On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  From the Cape he returns to Hull, and a position selling lubricating oil for machines, his wartime expertise no doubt respected. Then swiftly on to Bradford, where he meets Veda, and they shift from the Midlands city to this coastal village that is home to her but so inconveniently remote for his work; although that might have its appeal. George is always moving, restless, even before he becomes a soap salesman; three more decades of travelling follow. I have a handful of his train tickets from the 1920s, expenses pencilled on the back in his immaculate script. The routes are planned, the possibilities evaluated before every departure, his successes – and failures – recorded in the all-important order book, a measure of the pressures upon him. The soap he sells will gradually become redundant as chemists devise ever-more potent detergents. His customers in the dark satanic mills are always the same, never increasing in number. It must have been a Sisyphean task to fill that book.

  Once, George picked up a boy who was dithering by the tide and threw him straight into the water. Get on with it! This is told in a letter to my mother by the nephew who was banished to bed for bringing home the wrong cigarettes. I think of George raging at poor Granny Crawford. These incidents are so easily imagined they spring into my head fully formed, graphic as recurrent nightmares. I recoil from them almost more than events I cannot so readily picture: the affair with Hilda, the betrayal of Veda, the lies he told his daughter. These are, for the moment, still obscure. Historians tell of redemption: the addict who went to Australia and became a war hero; the adulterer who founded a children’s hospital. I want to find George’s better nature, to see him like the grandfather in the painting, with the innocent love of a grandchild.

  His intentions must be apparent, at least, in what he made – the doll’s house, the bookcases, the photograph of Veda. The fine Edwardian aviary for birds in the garden, above all the theatre with its potential for the full Shakespearean repertoire. And when George hands Betty the Bible that Christmas Day, solemnly declaring that it is the most important book she will ever own, shame might prompt the rhetoric. Even my mother considered this possibility in her memoir. ‘At this distance in time, I can see that he was perhaps in the throes of everlasting guilt over my advent. He was also a sick man, bedevilled increasingly by recurrent bronchitis every winter, and lumbago which literally doubled him over. A teenager enjoying robust health myself, and having no idea of the effects of ill-health upon the temper, I found his incessant coughing a great trial. But my mother was of such good nature she could only have been sympathetic.’

  Bent double also by his weekly suitcase, lugged around the country until retirement. And George does not retire until he is sixty-six, the year my mother comes of age. He has to keep earning to pay for his late-life daughter. The child might not appreciate this – I never asked to be born – but the grandchild does. His wages were smaller every year. I found a newspaper ad in which he puts his bandsman’s costume up for sale. ‘In fine condition, little used in recent years.’ He was only fifty-five.

  Again and again I return to the photograph of Veda. The beauty of the image, the love of the woman, the gentle light streaming through the scene and his camera. Time is photography’s true subject, people always say, but this picture seems alive to the stranger phenomenon of chance, the immense lucky strike by which two people meet and fall in love.

  A lifetime of anger towards George has washed out to sea. I have grown up and learned about human frailty; the effects of foolishness and disappointment; the longing for a child. I can imagine what it is to go out the front door and leave one’s mistakes behind; the newness of Monday, its redemptive return to work, the cancelling out of one week’s failures by the arrival of the next; the limitless ever-changing world seen from trains and through travel. And what was Hilda at first but a bright new travelling companion, going forward together with George? She shared what home-bound Veda never could.

  And who am I to know what the wager was in the end: whether Betty was the solace for a lost relationship with Hilda; or the adoption an act of expiation towards his daughter and her very young mother? Perhaps he gave Veda the child she could not have to atone for his infidelity; or perhaps he actually loved Betty. George struggles so hard to control the world, but cannot. His great idea, to pass my mother off as born to the Elstons, is as much a disaster as his later pretence that she is not his natural child. He gambles with the truth, twice, and falls to his fate by the water.

  But I have been angry with them all on behalf of my mother. Even Hilda, poor Hilda, with a desperate pregnancy at twenty, her life irrevocably altered, no choice available in those days: how could she involve herself in all this swithering and then end it with a complete renunciation of Grace, especially when her own family so loves and wants this child? Why is it Mary Jane and not Hilda who returns for Betty that day? And how can Hilda be party to a legal document that is effectively a restraining order against her own mother and all the Blanchards? When the document is signed, Hilda maintains this secrecy long after George’s death, reported to her in Australia. If she confided in her husband, they must have made a pact not to tell their children, for Hilda obviously kept her first daughter a secret from Judy and Susan all through their successive sojourns in England, when they were within hailing distance of Betty. Shame does not explain everything, nor does George’s insistent campaigning, or even the general principle of confidentiality in adoption. But every act is human here; nothing is beyond imagination or understanding.

  Answers to some of these questions came from several members of the Blanchard family to whom my mother wrote in the 1980s. They are so tender, these missives sent to a woman who might as well have been a stranger. But in fact they all knew of her existence. Each correspondent in turn is amazed to learn that Betty knows nothing about her past; and each goes on to give a different version of the story.

