it would later take Daisy so long to pay a visit.