On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  Why were there no children for Veda herself before Betty arrived in her life? As a young woman she had undergone a fairly serious operation, always a secret spoken of in hushed whispers, sometimes, curiously enough, in the changing rooms of dressshops, where she seemed to find it necessary to confide in the assistants because of a slightly enlarged waistline. She never would wear skirts, the way some people won’t wear trousers, only dresses. My mother was allowed to know, many years later, that she had suffered an ovarian cyst, and the worst thing about the operation for her was a great thirst that came after the anaesthetic. ‘Veda was nil by mouth. But she begged piteously for a drink, and the Irish nurse at last gave in to the plea for forbidden liquid, threatening to “knock her bloody head off” if she disclosed the incident to Matron. The relish with which she repeated the oath was comic, as never in her life did she use “language” of this coarseness herself.’

  Was it an ovarian cyst, or a botched hysterectomy? Whatever it was, Veda’s infertility was undisclosed – unexplained in contemporary parlance. Much later, exactly the same thing would happen to my mother, strangely; she had to wait many years for children until her condition was acknowledged and eventually cured by a very simple method. She has never ceased in her gratitude to the surgeon, saying that her life began anew. Later still, the same thing happened to me.

  Someone once sent me a postcard, for morale, of the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, a painting my mother also loved as an art student on a travelling scholarship to Italy. It shows two angels drawing back the curtains of a tent-like pavilion to reveal a Madonna with eyes gently lowered: a column of calmness, beautiful in blue. We had always thought the Madonna was pregnant – she has one hand to her waist as if easing the weight, and the other just below her breast where a seam in her overdress has been unstitched, as if her clothes were growing too tight. But looking at this postcard I suddenly wondered whether she was not pregnant at all, just gesturing at a mystical future she could only imagine. This crisis of faith came because I had just believed – hoped – that I was safely pregnant again, after the loss of a baby. I could not look at paintings of pregnant women at that time without wondering whether they really were conclusively with child.

  We need images, quite apart from anything else, when we have no words. The postcard was an encouragement from a friend who couldn’t have guessed how bad the timing would be. But how is an artist to represent fertility when it is an unknown quantity, invisible until the body shows it? And its opposite: infertility? I can hardly summon even one image to mind. Barren land, seeds cast on stony ground, the empty vessel – biblical metaphors, all, that speak irrefutably for themselves without need of illustration. Perhaps one should not be surprised that fertility clinics have no idea what to put on their walls. Something as vague and inoffensive as a computer-generated waterfall; I suppose they don’t want to raise your hopes. But it is in these clinics that some of us may see the first, best, most astonishing images of new life – in my case two sequins of light twinkling on the dark scanner: my twin daughters’ beating hearts.

  And how does that feel? I don’t have words; as so often, an image is better, specifically a painting made by a monk in a cell several centuries ago. A woman is receiving the news that she has conceived; an angel tells her so. In fact the split second of the telling is, in a sense, the conception. Mary leans forward, hands crossed over her body as if receiving a blessing, but also protecting a new life. Her face is a graceful portrait of that singular moment between universal awe and the dawning of more bewildering emotion. It is Fra Angelico’s Annunciation – sudden revelation made visible.

  8

  The Post Office

  War came to the Lincolnshire coast. Soldiers unfurled vast coils of barbed wire along the beaches to protect vulnerable villages from the much-threatened German invasion. Air-raid shelters were hollowed out of the ground and tank blockades began to appear in the landscape, abrupt as boxes dropped from the sky. In Skegness, Browning machine guns stood ready to strafe the Luftwaffe from angled mounts in the fairy dell, where children had lately paddled in the blue-bottomed pool. Butlin’s was transformed into a naval base.

