On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  The world goes on. The skies, now short of Icarus and his prodigious folly, arch above us while great or tiny incidents topple us below. The Chinese poet wonders whether this can be the same sky, and the same moon, as the one he saw all those years ago before he was exiled. I cannot quite believe that George walked the same earth, that we are related, that I share his blood, so remote is he through silence and estrangement. But Brueghel’s painting helps me to know it is so. Here we all are by the sea again. Our forebears move through the same landscape, and it is not a monochrome world.

  I wonder now whether George actually believed he had achieved it, sustained this arrogant and foolhardy deception all the way from my mother’s birth in 1926 to his own death in 1952. He certainly did not manage to deceive his neighbours. But it turns out that he had arranged the official fiction very carefully, through lawyers.

  Since my mother never told him what she knew, it is quite possible that he went to his death believing she had no idea. Which may have been a self-wrought agony, I suppose, along with her final alienation from him. Betty left for another life and George lost the child he had fought so hard to possess. Did he reap what he sowed?

  10

  The Agreement

  With the birth of her children in the 1960s, my mother began to wonder again about her own origins. She had no clues about her early life, no anecdotes, letters or pictures of herself before the age of three. She had never seen her own birth certificate. This document had to exist, of course, although George had been unable to produce it when requested by Headmaster Spendlove. In 1966, she decided to return to Lincolnshire, taking a room at the Vine where Veda was raised, where George took his drinks, where she herself had worked as a holiday waitress, to search for evidence of her past.

  And what news there was. In a solicitor’s office in the market town of Spilsby, the registrar reached up to an orderly shelf of 1920s files and efficiently retrieved her certificate. On reading it he became embarrassed. It was his reluctant duty to inform her that there was no mention of a father, only a mother; that she was, ipso facto, illegitimate.

  This she had realised long ago; what she did not know was where and to whom she was born.

  Her birth is recorded as having taken place on 8 August 1926 at the High Mill in Hogsthorpe. She is called Grace. Her mother is Hilda Blanchard, twenty-one years of age. The only other family member cited in the document is Fred Blanchard, father of Hilda, and proprietor of the windmill and bakery. Grace is the baker’s granddaughter.

  The baby has no middle name, but she does have an enigmatic initial. It lies there, singular and unexplained on the heavy paper. She is registered as Grace E. Blanchard.

  My mother was forty when she saw this document for the first time. She had already passed from Betty Elston to Elizabeth Cumming on marriage to my father, but now she had another new identity to absorb and intimations of an earlier life before the one she knew. She had come into the world at a mill, perhaps to the sound of turning sails and the grinding of grain, perhaps to the scent of baking cakes and bread, in a village stupefyingly close to Chapel. Her birth mother was not long out of childhood herself. And this young woman had given her a better name, so much more beautiful than unmusical Betty. Grace: a syllable of what might have been.

  My mother had not known that she was once called Grace. She had never asked Veda about her early life, given the secrecy and suppression of the Elston household, and had only now consulted her because she needed the exact name to find the certificate. Veda gave the details, and more. ‘In 1966 I approached Frearsons solicitors to ask if any documents still existed relating to my birth or adoption,’ my mother wrote on the envelope that still contains the papers, ‘and they replied in the affirmative, but would not let me look at these unless written Authority was received from my adoptive parent still surviving. This Veda Maud Mary Elston gave.’ One may imagine the tact and regret involved in appealing to Veda, who was then eighty-six years old, frail and deaf and half a lifetime away from George’s betrayal, each woman anguished to think there was a first mother.

  Veda knew precisely where the birth certificate was and what it contained because she had herself stood in this very office in Spilsby nearly four decades earlier. For Frearsons had one further document pertaining to my mother, and this was the adoption agreement by which Grace was handed from one family to another, changing name as she went. The signatories are Hilda Blanchard, George and Veda Elston. Every harsh word of it indicates that it was drawn up as an immediate response to the kidnap from Chapel Sands.

  The agreement, in red and black ink on thick parchment, is dated 14 November 1929. A cold Thursday in a grave year of hung parliaments, poverty and global depression. In the wide world around them, Italian teachers are forced to join the Fascist Party. Stalin exiles Trotsky. The Wall Street Crash is at its absolute lowest. But there is nothing in the world as important, on this day, to these people, as the signing of the document.

  Hilda is called The Parent. George is titled Commercial Traveller. Grace is the child they are passing between them. The terms are brutal and binding. The Adopters shall have ‘the controlled custody’ of the child until she is twenty-one. She shall bear the name Elston and ‘be held out to the World and in all respects treated as if she were in fact the child of the Adopters’. And here comes the first catch. Hilda must never do anything to undermine this fiction. In order to bring Grace to regard herself as the Adopters’ own child, ‘the Parent shall not herself, nor shall any other person on her behalf or with her consent hold any further communication with the Infant or attempt to convey to her any information as to her actual parentage or attempt to remove the Infant from the care and custody of the Adopters’. What happened on the beach that day must never happen again. That is the implication. Hilda has tried to take her daughter back from George, claiming her off the sands at Chapel; and the Elstons have resorted to a lawyer. There must be no further connection, no future plots to kidnap Grace, who now becomes Betty in the stroke of this tract, no more attempts ‘to speak to her, or to interfere with the control, education or management of the Infant’.

