On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  My mother drew up a startling timeline of Great-Aunt Fanny.

  Born in 1886.

  Queen Victoria still reigning, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, Grover Cleveland President of the USA, 4 years before was the fall of Bismarck.

  1 – When Fanny was one, Edinburgh had its first street lighting

  3 – Eiffel Tower built

  6 – Tennyson died. Hardy wrote Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

  7 – Tchaikovsky wrote Symphonie ‘Pathétique’.

  12 – Marie Curie discovered radium and Zeppelin invented airships.

  13 – Boer War begun, in which George Elston fought.

  15 – Victoria died.

  17 – Wright brothers flew for the first time.

  24 – Tolstoy died.

  28 – Great War began.

  40 – Grace Blanchard born.

  43 – Fanny sheltered me after the kidnap.

  Soon after this first visit, my mother arranged for my brother and me to meet Fanny. She was so fragile and fine, the skin practically translucent over her bones, light fingers gesturing expressively as she spoke. We made a tape recording of every word, in its concise simplicity. None of us mentioned the relationship between Hilda and George, about whom Fanny knew nothing. But we did ask about our mother’s arrival in the world; she replied with devastating directness.

  ‘I did not know Hilda was expecting a baby. I was visiting my mother in Alford and she said to me, have you been to Hogsthorpe lately? I said no, she says I wish you would go, I says, why, Mother, I have nothing to go for? She was worried so she got my older sister Lizzie to go, and she went to Hogsthorpe for the weekend and stayed there with Grandma Blanchard. At the time she was there, your grandma kept a shop and Lizzie bought some things from out the shop. Well, that night Hilda went to a dance and then she came home and went up to bed. Next morning she got up and took her mother and father a cup of tea, Lizzie told me, and then she went back to bed. In the afternoon your grandma went upstairs to fetch some wrapping for these goods my sister had bought and as she passed her door Hilda called out, Mother, I want you, come … So Grandma Blanchard went in and Hilda says, I’m having a baby. Now them’s the words Grandma Blanchard told me. No, Hilda, she says, you’re not! I am, I am having a baby, she says. And she opened the bedroom window and her brothers were down in the yard and she called out, will you fetch your father to me here at once? And they fetched Fred and when he sees the condition she was in, he ran and fetched the doctor and when the doctor got there, Hilda was in a state of agony. Kill it, she says to him when it was going to be born. Kill it! No, Hilda, he says, the baby will live and you will rear it here. Now I am telling you what it was, just as the words that Lizzie told me. And my sister she came back home and she says, Fanny, I was so upset and poor Mary she was so upset, and she didn’t know where to put herself … but she says I am thankful to say that the baby lived. And there she is now,’ said Fanny, gazing at my mother. ‘She is one of the best. I never thought I should live to tell the story, and that was the story it was.’

  Fanny told my weeping mother, to soften the shock, that her mother had certainly loved her. She spoke of Hilda as a lovely girl, so clever, educated at the grammar, training to be a teacher of English. But she spoke little more of her, presumably because Hilda was soon gone to Australia; and because her mind turned to Mary Jane, her sister, whose heart she understood better.

  ‘I went about a month afterwards, to visit the Mill, and there you were in the carriage, cooing, beautiful. I can remember the old bakehouse when you was asleep, I would come and peep at you. And when you woke up I used to go and push the pram, because they was all busy baking bread and cakes. Your grandma had a lovely new pram for you. Everything was up to date. She was very thorough. I can see you now in that carriage and you used to gurgle and I would wheel you about. You were a merry child and always so eager to help when you grew. They used to lift you up to fill the tarts. That wasn’t long though, and then you was gone. Disappeared. I knew you up to that. It broke your grandmother’s heart.’

