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On Chapel Sands

My mother and other missing persons

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On Chapel Sands

By: Laura Cumming
Narrated by: Laura Cumming
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Brought to you by Penguin.

**BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK**

'A modern masterpiece' Guardian

Uncovering the mystery of her mother’s disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story.

In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. It was another fifty years before she even learned of the kidnap.

The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. So many puzzles remained to be solved. Cumming began with a few criss-crossing lives in this fraction of English coast – the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker – but soon her search spread right out across the globe as she discovered just how many lives were affected by what happened that day on the beach – including her own.

On Chapel Sands is a book of mystery and memoir. Two narratives run through it: the mother’s childhood tale; and Cumming’s own pursuit of the truth. Humble objects light up the story: a pie dish, a carved box, an old Vick’s jar. Letters, tickets, recipe books, even the particular slant of a copperplate hand give vital clues. And pictures of all kinds, from paintings to photographs, open up like doors to the truth. Above all, Cumming discovers how to look more closely at the family album – with its curious gaps and missing persons – finding crucial answers, captured in plain sight at the click of a shutter.

'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times

(c) 2019, Laura Cumming (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

 Art Europe Great Britain Parenting & Families Relationships Disappearance Inspiring Thought-Provoking England
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Critic reviews

*Memoir of the Year* How we see -- and who see and what secrets they choose to share -- is at the heart of this exquisitely composed memoir... A peerless detective story that keeps you guessing to the end
On Chapel Sands is much more than a search for truth. It is a moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life. In short, a masterpiece (John Carey)
Cumming skilfully withholds key twists in the tale, revealing them at just the right moment. There are surprises, but no shocks. Her prose is too elegant for such gaudiness – composed and restrained but empathetic (Leaf Arbuthnot)
Brilliant... This book is a love letter to her [Cumming's] mother, whose warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine though. It's also an intimate portrait of a village community, with its storybook characters (butcher, baker, dairyman, bell-ringer, gravedigger) and their wonderful old-fashioned names (Blake Morrison)
By turns beautiful, wistful, and ominous… the reasons behind the kidnap, and the repurcussions, are every bit as complex as any served up by fiction, and, oddly enough, the dénouement -- or succession of dénouements -- is just as satisfying, perhaps more so... a meditation on the way some people disappear, and time erases memory... so familiar as to be universal, and will probably ring bells with all but the sunniest reader (***** Five Stars) (Craig Brown)
A deeply felt, forensic yet ultimately empathetic examination of human motivation and its attendant sorrows, which is as much a social history of the early 20th century as it is the story of one family and its secrets… [Cumming's] intermeshing of art, time and memory is superlative… The repercussions are interrogated by Cumming with a hungry precision up to her last, revelatory pages (Catherine Taylor)
On Chapel Sands is a mystery solved through empathy and interpretation. It feels as if this is the book Cumming has been working towards, a deeply personal story but one that also draws on practised skills as a critic and a writer. It is perfectly balanced between the requirements of its narrative and the expression of its author's passions. It is a moving tribute from a daughter to her parents and grandparents. It is beautifully written (Andy Miller)
Unputdownable… this memoir-cum-detective story becomes a remarkable search for truth (Charlotte Cox)
A fascinating, beautifully written feat of detective work, evoking bygone Britain during an era when so much was left unsaid (Charlotte Heathcote)
A poetic blend of memoir and detective story… Cumming breathes new life into the form, with her art critic’s analysis of the family photographs which appear on many of the pages (Marcus Field)
All stars
Most relevant
Tender, colourful and descriptive. I would recommend it to all my friends who are interested in family history.

A heartfelt real story

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well told story that explores the lives of all involved.although a true story and memoirs, it reads as a story. perfect narration..definitely best listened to in audio.

captivating

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Didn't really get going for me. Think that it might have worked better as a book, so you can see the pictures.

Not my sort of thing

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In ways this heartfelt family history is like a forensic detective story, but containing beautiful prose plus insightful analysis of paintings which I now need to find...

Narrated with feeling

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This book proves to me that a very good writer has the power to over-egg the pudding of a simple story and turn it into a best seller published by Penguin. The story could have been told on one side of an A4 sheet viz.: my mother was briefly kidnapped by her grandmother after she was adopted by her legitimate father and his childless wife etc. etc.

By dint of her considerable plotting skills - knowing just the right moment to bring in this or that element of the story - and placing the story in the archetypal context of the masterworks of great painters, and other literary sleights of hand, Laura Cumming has succeed in claiming many 5 star reviews. The great painters and their subjects that she brings inn - especially the reference to Icarus - is an example of this 'over-egging', but I forgave the author because I love Bruegel's painting and her description of it was so well done, as were the descriptions of other artists whose work she referred to and whilst the narrative was unfolding on my computer, I found myself Googling the paintings in what turned out to be an enjoyable art history lesson. Most of us, of a certain age, have similarly upsetting stories to tell about ourselves or a family member, but we don't have the skills to transform them into literature.

Eventually I became bored by what Hilda or the author's mother, or George, or Vida etc. might have been up to. Clearly the author loved her mother, but some distance from its cloying nature might have been refreshing.

An excellent art history lesson, and much more

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