  And of course there would not be – as far as the Elstons knew – for another decade, until that day on the green country bus.

  Now the document becomes threatening, and needlessly cruel. ‘The Parent shall not institute any legal proceedings for the recovery of the Infant.’ She must rein herself in, let the child go, never try to contest this binding document – a document quite possibly made up out of George’s own head. For it is by no means a standard contract. And if the Parent should ever attempt to breach this deal in any way, she must ‘forthwith repay to the Adopters the entire amount expended by the latter in the maintenance, education and support of the child as ascertained debt’. An unimaginable threat to a young woman with no funds to speak of. And then comes the reward, such as it is: that if Hilda Blanchard abides by all of the above terms, then the Adopters will finance the child ‘for the cost of her maintenance and education’.

  And they agree to it all, this strange trio. Hilda Blanchard signs in the presence of the Hogsthorpe blacksmith Mr Janney, father of a childhood friend, who has perhaps taken the day off to travel to Spilsby and act as her witness. She gives nothing but her initial and surname. But there it is: her signature. This was the first time my mother had ever set eyes on Hilda’s shapely handwriting. George spells out his full name, as always, and is witnessed by the manager of the Victory Hotel, miles away in Leicester. Poor Veda has no witness except Miss Moore, secretary to the very solicitor who is drawing up this document; the same Miss Moore who sat next to the woman on the bus. No wonder she remembered it all so well.

  It is impossible to say who signed first, what order these signatures took. But the fact that George was in Leicester, the document presumably posted, or carried there with him, indicates that they were probably never in the same room together. What a mercy for all involved; for Veda, so betrayed, now agreeing to accept into her life
the child of her husband’s infidelity; for Hilda, forced to give up her daughter under pain of incalculable penalty; and for George, who would have had to look them both in the eye on this day of reckoning.

  How strange that the agreement should pivot on money, that the leverage – and the threat – is financial. George will come after Hilda for untold sums if she ever tries to speak to her daughter, or sue for her return. The model, one senses, may have been the court case between the Elstons and the Johnstons, where Veda had looked after her three nephews for years without receiving the promised payments. Except that this time the minor is George’s own daughter. The housing of children equals the spending of money: a Dickensian contract, fit for Scrooge. Or is there another way to see it? George is so desperate to have possession of his daughter, sole offspring, child of his heart, that he unleashes the one substantial threat he can come up with: take her away from me again and you will pay back every penny.

  The Adoption Act had only recently been passed in 1926. The whole possibility of surreptitiously commandeering someone else’s child was now over, at least in theory. Before the Act, children of all ages could be ‘borrowed’ in perpetuity, brought up by sisters, neighbours, aunts and uncles or even just random strangers who took a fancy to some child whose parents could not afford, or were not able, to look after them, or who simply believed that the child might have a better life elsewhere. Children from orphanages were distributed this way; or handed into orphanages in the first place because their mothers had too little money or too many other children. Infants grew up believing that their aunts or grandmothers were their mothers; whole villages and communities conspired to keep the exact truth of an unwanted teenage pregnancy from the growing child. Notorious maternity homes passed babies straight on to adoptive parents, taking fees from both sides, and children were often shipped overseas without any background checks, particularly to countries such as the Netherlands, where adoption was frowned on by the government. In a bid to stop the casual disappearance of children from orphanages overnight, specifically, progressive legislators in the House of Lords pioneered a new Act to protect both children and their birth parents, most usually the mothers from whom these children were effectively stolen.

  An Adoption Register was established in 1926 and every case was to be recorded in detail. The name of the birth parents must be registered, and so must the name and address of the adopter. This of course meant that it was possible for the adopted child to trace the birth mother in later life. It also meant that the child could trace the father, if the parent’s name was known. If my mother had consulted the Adoption Register she would have discovered not only the identity of her birth mother, Hilda, but also the fact that George was her father.

  Except that there was no such entry.

  My mother had in fact started her search with the Adoption Register. She travelled from Edinburgh to London by train to consult the archives and found no trace of her case; which is why, with considerable reluctance, in case it distressed her, she was forced to ask Veda.

  It turns out that George evaded the law. He never legally adopted my mother at all. I only know this because I live in the Internet age; my mother was searching on foot, as it were, and the long trudge through the woods did not give her the aerial picture of today. For George to adopt his daughter with full legality, in 1929, would have meant giving away the true relationship between her birth parents, as well as putting Hilda Blanchard’s name on public record. So the document they signed that day is nothing more than a business deal, a collection of terms upon which they somehow came to agreement. Which is perhaps where the money comes in. George could hardly take Hilda to court if she tried to retrieve her own child, for he had not legally adopted her; but the contract meant he could come after her money.