  We asked about the kidnap. It seems that George and Hilda both wanted Grace. They would take her on picnics and outings together, sometimes to Chapel beach, and she passed time with them both. The to and fro was supposed to cease in 1929 when she finally went to the Elstons; except that she was suddenly kidnapped back. Betty was brought to Fanny’s house, where it was thought that nobody would look for her, and given this disguise of new clothes. It didn’t last long. ‘In the end you had to go with your father. The lawyer made it so your Grandma was not allowed to speak to you, nor your mother, none of the family, nobody was, or to let you know you belonged to them. That was in the solicitor’s agreement. And she kept her word, did your Grandma Blanchard. Nor even my son Billy said a word, none of them – they all did as they were told. They all knew you, though. They used to see you at all sorts of events, but they never made themselves known. I can remember you running about, about this height, on the sands. I couldn’t speak to you. And when you got older, I used to meet you at Mrs Richardson’s house when I went to visit there. You would be bicycling in from school at Skegness. Billy used to come home and say do you know, I had a dance at Chapel tonight with Hilda’s little daughter.’

  Mrs Richardson: mother of Pat, Betty’s school friend. Presumably this was how the Richardsons knew. But everyone kept the contract to say nothing to the child; even Harold Blanchard, with the bread basket on his arm, calling upon the neighbours. Never did he once betray himself, or any of them, with a single word that he might so easily have tossed over the hedge.

  ‘I am so sorry I never saw my grandmother again,’ says my mother, on the tape, ‘because she took a lot of care of me.’

  ‘Well,’ says Fanny, ‘you would have been very happy if you had been brought up at the mill, because everyone was very content there together. These uncles of yours, they used to come rabbiting with Billy. My daughter had a piano, and they all were musical – the violin, the concertina, they always used to be playing and singing and enjoying themselves. And I had them every Christmas Day, your grandma was always so tired out after the Christmas baking and she was pleased they all would come. We used to take up the carpets and dance.’

  It pierces me to think what was taken from my mother. All the possibilities of a large and bustling family. She was a merry child then; but she became an anxious woman. The celebratory in her, strong as it is, lives inside a forest of fears.

  Fanny identified the woman on the bus. She was Aunt Emma, one of Fanny’s many sisters. Her intentions were benign. Compassion for Mary Jane led her to break George’s despotic rules, although of course she achieved nothing by it for, like the North Wind in Aesop’s fable, she terrified Betty instead of appealing to her with the warmth of the sun.

  ‘I suppose you wonder why I hadn’t tried to discover you,’ my mother later wrote with characteristic self-reproach to her new sisters, never wondering why they had not tried to contact her, since they had known of her existence and even her exact location since the early 1970s. ‘There seems to have been a reciprocal block, operating on both sides … I just looked on the past as a closed chapter, and felt that I was some other person than the one who had been Grace for those three years in another life. The Buddhists I think it is who ask their adherents to take a completely new name, really understanding the power of the word. A new orientation takes place.’

  My mother and her sisters are united by love, and blood, but have no shared background. They are from different continents, have disparate natures. For a while afterwards, she hesitantly questioned and they were serenely unexpansive about the past, even their own reaction to the revelation that Hilda had another daughter. They have made the long journey from Australia twice since then, and embraced my mother completely within their lives. The lost time is emblematically diminished in the gold band she wears on her middle finger: Mary Jane’s wedding ring, the gift of Judy and Susan. But all I have ever really learned of Hilda herself has
come much more recently from my aunts. ‘Her eyes were very blue, deep-set. Height 5’4”. She had no accent, English, but hard to say where from – just like Betty. I never heard her shout or raise her voice. She had a soft beautiful voice. Character, strong, well educated. I would say brave as she came to a strange country.’ Which could as easily be a description of my mother.

  Hilda set out for Australia from the Port of London on 1 February 1930, ten weeks after signing the adoption agreement. Any hopes she had of being employed as a teacher by the Australian government were flattened on arrival. They were not in need of teachers so much as domestic help for large country properties and Hilda was sent out to the magnificent wilds of the Western District, as it was then known, to a sheep station called Mount Hesse. Here she cooked and cleaned for the Scottish Kinninmonth family, who had several children she may have taught before they were sent off to boarding school in Geelong. Among the red rocks and the parched acres of merino sheep, she met Lance who ran the shearing machinery. They married; Judy and Susan were born.

