On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  But of course it can’t quite be like that. They cannot know exactly when Veda will be there; it isn’t a perfect plot. The story tilts between luck and design. The younger boys were Hugh and Harold, then aged twelve and fifteen. Arthur would have been nineteen. Fanny told us of his death. ‘I was getting ready for church and Arthur called. Auntie, I’ve come to say goodbye. I am going to London to work at Gamages. Well, he’d been there only a little while when he came home, and didn’t look too well, and then he was in Alford Hospital. A man from Thoresby was in too and Arthur said to him I’ll never get better. Give my love to them, and if I don’t see them again I will remember them forever. He died that night, a growth in his stomach.’

  It is always this way – a growth, a turn, a seizure, a decline. No details. And so it still is with my mother. Nothing explicit should be asked or revealed. I do not know if this is tact, fear or decorum. I have an Edinburgh memory of someone visiting our house who was suffering from cancer. My uncle said not to sit on his chair, perhaps it was infectious. And when my father was dying in hospital, my mother didn’t want me to kiss his poor face too much. Illness was to them nameless and alien. Arthur died of a ruptured appendix, two years before the invention of penicillin.

  But still these two stories do not match. Fanny says two local boys were involved, which sits with the idea of chance and spontaneity; my aunt says two uncles were brought along to help, which complies with the notion of a plan. Mary Jane was acting alone; or with the help of her family. Betty was taken to the mill; or to Fanny’s house. Mary Jane did what she did on behalf of her daughter, trying to reverse Hilda’s harrowing decision; or to rescue a beloved grandchild. Or both. The only point on which they agree is that Hilda was not involved.

  I sit on the raised wall that runs ten miles in each direction and everyone says hello. A group of children on a geography field trip ask questions from their questionnaire. Do I know about the floods in 1953? Of course I do, for the houses were washed away and the tide came right up to the front steps of my mother’s old home. Do I think Chapel needs more money to prevent floods? I do indeed, for they are still occurring. Do I think much has changed here? Nothing at all, except for the opposing flood of caravans and the windmills of today, descendants of the old, cartwheeling away far out at sea, a rival village on the water.

  As I am sitting here, the bell of St Leonard’s Church chimes midday, sounding right out across the beach to mingle with the sea air. It is a shock – always the same shock in Chapel – just how close all the buildings are to drowning. I walk over to the church.

  And there, outside, stands the white stone memorial commemorating the dead of two wars. Right at the bottom of the roll of honour is Hugh Green: Navy. The boy who went missing, for whom his mother set a place at table all through the Second World War, without ever knowing his fate. Dismissed from the Royal Navy, Hugh had signed up as a deckhand on a merchant navy ship that departed from the Clyde on 2 January 1943 as part of a rescue convoy. The vessel sailed up towards the North-West Passage where Franklin disappeared, and then sank without trace in the freezing waters off Nova Scotia. It is presumed that the rigging became encrusted with ice and the ship turned turtle. ‘Lost with all hands’ is the seafaring phrase. I found Hugh’s name on the war memorial at Tower Hill in London. He was just twenty.

  Hilda Green was destroyed by grief and Rebe, so much the subject of my mother’s childhood envy, led a solitary life in nearby Woodhall Spa. She might have been just as resistant to our enquiries as everyone else in Chapel. But it was Rebe who told us that George had been a considerable draughtsman; that he’d made all the exquisite bookcases in their house and once designed a device for rolling their car headlamps in the days before the dipping of beams was invented. She dignified George Elston. Indeed she was the only one who did not recoil from the supposed shame of Betty’s adoption. And when she died, Rebe Green left what remained of the family wealth to my startled mother. Veda’s adopted daughter, George’s illegitimate child, she felt she had no right to any Green bequest. But my mother had been loving of Rebe, careful of her peccadilloes and respectful of her parents’ memory; blood, in the end, meant less than behaviour.

  There was enough money to build a studio for my parents’ cottage in the Borders. It was used by my father until his death and then, for many years afterwards, by my mother. It was there that she wove her homage to Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’. Instead of the standard scene, beloved of Victorian painters, in which the damsel drifts to her death in a flower-strewn barge, my mother depicted the Lady in the tower, working at her loom, sunlight pouring through the window – the very conditions in which she wove her own tapestry; a tribute from one weaver to another.

