The BBC Radio 2 Book Club announced on 24 January that its new home is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming LinenMe Bookclub: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

For my twenty-first birthday, my mother gave me the gift I most wanted: the tale of her early life. This memoir is short, ending with her teenage years, but its writing carries so much of her grace, her truthful eloquence and witness, her artist's way of looking at the world. One of the principal ways we understand human acts is through art, and one of the great pleasures of On Chapel Sands is the digressions – which are not really digressions – where Cumming writes with fluency and verve on great artworks, from Degas’s painting of the Bellelli family (“a psychological masterpiece, a novel in paint”) to Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting which, more than any other, “has made me feel so keenly alive to the idea that this high, round world, lit by the sun, is the very same place where our ancestors once trudged and ploughed and fished the very same seas”.One minute she was there, barefoot and absorbed, spade in hand, seconds later she was taken off the sands at the village of Chapel St Leonards apparently without anybody noticing at all. Thus my mother was kidnapped.

On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing Book review: On Chapel Sands: My Mother And Other Missing

Her father, George, a travelling salesman, was called home; the police were summoned; but a few days later, the little girl was found safe and well in a nearby village, completely unharmed but dressed in a brand new set of clothes. She was restored to her parents, her memory of what had happened would fade away, and her life would go on. Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death. Chatto & Windus, London, 2023, ISBN 9781982181765; Scribner, New York, 2023, ISBN 9781982181741 To begin with he’s the villain of the piece, because of the loveless regime in which Betty was brought up. After the kidnapping, he kept her on a tight leash. She wasn’t allowed to play with other children or walk the half mile to the shops; by the age of 10, she had travelled no further than Skegness, seven miles away. At home he barked out brisk instructions: sit up straight, don’t play with your food, finish what’s on your plate. He and Veda were already 49 when Betty came to them and, with a short temper made worse by his bronchitis and lumbago, he hadn’t the temperament to give her the love she needed. Nor had the gentle, self-effacing Veda the temperament to withstand his tyranny. Serendipitously, that same day, Laura Cumming wrote an article in the Observer about the collective yearning for visiting art exhibitions; for Velázquez in Edinburgh, Monet in Glasgow, Goya in Cambridge, Rembrandt at Kenwood House, Poussin in Dulwich, Gwen John in Sheffield.This is how it began, and how it would end, on the long pale strand of a Lincolnshire beach in the last hour of sun, the daylight moon small as a kite in the sky. Far below, a child of three was playing by herself with a new tin spade. It was still strangely warm in that autumn of 1929, and she had taken off her plimsolls to feel the day’s heat lingering in the sand beneath her feet. Short fair hair, no coat, blue eyes and dress to match: that was the description later given to the police. She had come out of the house that afternoon and along the short path to the beach with her mother, Mrs Veda Elston. They had already been there for some time, with biscuits in an old tartan tin, digging and sieving the sand. The tide was receding when they arrived, the concussion of waves on the shore gradually quietening as the day wore on; by now the sea was almost half a mile in the distance. In this lull, on their own familiar beach, and so comfortingly close to home, Veda must have let her daughter wander free for a moment. For she did not see what happened next. In any case, no amount of research-effort devoted to the mystery is likely to reduce its mysteriousness. In fact every anecdote told by another, every photograph, and every letter creates more mysteries. These we resolve with stories... or not, just as we could have done at the outset. Searching for oneself is ultimately like searching for the fossil of the first human being. Even holding such a thing in our hands, we wouldn’t know we had it. So after such an extensive trip through Cumming’s family life what is there but another imaginative story? Which is where I will end this escape from my city: at Gibraltar Point, a magnificent nature reserve that runs along the coast about five miles south of Skegness. Here the salt marshes meet the shore. A big bowl of broth at the cafe, a weary dog and the whistle of curlews in the briny air as the sun goes down on the waters. George and Veda as a young married couple outside Bradford in 1913. On the left is Veda’s sister Hilda. For along time I thought those lines were written by Alexander Pope, but the internet tells me that their author was in fact Walter Scott, so much for my innocent illusions.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | Waterstones On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming | Waterstones

Cumming is the daughter of the Scottish artists James Cumming and Betty Elston, his wife. She initially studied literature, came to London in her early twenties, and worked there in publishing in the 1980s, though she found her 'sense of life' came 'through streams of pictures' rather than sentences. [3] 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.

Laura Cummings, as a late-life gift to her beloved mother, has drawn together the threads of the story of her mother's birth and up-bringing, a story so bizarre and emotionally convoluted that it could easily pass as the outline of a lost novel by Thomas Hardy.