  One second cousin writes to explain that Fred Blanchard – ‘a lovely kind gentleman with twinkling blue eyes, a warden of Hogsthorpe church’ – was unable to live with the shameful situation. Some believe that Fred and Mary Jane together urged Hilda to give up her child, though this is surely contradicted by the kidnap. Still others repeat the claim that the mill was too rough a place to raise Grace, or emphasise the social advantages offered by George: a quiet and more studious house, a better school for Betty, possibly even a girls’ school, though this is obviously not what happened. Indeed there is much talk of education as the main argument for the adoption, which makes little sense considering that Hilda herself was a boarder at Louth Grammar. I sieve the evidence like flour. Nobody explicitly mentions reputation, or marriage prospects, or seduction or anything so coarse. But each correspondent seems equally surprised by my mother’s ignorance.

  This secrecy makes me want to scream, like my mother trapped in the Edinburgh lift. How was she supposed to know anything about her past if they all kept mute? George died in 1952. Grandma Blanchard lived on for another seventeen years knowing where Betty was, sending cuttings about her out to Australia – school, art college, graduation, marriage, even my brother’s birth – so that Hilda knew too. Were they just abiding by a worthless document all that time? There had been no legal threat whatsoever since my mother came of age in 1947. The unending silence may have been out of respect for Hilda, Veda, Betty, or all three; or for the sake of George’s amour propre. Yet there was little point in it ever since the day Aunt Emma unleashed her revelation, backed up by a photograph, on that green country bus. Whatever the original motive it must surely have changed over time until everyone thought it was just too late.

  And even when the wall came down in 1986, the same thing seemed to happen in miniature during the family gatherings with Judy and Susan. Hardly anything was said about Hilda, her character, her feelings, what her life was like with and without Grace, or Betty, still less how (or when) that name could have been so casually changed. My mother never asked Veda about the adoption, the sudden arrival of this child in her house; and I can never ask George.
I marvel that she knows so little about her father and that I have to dig so deep. A great silence hangs over Chapel.

  I could place too much emphasis on George’s end simply because I have a death certificate: shortest of stories, last tale of cause and effect. Even a birth certificate may not give us so much. Of Ghirlandaio, poignant painter, we have neither a month nor a year for his birth, sometime in the fifteenth century, only the narrative of his very sudden illness, carried off by ‘a pestilential fever’ in his forties. George’s death certificate – which of course my mother does not have, so I send off for it – tells a sad story. He dies at home, on Valentine’s Day, at the age of seventy-one. Mrs Simpson has come round from next door, presumably to comfort Veda, since Betty is not there. Dr Paterson certifies his old friend’s death. The cause is that annual bronchitis Betty found so hard to endure, which has finally turned into hypostatic pneumonia. George is described, here, in this last of all documents, simply as Traveller.

  Books are reckonings. I picture an encounter with my grandfather in the afterlife, should it exist. The child’s question immediately presents itself: what age are we in that state? Is it the age at which we die? In which case my mother is now twenty-two years older than George was at his death; old enough to be his mother, in this existential algebra. Perhaps George is young again and yet to make his fateful mistake; or seventy-one and furious to find the past revived. Maybe he explains it all to me as nobody else ever could: grandfather to grandchild, patient, loving, with an eternity of time to explain the vagaries of life.

  My mother says George had no accent and I see him slipping free of the Yorkshire tones he was born to, always escaping the status quo. And though he is my grandfather, and I have his blood, he is like all long-distant ancestors to me – these people of the past who elude us, no matter how hard we try to drag them back out of time’s tide. A photograph and an anecdote or two; if we are lucky, some writing or a headstone.

  If he could be brought back from beyond the bar, what would George say? That he had no regrets, that he’d had the joy of a child and known what it was to love Betty as well as Veda (and perhaps Hilda)? Or would he say that nobody understood him, all the decades of hard grind up and down the country, the misery of having no child followed by the ingratitude of the one who came, and then went? Shut down the heart, remain fiercely practical.

  I have another grandfather who I also did not know, on my father’s side. He died running for a bus at fifty. But he lives on in people’s conversations – always cracking jokes, the life and soul, the man who built the first crystal radio in Dunfermline and turned the volume so high they could hear Caruso singing Tosca on the far side of town. Willie Cumming’s warmth survives in words. George Elston seems to die by them.

  Yet I know he had friends and drinking partners, conducted his fellow musicians at dances. Mr Geo. Elston officiated, it says in newspaper accounts of fundraisers for the cottage hospital. He wins a dance competition himself, surely taught by his mother Lauretta. An ex-serviceman, he continues to serve, a mender, a carpenter, an engineer, a signalman in the Home Guard. His precision is there in the perfect point of that ancient pencil. I can imagine so much more, but my sense is that George does not want my attention. The subterfuge is his idea; he is the founder of all this silence, as averted as Count Bellelli in Degas’s painting.

