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On Chapel Sands

Page 20

by Laura Cumming


  It is all as remote as a fairy tale for my mother, but not for me. I reach back for my forebears, longing to make them love her. For most of my life, the only childhood photographs of her were those taken by George. Given what I knew about these years, I would look at them as if the roles were reversed: how can I reach you, dear child to whom I feel so maternal, how can I protect you from what is coming next, when you will no longer belong to anyone? I can’t pluck you out of these old images, fading away even as your life is drawing to its close. I cannot give you back the lost happiness. How many years before anybody said they loved you?

  The first inkling of that love, for me, came not in words but images: the photographs sent to my mother by the Australian Blanchards. These pictures were not in albums, but loose. They came in a plastic bag, a scattering of shadows from the past. Mary Jane dandling her. Hugh and Frank holding her hand. Grandma and grandchild on the beach. But lately I wrote to my aunts, searching for more answers, and in return came a package from Australia containing several photographs of George with Grace before she was Betty. He is kissing her, kneeling with her in the shallow waters in long-legged swimming costumes, monkeying about on the shore. There are many of her at the mill, playing on the doorstep, feeding chickens. But the shock is a picture I already know very well: George holding Grace on Chapel Sands.

  The moment is gone, passed into fading history, and yet something pulls it forward out of monochrome. For now we are back upon the beach and nothing bad has happened yet. My mother has not been handed over to George, lost Hilda, been kidnapped, or even shifted from Grace to Betty. Time runs backwards and here she is once more before her life divides. I look for the spark of chance, that trace of the here and now that the photographer cannot control, and it is there in that almost imperceptible blur of motion. We look back into the past to see the origins of the future. And it is as if the photograph predicts that future: my mother shifts in George’s grasp, trying to go her own way.

  The photograph implies the photographer; until now I could only guess who this was. Turning the scene around in the mind’s eye, and knowing to whom it belonged, I see George looking back at Hilda.

  The three of them are together like any other family on the beach, and Hilda is taking the photograph with George’s camera. It is better than the one they have at the mill. She stands quite close to Grace and George to frame the scene, but more telling than this intimacy is the expression on his face. This is the only family photograph in which George smiles.

  The moustache of his Bradford days has gone, along with some of his hair. The face is thinner, older, gentler. The photograph has not altered since I first saw it with the eyes of a child, but my understanding of it has changed, just like the Chapel stories my mother used to tell; I see it all anew.

  It is a way of keeping them all together, this picture, like the one my mother took of her parents in the garden; and perhaps it is elegiac, Hilda taking up the camera to commemorate these last days on Chapel Sands, knowing that her daughter may soon be gone. But my sense is that it comes before all of the sorrow and confusion and is a bright souvenir of that day, skimmed like the day itself out of time.

  George made one copy for himself and another for Hilda; that much is clear. But there is a difference between them. The print that stayed in Chapel was entirely mute and obscure, hidden in the back of the family album. The other one is not silent. Written across the top in fountain pen is this declaration: We Love You.

  Sending it to me, my Australian aunt was puzzled. Who could have written these words? To whom were they addressed? She was not sure, for the simple reason that she had never seen George’s handwriting. And it is a revelation of another kind for me too, for I hear my grandfather’s voice for the first and only time. All I ever had of him were a few stories and some photographs, but now came the speech of his heart. Looking again at the family album, I realise that almost the only person in it is his child, again and again, and that George cannot appear for taking her picture. But now they are together, father and daughter bound forever in this image, and speaking these words to the third, to the lost mother – we love you.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is written out of love for my mother, whose truest name was Grace. She gave me everything through our lives together. This is the least I can give back to a woman whose idea of a birthday present for her child was not to buy a memoir but to write one especially for her. And then to give that daughter permission to use it, so generously, thirty years later. Grace, Betty, beloved Elizabeth: my gratitude is unending.

  To all those who gave me the chance to tell this tale, I offer heartfelt thanks. To my great friend Patrick Walsh, best of all agents, who so well understood why I wanted to construct a pedestal for my mother’s writing. To Nan Graham of Scribner who so appreciated it, and sent her praise all the way from Fifth Avenue to a rural cottage in Wiltshire, where my mother was astonished to receive it in her ninety-second year. And to her colleague Daniel Loedel, for his acute and sensitive editing and his faith in the enterprise.

  At Chatto, my thanks to Kathryn Fry for her eagle-eyed copyediting, Kris Potter and Lily Richards for their vision of Chapel on the cover, to productive Polly Collier, and marvellous Mia Quibell-Smith. Clara Farmer, publishing director of Chatto and Windus, once asked me to write about my sense of art as vital to life itself, and not a thing apart, and this is the second time I have written that book by other means and she has not complained. For her outstanding editorial rigour, her meticulous intellect and eye, I thank her.

  I wondered for a long time precisely how George took the photograph of Veda in the kitchen. I am very grateful to the photographer Peter Cattrell for his wisdom about period images and cameras; and to Z, clandestine operative in Maryland, whose knowledge of reconnaissance photography taught me so much. Thanks to Simon Bradley, renowned railway historian, for his help with the complexities of the Mablethorpe Loop. And to Tom Ambridge and his siblings for allowing me to quote from May Hill’s compelling Chapel war diaries.

  My dear Australian aunts, Susan Baker and Judith Beale, have been kindness itself, answering questions, sending revelatory photographs and suffering my suggestions. I hope they will forgive my interpretation of events that took place before we were born. This tale of our forebears is for their children, too, and for my brother Timothy Cumming, whose dynamism helped us all to find each other in the first place. And it is for Hilda Blanchard’s great-grandchildren in England: Ruby and Holly Cumming, and my adored daughters, Hilla and Thea Sewell.

  The writing of On Chapel Sands was sustained by friends so modest they probably do not even how or that they helped: Sarah Baxter, Julian Bell, Marcel Berlins, Patricia Carrott, Louise Cattrell, Jill Chisholm, Kate Colquhoun, David Cox, Sarah Donaldson, Lisa Forrell, Kate Kellaway, Carol McDaid, Alex McLennan, Louise Swan, William Sewell, Ruth Williamson, the late Bronwen Pulsford and Marion Owen. I still remember the exhilarating conversations I had with Tom Lubbock about some of these pictures when he was alive, and I was privileged to know him.

  Dennis Sewell has lived with this book closer than anyone, turning it over with me day after day, never ceasing in his abundant generosity. His compassion always produces new insights. For this, as for everything he does to help me, to help us, boundless gratitude and love.

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  Copyright © Laura Cumming 2019

  INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo

  Laura Cumming has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Chatto & Windus in 2019

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ from Collected Poems II: 1939–1962, William Carlos Williams, reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited Windmills on a Coastline, John Sell Cotman, reproduced courtesy of Bonhams

  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, reproduced courtesy of Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Bridgeman Images

  The Bellelli Family, Edgar Degas, reproduced courtesy of Musee d’Orsay/Bridgeman Images

  Cake Window (Seven Cakes), 1976 © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  ISBN 9781473556508

 

 

 


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