  Number 1 St Leonard’s Villas is now cracked and pebble-dashed, although the great tree is still there. I walk along the drains, over Tyler’s Bridge, and on towards the village of Hogsthorpe, scenting the lime trees, watching skylarks dip down over the summer fields. Poplars stand along the horizon like tall dark stitches, tacking the land to the sky. The pulse jumps with the sudden sight of a spire, and in this extreme flatness even the corn stooks seem high.

  The windmill is completely gone now, leaving only a ring of foundation stones. But in Hogsthorpe church, damp and medieval, remains the old parish register. Here is my mother’s surprising baptismal entry, Grace Ellston Blanchard, in which Hilda, or the vicar, acknowledges George. And further back in time is the record of Hilda’s own baptism, the christening of her brothers, and their deaths, along with those of Fred and Mary Jane. The completing circle.

  But there are other familiar names: the Crawford sisters, Daisy and Hilda, from the photograph of that country walk near Bradford. There is even a mention of Granny Crawford, who came to live with the Elstons. They all started life at Hogsthorpe; and so did Veda. Reading the spidery dates, I realise that Veda Elston and Mary Jane Blanchard were the same age.

  When my mother first went to Lincolnshire to search for her past in 1966, she was sorry to find that the Spilsby solicitor had no further documents relating to the adoption agreement. ‘So it cannot be scrutinised who instigated the arrangement,’ wrote my mother, ‘which means we are in the dark as to the circumstances at that time.’ I am struck by her probity. She could not be sure who had gone to the solicitor’s, and so she remained open-minded. Everyone else believed it was George.

  We have not spoken about the agreement for decades. Talking about it is too hard for my mother. To discover who Hilda was, to see her face in photographs, to come to know Judy and Susan, that has long since been enough to cauterise her curiosity about the document, with its cruel phrases and terms, its bargaining over – bargaining with – a living child.

  But I still want to know more, to see and understand it all clearly. Among the photographs sent by my Australian aunts are several showing my mother as a very small child, among fruit trees and raspberry canes, picking gooseberries, standing among cabbages, by the bakery and so on. On the back of each picture, her name is written. Sometimes she is called Grace; sometimes Betty. Here she is living in her mother’s house, and yet with her father’s name. How does she suddenly become Betty? Where and when and to whom does she belong?

  According to Fanny, Hilda did not know where Betty was after the kidnap, didn’t even know she had been taken from the sands at first. The child was no longer living with her, after all, and she seems to have been away for work. It is the new mother who is in charge of Betty that day, Veda who raises the fearful alarm; who calls George back from the Midlands to search for her, and to summon the police, who come knocking in Hogsthorpe. And then Grandma Blanchard is forced to confess that she has taken Betty, who is safe and sound with Fanny. Hilda now has the horror of retrieving her daughter and taking her back to the Elstons all over again, saying goodbye forever – once more.

  Again it is Fanny who tells what Hilda did next, in that written transcription.

  ‘Your grandma brought you to me. Then when Hilda got to know, she went
to the lawyer and had this document all made out, and sent it to Grandma Blanchard. George wanted you, and your grandma, she wanted you as well. So Hilda goes to the solicitor to settle it all, and Grandma never interfered again.’ Perhaps there never would have been such a document – or such a terminal loss to Mary Jane – without that hasty kidnap. Of course it is possible that Hilda and George had to act in concert to prevent any more ‘trouble’. Either way, this ruthless agreement removed Betty from her grandmother forever. Except for one final encounter.

  ‘One day your adopted mother, she took you to church and she saw Grandma Blanchard there in the pews, and before the service was over she took you out of the church and home so that she wouldn’t get a chance to speak to you. That was how it was. And then after that … nothing.’

  So poor Veda came face to face with Mary Jane in the little parish church. These two women, one with the child, the other without: a Solomonic judgement in Chapel. And Mary Jane, forced to do what seems best for Grace, must lovingly give her up. Veda and Mary Jane, the new mother, the old grandmother, both in their forties and living scarcely a mile apart, two strangers drawn together by this innocent child.