  Historians do not give much consideration to the feelings of people in the past: emotions are to be avoided as unstable, irrelevant or simply unverifiable in the absence of documentary evidence. A teacher at my school once gave a lesson about the naming of sixteenth-century children – how each new baby might be christened John, even if it was a girl, because infant mortality rates were so high and the ancestral name must be preserved; this was supposedly proof that the parents felt no grief. We learned that widows conveniently wed their neighbours, widowers married their wives’ sisters, that halfwit children were suppressed, and all of it with nothing but brutal pragmatism. As a student, I remember a professor insisting that romantic love did not exist until the Renaissance, when it was invented; that mothers and fathers did not develop parental feelings for their young until it was obvious that they would survive infancy, and other contrived academic hypotheses. Only consider Dante’s love songs to Beatrice or Ben Jonson’s lament for his beloved son, dead at seven, his best and most feelingful poetry. Even now, art historians regard Ghirlandaio’s painting of 1461 as an anomaly because it runs against their theories of Renaissance portraiture in acknowledging the old man’s deformity. I have even read that it must be an imaginary portrait, devised to illustrate the blindness of a grandchild’s love. It is amazing that any scholar should be so arrogant as to assume a lack of feeling in the long dead simply because there is no textual evidence of the opposite. Or that anyone could look at the Ghirlandaio and not see a portrait of two people who really lived, and loved, not see the authenticity of both the likeness and the emotion represented there. Look at the photograph of Betty and Mary Jane on the beach; it is exactly the same relationship.

  My mother’s childhood was given to me as a black-and-white fable, and I am trying to confuse it with colour. I cannot bear to think that it was all so straightforward, or that they all suffered so much – Hilda bereft and banished, Grandma Blanchard heartbroken, Veda presumably flattened, my mother lied to and deprived of her freedom, my grandfather loathed and forgotten. George gave me my mother, loved Veda, was drawn to Hilda, whose daughters adored her as a woman of utmost patience and kindness. All around us are stories that cannot be squared or circled or turned into something so easily defined. Death, after all, comes to interrupt any narrative that looks as if it might have the audacity to try and complete itself.

  The cortège passes through the market square, past the statue of vanished Franklin and into the graveyard at Spilsby, where George himself disappears.

  From him my mother inherited a perfect sense of rhythm on the drums, and possibly her gift for drawing, although I never understand why this is regarded as such a heritable trait; we do not expect builders, dentists or composers to hand down professional genes. From Hilda, she inherited prodigiously flexible thumbs, as demonstrated in a photograph of her with some newly discovered Blanchard relatives all miming in a row. The picture immediately tells you that they are related: biological proof. But what else do they share? In the ninety-two years of my mother’s lifetime the nature–nurture debate has flourished, but it is as if she exists beyond the influence of either. She has her social fears and her opposable thumbs, she still loves jam tarts and encourages my children to make them. But so what? Without any pattern, she turned herself into an ideal mother, a tender grandmother. She alone invented herself.

  Go your own way. That was my father’s exhortation. He said it often and it has been the inspiration of my life. He lived it, and so did my mother in her more reticent way, even from an early age. Lately a letter was returned to her by an old school friend. It follows a chance encounter between them on the train from Lincoln to Mumby Road. Betty is twenty. She is responding to the resentful suggestion that she has gotten above herself and betrayed her origins, going off to art college. She writes with such modesty about all the things she is experiencing for the first time: the exhilaration of music, newspapers, comedies on radio and screen, the humour of James Thurber, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, the cartoons of H. M. Bateman, Renaissance painting, Degas, dancing with boys, staying up all night talking or drawing, having a room of her own. I see my young mother go forward, making herself up as she goes.

  She gave me the only grandparent I ever knew, sweet-faced Veda. A photograph of her from 1902 shows an Edwardian girl wearing a waist-length gold chain. I have the picture, the chain and its box, which still holds something of her – a breath, a faint dust – in its faded silk lining. All enter into living colour for me because I knew Veda. I can still see her bent hands, and hear the slight burr on the R as she tells my brother and me not to quarrel. I know that she had rhotacism, and
that this is an element of herself as much as her fondness for handkerchiefs embroidered with pansies or for Simnel cake, a thing as antique to me as the cartwheel pies in a Brueghel.

  She sits with us children at the table, smiling even though she is quite deaf and cannot hear what we are saying. She goes about tidying, shoulders hunched, frail body kept warm with many layers of wool. She holds up the blue glass to the light, thin arm around me, fine hair caught up in a nearly invisible net, the half-smile about her mouth completed in her soft blue eyes. And when she dies, I dream that she is standing by the garden gate, still smiling, but her eyes have turned into the amber beads of her necklace.

  Somehow she found another small community late in life, among the congregation of the Scottish church across the road, at the infirmary where she spent afternoons sewing with like-minded ladies. She kept working away, long after George’s death, holding up her spirits. Had she long ago forgiven him, or mildly accepted her fate? I might guess both.