  It might be argued that he had no need to adopt his daughter at all, since he was her ‘natural’ father. But in establishing this arrangement, he also managed to erase his own paternity from the record (and nor did it appear on the birth certificate) by drawing up the document himself. Did he do so to cover his own secret, to conceal it from his daughter, to protect Veda, or Hilda, or for all these reasons? It is doubtful whether the adoption agreement could ever have been binding in any case, whether it was worth the proverbial parchment upon which it is written. But this is part of the tragedy. Did Hilda, or Veda, for one moment suspect this?

  A more unfathomable complication of my mother’s early life is something almost accidentally implied in the agreement, namely that she seems to have been back and forth between two lives. This child who has been Grace Blanchard in one village is now Betty Elston in another. For three years she has been living with her mother at the mill in Hogsthorpe, and now she is to live permanently with the Elstons at Chapel. But only if Hilda does not try to ‘hold any further communication with the Infant … or attempt to remove the Infant from the care and custody of the Adopters’. The warning is very specific; the possibility as real as if it had happened already. Grace is at the mill, then the house in Chapel, then she is stolen from the beach, perhaps taken back to the mill later. A sense of to and fro is inscribed in the document, which was signed less than three weeks after the kidnap.

  My mother knew nothing of this incident in 1966. We only learned of it twenty years later. To her, the agreement seemed a testament of longing and despair: a very young woman deprived of her child, forced to hand her over to bullying George, who has paid a solicitor to come up with terms so menacing as to keep Hilda well away. According to the Spilsby solicitor, the contract officially ‘extinguished’ all Hilda’s rights as a parent, although it could hardly have killed her feelings.

  About these, my mother must have felt keenly herself and yet she has never spoken of them to me. Perhaps she guards herself against the anguish. The document was painful enough, a revelation of chaos and casual bargaining with a child. It increased the retrospective sadness of her youth; whereas for me, growing up, it was the spar of hope for which I continually reached. Hilda must have loved Grace to have fought for her this way; George must have loved her to have fought back: this was what the document signified. And all those childhood imprisonments – never allowed out of the garden, no playing with other children, withdrawal from school to the post office jail – perhaps they were extreme methods devised by George to protect Betty from ‘attempts to convey her actual parentage’, or to snatch her back again from the Elstons. The direct breach of the adoption contract by the woman on the bus, whoever she was, trying so hard to bring Grace back to her grandmother: this was another proof of love. Against all this runs the certain knowledge that Hilda actually agreed to this intimidating contract and handed over her daughter for reasons as yet unknown but which might be guessed. Still, I could even make the intimidation a measure of feeling. What was George so afraid of: another kidnap from Chapel Sands, or the power of Hilda’s love for her child?

  My mother knew Hogsthorpe well, had cycled through it a thousand times as a girl. She also knew the Blanchard name, with its French origins and overtones of Thomas Hardy. It would have been perfectly possible for her to travel straight from Spilsby to Hogsthorpe – only twelve miles distant – the very morning she saw Hilda’s name on the birth certificate, or to have walked up the short road that evening from the Vine Hotel to the bakery. She might have discovered the identity of the woman on the bus, who always got off at Hogsthorpe; she might have searched for the grandmother who wanted to see her; she might have tried to find her birth mother. The map was, after all, tiny. But she was always fearful of hurting others. Had she gone any further, it might have brought maelstrom into Hilda’s life, and grief into Veda’s final years, for she was already suffering from heart failure and soon to die. Here is the dilemma for the adopted child: how to love and respect both mothers, the one unknown as well as the one who is here every day. I suppose my mother was trying to honour both. But all the possibilities were sidestepped, and slipped away.

  These people who invented us – who we
re they? In my own case, I have no doubt. For my mother, the identification was impossible. She really had no idea about any of them, even after seeing the documents in Spilsby. Recently, driving with her in the car, I ask her about her parents, whether Veda was an anxious woman given all she endured. ‘If she was, she never showed it.’ And George? ‘I have no idea. I do not know either of them.’ She speaks of them in the present tense, and suddenly they are with us in this instant: two people, once living, once lived with for almost twenty years, yet forever unknown.

  When Veda died in 1967, and my mother had to visit another lawyer to read the will, she found her origins invoked once again. Veda left everything ‘to my adopted daughter Betty’. The phrase must have been a legal requirement, but it communicated a lingering sense of detachment, as if the ruthless document still held sway.

  The effect of this visit to the Spilsby solicitor was to make my mother cease searching, at least for the moment. She wanted the truth, the sense of identity that comes from knowing about one’s birth, to add to the experience of living. But precisely what had she learned? Hilda’s name, her tender age, her proximity to Chapel; very little so far. But there was one immediate and jolting realisation and it concerned a childhood puzzle. In Chapel, each day, arrived that regular baker’s van from Hogsthorpe, cream-coloured, with Blanchard painted in capital letters on the side. Out of it got Harold Blanchard, the baker’s son, calling with bread for the Simpsons next door, then the Robinsons, and so on – but never for the Elstons. A strange anomaly of Betty’s youth was now suddenly and sharply explained.

  11

  George and Hilda

  Is it tactless to put their names together? Who knows anything profound about their union except that they produced a child. The only thing that can be said about George and Hilda for certain, at this stage, is what the document deliberately avoids: that they met – once, twice, many times? – and then came to an agreement never to meet again, while passing between them a daughter.