  What a translation for Hilda from Lincolnshire to the Australian landscape: unimaginably vast, ancient, sunburned and free, with its unbounded space and crackling outback. From the low dark drains to the immense heat and light; from Hogsthorpe to the teeming port of Melbourne, where she later lived with Lance, shiny new cars churning the ochre dust of Bourke Street, elegant buildings going up from the centre out to the fledgling suburbs. But soon the work begins to dry up; Australia succumbs to the global Depression. Assisted passages virtually cease after 1930 and many of those who have only recently arrived start to depart. Hilda returns, back to the village from out of the wide open world, but Lance could not or would not settle in Hogsthorpe. On the second visit, in 1938, Mary Jane and Fred hope that Hilda will stay, even buying her a house in Chapel of all places, and so close to the Elstons that one imagines them forever running into each other. What were they thinking of? But back she goes again. Susan sent my mother some of Hilda’s old letters. In these, she writes home in a tense, practical voice. It is not hard to discern the suffering suppressed.

  For several years, before she finally found a teaching position, Hilda worked in a post office.

  An Australian friend once told me that his compatriots can appear incurious about the past, putting it behind them because they are always ‘just starting’. Perhaps this is why Susan and Judy did not press their mother about the photograph by the bed. It had always been there. Susan wrote to me: ‘I knew it was not me or Judy, or anyone else I had ever seen a photo of, but things were just accepted. It was part of the room. I had asked who it was when I was eleven or twelve and I can still remember her soft voice with the reply, and maybe instinctively knew that that was enough.’ Judy, taken as a small child to stand outside 1 St Leonard’s Villas, received the same answer from her mother. Who lived there? ‘A little girl I once knew.’

  14

  Out to Sea

  The beach is immense. It stretches for miles in the summer haze, unchanging, perpetually modern. What I see today is exactly what Tennyson saw, and generations of my family from Granny Crawford to Veda then Betty, day by day through her childhood: the pale bronze sand beneath a soaring cobalt sky – the houseless shore in living colour.

  I must stop seeing their world in black and white, the way old cameras preserve it, and my mind’s eye still frames it: George a dark spectre, Veda a shadow in the kitchen. Imagination arranges the figures like a practised photographer, composing scenes so they make sense, justifying each sequence with explanatory subplots. George has his way; Hilda surrenders the child and is banished; Veda is no longer lonely. That version is as graphic and reductive as a monochrome photograph. But it was for a long time my only picture of events, constructed from clues, and reinforced by emotion and instinct, until searching made a mockery of each certainty. Life reproves the imagination: look closer.

  Sitting on the dune walkway, I see occasional flashes of sky in the sea and recall the ships stalled in the shallows, the airmen dropping from German planes, grapefruit spilling yellow across the beach. I picture my mother in her bright blue dress stolen from these sands.

  We came here when I was a child, long before anyone knew of the kidnap. In those days it was a simple narrative of buckets, spades and candyfloss, warm translucent waves, the peg-legged gait of a donkey ride along the shore. I remember staying at the Vine; its liquid porridge heavily doused with sugar, which was not our Scottish way, the diamond-pane windows and the Jolly Fisherman printed on display plates in the foyer. I remember driving all the way from Edinburgh in a car without seat belts, hot red leather sucking at the backs of my knees. But I have no recollection of paddling in the fairy dell at Skegness; photographs say that we did, but they don’t generate a spark. The memory has gone out. I was three, like my mother in the bakery, and she had not even the prompt of photographs or family anecdotes. It doesn’t surprise me that she has nothing left except the jam.