  Billy Butlin was a shrewd entrepreneur, ever-zealous to expand his empire. Just before the outbreak of war, he had shipped a whole amusement park out to the International Exhibition in Liège. Four hundred tons of big dippers, merry-go-rounds, shooting galleries and dodgems now had to be transported back home in haste. He hired Belgian boatmen to load these outlandish contraptions onto barges, dragging iron horses and ghost trains through the country’s slow maze of canals in the darkness of night. Ships ferried them the last few miles across the Channel to Hull, in May 1940, just days before the Nazis invaded Belgium and British troops began the agonising evacuation of Dunkirk.

  The fairground was eventually stowed away in farm outhouses in Ireland, and Butlin lent all his holiday camps to the Admiralty as part of the war effort. The camp at Skegness was transformed into HMS Royal Arthur, as if it were itself a ship. The bright colours were painted over, the dance hall became an armoury and air-raid shelters were concealed beneath the jaunty flower beds. The surrealist painter George Melly, stationed there as a petty officer, remembered that the navy could not quite suppress the atmosphere of gaiety. The main office was still covered in murals of brilliant blue seaside skies and officers had their meals in a faux-Elizabethan inn called Ye Olde Pigge and Whistle.

  Lincolnshire, with so much flat shore on the east coast, opposite Belgium and the Netherlands, was strategically ideal as an embarkation point for British ships, and also as a launch pad for bombing raids. It is known to this day as Bomber County. Centres for training pilots and soldiers sprang up around Chapel and Ingoldmells, and the whole area took on the character of an armed encampment, a sinister inversion of Butlin’s, with added barbed wire.

  My mother was thirteen when the news of war came into the Elston household, funnelled through the wireless in the kitchen. This was controlled, of course, by George who censored the worst reports in favour of Churchill’s great morale-boosting orations. It all began with Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast on 3 September 1939 announcing that the Germans had been asked to withdraw their troops from Poland by 11 a.m. that day. ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received.’ It is a curious fact that nobody ever remembers the declaration of war, only Chamberlain’s grave intimation to the British people at 11.15.

  George switched the radio off and instantly set about making blackouts for the windows.

  Our neighbour Mr Simpson was a joiner with a big store room of plywood quickly available, and my father measured and cut with rapid accuracy. It looked bleak indeed, until curtains covered up these wooden panels. The ritual of putting up the blackout every evening was strictly followed. In a small village, the air raid wardens on their bicycle circuits were acute discoverers of any forbidden gleam of light.

  George immediately put himself forward as a soldier, this time joining the Home Guard, dressed once more in wartime khaki at the age of fifty-nine. A sergeant in the Boer War, he had been promoted from 2nd Lieutenant to Captain in the West Riding Volunteer Regiment during the Great War – a position that incidentally put him on equal footing with his brother-in-law, Captain Green – and now used his considerable experience to teach signalling to local farmers, veterans and other men who were not called up. They practised semaphore in the potato fields, tapped out Morse messages through the telegraph wires at the post office on Sundays, remained ever-ready for invasion. And their role was not without danger. The Luftwaffe attacked Butlin’s four hundred times in the first three years of the war; unexploded bombs are even now being found on Chapel beach.

  I have crossed those fields where George paraded with his troops, the low-lying earth still yielding up its victory crops. The wires are all still in place; the path from the Elstons’ house to the church in one direction, and to the post office in the other; they all remain unaltered. The dun, green and
grey palette is no different. And yet I find it almost impossible to believe that George and I walked the same landscape, felt the same emotions, had the same joy in the enormous sunrises that radiate over Lincolnshire, noticed the same gull-flocking dusks, loved – if he did – the same Betty. He is as remote to me as some soldier in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we translated at university, unreal, incomprehensible, a figure trudging through the ploughed fields of an illuminated manuscript. It is not just that I never met him, it is that my mother has made of him an absolute stranger.

  In 1940, all the local road and street signs were removed so that German parachute troops falling to earth around Chapel would have no idea where they were. A prisoner-of-war camp was set up less than a mile outside the village and hundreds of wireless operators were employed at Butlin’s, all ready to trigger the firing of torpedoes at any slight hint of an enemy submarine. Everyone in Chapel lived in fear of an imminent German invasion, which might arrive this very day on this very beach on this very stretch of the English coast. After all, leaked news of Operation Sealion revealed that Hitler was preparing to gun down the English on their very shores.