  Why did Hilda give up her daughter? All accounts differ. Fanny says, ‘She loved you but she didn’t want you growing up with the boys in the windmill.’ Another relative puts the onus on Grandma Blanchard. ‘She felt, reluctantly, that you had a better chance of education etc in a home with no other children.’ One of my Australian aunts writes that ‘Hilda let her go because growing up in that small community, they all knew. She couldn’t support her daughter and didn’t want her brought up in the bakery with those rough boys. George could give her an education and Veda would love her, having no child with George.’ My other Australian aunt believes that shame weighed heavily upon Hilda and it was better to leave her home and family behind and try to make a new life elsewhere, both for herself and for her daughter.

  A myth overgrew this story in my mind. I came to believe, in my vilification of him, that George must have paid Hilda to go away. Thousands of people left England for Australia in the twenties and thirties. Some were children, wrenched from their parents and sent away as ‘orphans’ to be adopted in the new world. Others took the assisted passage offered by the British government, after the 1922 Empire Land Settlement Scheme, to go out and populate the vast empty territories. I imagined that George took advantage of this scheme, as he had taken advantage of Hilda, topping up the money to send her away.

  When they first met, her Australian sisters gave my mother photographs of herself at the mill, as her birthright. They move me very much. Here is Grace cuddled by her boy uncles, dandled on Grandma Blanchard’s knee, danced up and down on her leg, smiling between Fred and his wife. She plays in the garden, laughs on the shore. Most uplifting is a photograph of Grace beaming up at her grandma, both perched on a knoll at Chapel beach. In every image, Mary Jane’s loving eyes look down upon her.

  But photographs of Grace with Hilda hardly exist. I am always distressed by this, leafing through these shots with my mother. There is one of her in Hilda’s lap as a baby, but it is obscure. ‘What a pity my head is in so much shadow and her face isn’t visible,’ she quietly remarks as we look at it. ‘The only face I really want to see is hers.’ In these pictures Grace appears part of a large loving family and it brings us joy to see that she was, briefly, in her remotest past, happy. But there are no memories to buoy these images, no anecdotes to anchor them, nothing to which these scenes could be moored. She has never known anybody from this time and place and cannot feel that these images connect with the present, more than ninety years later. ‘It is all so far away now’, she says, ‘that this person cannot possibly be me.’

  With the transcript of that first visit to Fanny there were other old papers, one of them a scrap torn from my mother’s Letts diary for 1986. ‘Went to see Mrs Toyne at Hogsthorpe, friend of Hilda. Says George and Hilda kept on meeting. Also her Aunt North, aged 98, aunt to Veda by marriage too, incredibly. Used to deliver milk to the mill and remembers my hair fine and fair. Also said Hilda used to meet George, putting the baby on a rug for picnics, clandestinely. This upset Grandma Blanchard.’

  It also upset my long-held sense of what was going on. The baby on the picnic rug was as much a shock as the village dance the night before the birth, or the unexpected arrival. Hilda couldn’t possibly want to see George, an unregenerate chancer who had surely ruined her life. And yet apparently she did, bringing Grace to meet him in secret. How else could George have come to know his daughter, after all, become so possessed with claiming her?

  Perhaps Hilda had some feelings for George, the sophisticated older man. I can’t picture that in black and white. I only want to believe that she loved Grace, and was forced to give her up, not that she sealed it by consulting a solicitor. If there are no pictures of mother and daughter together then surely it is only because Hilda is taking the photograph, invariably the one with the camera.

  Hilda departed from my mother’s life in 1929, taking that ship across the waters that circle around our world. Maybe she had hopes of return, like her brother Frank, who had gone to Melbourne before her and still come home. But the sea that connects us also separates us. Perhaps only by making this voyage could Hilda give up her child.

  She left from the coast where Franklin embarked for Australia to become governor general of what is now Tasmania. A statue of him stands in the centre of Hobart, an exact copy of the figure that dominates the main square in Spilsby. Franklin did not thrive in Australia and on his return to England accepted the invitation to search for the North-West Passage. In the late summer of 1845, his convoy was sighted by Inuit whalers. Nothing more was heard of it for fourteen years. During that time more than a dozen expeditions were dispatched in search of Franklin and his men, several funded by his wife in Lincolnshire. The wreck of one of these expeditionary ships, the Resolute, was itself only discovered decades later; wood from its hull was used to make the Oval Office desk at which American presidents have worked ever since.