  Her life in Chapel was my childhood fable. Naturally I began to question it as an adult. Stories get better with the telling. Going through the usual travails after university, trying to find work, trapped in a first job where the vicious employer menaced his young staff, where I saw colleagues bullied and sacked on the spot, I occasionally wondered just how terrible the Post Office could be under the kindly eye of Mr Stow. I go there now, into what used to be the Stores, now an omnipurpose emporium stocked mainly out of China, and instantly realise for the very first time – what a failure of my imagination – just what a prison this is. For here is the back room where my mother sat, windowless and oppressively dark despite modern strip lighting: a freezing cave even on this summer’s day. How could George have done it? How could he have wrenched her out of school, locked her away in the prime of her youth, deprived her of everything that my parents gave me – education and hope, friendship, freedom and love?

  The Vine is long past its best, getting by with alternate nights of karaoke and curry. You have to search hard to discover the old village in the tide of new holiday homes and caravan parks (one called Happy Days) but still it is just about there. The circular village green remains, and the handful of shops and cafes where the buses from Skegness still wheel round, a faint haze of sand shifting down from the strand. Walk up and over the Pulley and there is the beach, a sequence of receding strips: esplanade, shore, sea and far horizon. The edge of the world.

  Today, in high June, in the baking heat, there is not a soul here. A pub built from an old boat opens its doors on the beach, gentle winds shiver the seagrass, the water reflects the swelling cumulus above. And there is the uninterrupted stretch of sand. How could Hilda have snatched her away so easily, when there is nowhere to hide?

  It seems to me that the only exit is the Pulley in the centre of the village, but then I begin to walk and discover narrow chines through which today’s sunseekers pass on holiday mornings. Grace could have been whisked through any of them, straight into the waiting baker’s van. For there cannot have been anything spontaneous about it, as I had always imagined. Hilda could hardly have walked my tiny mother all the way home to Hogsthorpe, still less the twelve miles to Fanny’s house. There must have been a getaway vehicle, other Blanchards involved, perhaps even Mr and Mrs Blanchard themselves helping to save Grace from a terrible mistake. Fanny’s phrase keeps coming back to me: ‘It broke your grandmother’s heart.’ But why Mary Jane and not Hilda?

  It was Fanny who gave the details. And they are not on the tape that we made that day, but in the written transcript of my mother’s first visit to her great-aunt without us. One of those documents tossed in the tide of history, that have lain in lofts and boxes and plastic bags, that have been transported from Scotland to England, and from house to house over thirty years, now unearthed from a silt of old papers.

  There must have been too many picnics, too many outings. For it seems that George promised Grandma Blanchard that he would cease all connection with Hilda if only their child could go and
live with him in Chapel. ‘But he did not keep his promise,’ said Fanny. ‘And your grandma, she wanted you as well. It was she who claimed you off the sands. She asked two lads who were playing near you to bring you over. Then she took you away, and gave you all new clothes and brought you to my house to stay. But in the end you had to go with your father. The lawyer made it so that Grandma couldn’t see you any more. But she says, Fanny, I shall not interfere. It is Hilda’s wish and I know I have all the lads at home, and she doesn’t want her bringing up with the boys. And so your grandma couldn’t have you.’

  Ever since we first learned of the kidnap in 1985, we all assumed that it was the mother and not the grandmother who had come for Betty. More bewildering is that Hilda seems not to have known anything about it, until the police came knocking at the bakery door in Hogsthorpe and Mary Jane had to own up. ‘Your own mother, well, then she found out where you were and came and got you again and took you away to your father and new mother, and they had you ever after. It broke your grandmother’s heart.’

  Grandma Blanchard wanted her back and came to the beach with a plan. One of my Australian aunts now confirms it, in a different version. ‘Hilda had given Betty to George, gone home to Grandma alone and I guess the realisation of what had taken place must have set in very quickly. Grandma must have concluded that she could reverse this, and so, with the help of the younger boys, they decided they would go to the beach and get her back within only a few days of her going to live with George. Veda was alone with Betty on the beach, and the boys a little further along called her and she came running up. Off they all went, quickly back to the mill.’