  But my mother remembers none of this. Perhaps George’s home guarding protected her from such knowledge. What she does recall is the peculiar fact that she was allowed to visit the coastguard’s lookout, up the long wooden stairs to this frail hut perched on the sandhills in the path of the North Sea gales, where old Mr Andrews, the burly coastguard, peered through his brass telescope for ominous vessels on the horizon. Somehow Betty was permitted to go with him, for a brief period at the outset of war, as if his lookout was the safest place on earth. But it was not long before household fears curtailed her freedom.

  I can’t forget the night when the invasion was most imminent. Leonard Short, also Home Guard, had received a message to raise George, who dressed and rushed out. We were quite uninformed as to where, why, what. But this was full alert. The adults must have been terrified. I remember the tapping at the window and all of us sleeping downstairs in case of this dire news and the urgent voice of Leonard calling Mr Elston to get up, get up, get up! I went to school next day as if nothing had ever happened.

  At Skegness Grammar, Headmaster Spendlove issued all his pupils with gas masks, which they found hilarious, running round the assembly hall laughing at these goggling gadgets. Perhaps it was one of his last cheerful moments as a teacher. In December that year, boys between sixteen and eighteen were required to register for national training. A month later, all eighteen-year-olds were conscripted.

  At school was a handsome lad named George Allenby, hero of the field and an academic scholar. He signed up at seventeen as a pilot and was swiftly flying sweeps across the water to France. On return, he used to drop notes from the cockpit down to school friends on the playing fields below and perform victory rolls above his mother’s house. All this spirit, all this gallant levity, ceased one still evening in May 1940 when his plane crashed into the sea eight miles from the shore. I have seen a photograph of Allenby, captain of the rugby team, strong arms folded, head tilted as he squints at the lens in the Lincolnshire sun. How rapidly was this schoolboy trained, flying perilous missions and then dead, before his eighteenth birthday. Mr Spendlove wept as he announced the death of Sergeant Allenby to rows of bewildered pupils in the assembly hall. Later, he seems to have suffered a kind of depression at the loss of so many of his boys.

  In the autumn of that same year, a dogfight took place at twilight over the shallow waters of Chapel Sands. A Heinkel was seen in the gathering darkness, attacking an RAF Hudson bomber, which spun back with all guns blazing. The crew of the Heinkel managed to jump out of the cockpit and into the sea only moments before it crashed. Amazed villagers saw two exhausted Germans struggling through the water to collapse on the dim shore. One was a boy of eighteen, the other a veteran of forty, both with Iron Crosses and freely admitting that they were glad to be alive and out of danger. They were immediately interned in the POW camp.

  The beach is a stage, washed new each day in the half-light of dawn. The village is an audience to every performance, the sea an ever-changing backdrop. And so it always has been, long before the Saxons came to pick edible seaweed, or the Romans channelled their elaborate drains into the tide, or medieval villagers took their walnut-shell boats out on the waters to fish for a living. Here is where the tall ships stalled and smugglers plundered cargo by night; where beacons were lit during the Napoleonic Wars; where men and women courted down the centuries in long dark clothes and striped Edwardian bathing suits and T-shirts and bikinis, and where generations of children built their first sandcastles. Messages in the sand, pebbles spelling out significant names, keys and rings disastrously lost: the everyday theatre of the shore. Early racing cars hurtled up and down in the roaring twenties. The Hindenburg sailed overhead, imponderably slow, in 1936. Here is where the Caprons supposedly sent clandestine signals to the enemy, where a Second World War colonel was arrested for treason, where dogfights took place and incendiary bombs fell. Ninety years of picnics and summer holidays have come and gone since my mother’s kidnap, as if it too had never happened. Each day’s events are wiped clean by the tide.