  Franklin could only depart believing he would return. The party took provisions for three years, long enough to make their valiant discovery and sail back to be feted in London. But the ships were trapped in ice by 1847, and none of the crew lived to tell what happened next. Their exact fate is still disputed, though the vessels were recently discovered in eerily pristine condition on the ocean floor. In 1926, the year of my mother’s birth, headlines in the Skegness Times reported the discovery of a tin of meat found on a sledge abandoned by the Franklin expedition. It contained boiled beef, and when analysed by scientists, was declared to be in perfectly good condition. It is now thought that the tins contained dangerous levels of lead which may have weakened the mariners’ health. The manufacturers had not tested their product in the rush to be off, hastening these deaths in the ice.

  For many years Lady Franklin refused to believe that she might be a widow. She lived and died in hope. The epitaph for Franklin’s memorial in Westminster Abbey – there could be no grave – was written by her nephew-in-law, Tennyson.

  Not here! The white North has thy bones: and thou,

  Heroic sailor-soul,

  Art passing on thine happier voyage now

  Toward no earthly pole.

  Sea ice grows slowly. The film of young crystals that first appears on the surface can drift there for months, keeping time with the swell; it takes several seasons to harden into pack ice. Franklin’s ships moved more and more slowly as winter drew on, until they were caught fast in the Arctic ice. And so it may be with people. My mother’s feelings for her father took years to freeze into fixed aversion, and I wonder now whether they could ever be melted. When I showed her George’s radiant photograph of Veda in the kitchen in Bradford, speaking of its beauty and grace, she could not believe that he had taken it.

  15

  Grandparents

  I should have had a grandfather except that he died a decade before I was born
. I would like to have studied his face, circled in his embrace, like the child in Ghirlandaio’s masterpiece. Old Man and His Grandson is a picture of tenderness between two generations who have not the friction of being so close in age as parents and children. The old man with the carbuncled nose looks down at the flawless boy, who returns his gaze with the same unhurried interest. The child’s gaze (and the picture) invite you to imagine the surface of that nose, the feel of its bulbous swellings; but the child’s love (and the picture) cancel those deformities. This is how it should be between grandparent and grandchild: mutual curiosity, unqualified love.

  I never heard anything good about George from my mother, beyond the things he made and a few childhood games. From all the other fragments I could find, I fixed upon a single story. George was an ill-tempered, aggressive, domineering older man who seduced a very much younger woman and insisted on taking the daughter born of that deed. He imprisoned the child as far as he was able, first in the house, then the post office, until someone recognised her artistic gifts and pride so overcame his possessiveness that he set her free to study art. He dies; she shuts her eyes. Extinction, followed by oblivion.

  George Maybrook Elston: a pompous signature and a handful of photographs, a memory of gaiety at the Vine, where he plays the drums in that modest band, and of angry outbursts and ferocious coughing at home. Of course he is more than just this. I can hardly bear to think of the way he cheated and confined my mother, but we are not the collected memories of other people. I must be able to look more steadily at George, as his grandchild, consider the lineaments of his life: the non-existent father and the sudden orphaning at thirteen, when he no longer belongs to anyone; the uprooting from Yorkshire on a branch-line train down through England to the port of Plymouth to set sail for South Africa, a land scarcely mentioned or known to his contemporaries before the Boer War. In Plymouth he signs up with other raw recruits for a conflict so remote as to be unimaginable. G. M. Elston, nineteen years old, Signaller 24154, 11th (Yorkshire) Company, 3rd Battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry. There was no conscription; he didn’t have to go. A hazy photograph survives of him leading a little band of men down a hill to the Battle of Tygerfontein, armed with nothing but the mirrors with which they flashed messages across the hot valleys. Whatever lay before him in England was replaced by this new life of danger, of stalled days and sudden mobilisations, parched canvas, exhausted horses and disease. The draughtsmanship praised by Rebe may not have its expression in anything that survives but the army recognised his gifts, awarding him a distinction for engineering drawing. His career was surely one of decline thereafter – glory in the Eastern Cape more qualified in the Great War, where he is invalided out by bronchitis; prowess in drawing followed by a downward spiral through the 1920s, the General Strike and the Depression, holding tight to a job of ever-dwindling importance.