  The sea covers almost three-quarters of the earth’s surface, but few artists before the age of flight ever imagine its immense geographic spread across the globe. Leonardo, as so often, is the pioneer. Around 1515, he made a watercolour known as Bird’s Eye View of Sea Coast in which he imagines the sea off Italy, snug to the curving bays, meeting the land like a fitted blue carpet. The image is partly a map, and partly a relief, for the land is wavy with mountains. But mainly it is a vision of how the sea-covered world might look from way up in the air, where the war pilots fly.

  On a clear day the sea at Chapel is like a Seurat, crystal clear in its frozen shimmer of sand–sea colours. On a breezy day it is a Turner, the waves meeting the sky in a rolling vortex of liquid and air, the two elements blending in one of his rapid watercolours. ‘Pictures of nothing, and very like,’ was Hazlitt’s barbed remark; which, turned on its head by modern critics, makes Turner a pioneer of abstract painting. And what is the sea but a perfect abstraction? The sweep of sand stretches away in that blurry miasma of motion, colour and light that Turner captured so miraculously in a thousand paintings. He could be right there at work on Chapel Sands, I sometimes think: the sea remote and withdrawn, a distant bar of blue far away across the strand.

  Unlike so many other English artists, who cannot resist bathers, parasols or paddling children, Turner’s beaches are empty.

  Which is how Chapel would have looked in his day. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the beach was solitary, too far from the nearest railway station to be a popular bathing spot. It carried certain dangers, for the placid tide sometimes lost its temper in momentous gales that overwhelmed the undefended village. The Elizabethan historian Holinshed recorded in his Chronicles that the whole of Chapel was lost in 1571 except for a paltry few houses. ‘A ship was marooned on a housetop, the church was washed down except the steeple and a Master Pelham had a hundred sheep drowned.’

  Even when Victorian tents began to appear, and then beach huts, and a small wooden cafe, the tide would rise up and wash them away. The first guest house on the sea bank was extraordinary for its daring: patrons could open the front door and step straight out onto the sand. But the owners abandoned it after constant battles with the sea, and emigrated to Australia. The deserted building gradually crumbled, until the floods of 1922 swept it clean away.

  Visitors, on period postcards, constantly remark that this is all there is on this particular stretch of the Lincolnshire coast, nothing but sea and air. But it never feels that way to me. I look for traces of my mother’s story here; for what is sand but the pulverised past, ancient history in billions of particles? Something of her – of all these people – must still be here, or so I want to believe. But of course the tide never stays still and the sands are shaped by it, endlessly shifting, restless
ly dispersing out across the wide world.

  In the strange conditions of wartime, George Elston made a terrible decision. He removed his daughter from school without notice or explanation and installed her in the village post office. She was sixteen, and only a year away from qualifying for higher education. All her promise was now wasted in an even more circumscribed jail.

  It was the darkest place of my life. Eighteen months in a very small Civil Service prison. My sentence was to be junior assistant to the Postmaster in a cubicle he had partitioned off from his real business as the village shopkeeper. At the far end of his large and homely grocery was my hole, a shoe box standing on end, not a chink of daylight, a naked bulb dangling from a dusty flex above my miserable head. Everything apart from the wooden till, which had to be balanced every night, was of paper, yellowing and ancient; old calendars, old telegram forms, leaflets about pensions and savings stamps – things that did not Turn Over rapidly, but gave a half-shuffle forwards every decade. The only mint-new things, brightly coloured by contrast – flaring red and Reckitt’s blue – were the stamps, halfpenny and penny. Decrepit cloth-bound books fell open to reveal other sorts of stamps which I had never known existed – insurance stamps of various kinds in faded greys and brown colours and the most perplexing values for the innumerate. ‘Five thirteen and three halfpenny agriculturals please’, was the sort of demand which sent me into a quiver, and with stubs of pencils and backs of old forms I would try to cost it out, while some gnarled old ploughman waited suspiciously for the result.