On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

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Previously, she was a presenter of Nightwaves on Radio 3, arts producer for the BBC World Service and arts editor of the New Statesman. Paced much like a mystery novel, it is filled with sudden twists and revelations that cleverly alter perceptions of events.

Laura Cumming - Wikipedia Laura Cumming - Wikipedia

I remember hating it all, the artificial smile, the sitting quite still for an eternity, eyes watering in the sunlight, while my father got his picture. In fact, George appears to be selecting only the best images from many rolls of film for his album; there are rejects in the back, and considerable time passes between one picture and the next. But if your quick assumption on the book’s central mystery is that Betty was snatched from the beach by her birth parents, then think again; it’s a lot knottier than that. As Cumming depicts it, the landscape was almost Dutch in its flatness and ‘ancient maze of dykes and paths’.Even humdrum mysteries – why the baker delivered bread to everyone’s house but hers – fall into place. The radiance of his new bride is to be matched by the gracious light flowing through the window: that is the point and poetry of his picture. All of this is duly reported to the police, but not until the following day; and not, I suspect, by Veda.

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming review - The 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.He would not yield his Box Brownie to anyone else, which is why he never appears on the shore with his daughter. Betty, always a lonely child – inexplicably not allowed to play outdoors or even with other children, always kept within the confines of her parents’ tiny cottage – had at last been allowed to go away to school. She taught me how to remember paintings in those long-ago days before I could take their image home from the museum in the blink of an iPhone: first draw the frame, then summarise the main shapes and volumes in rapid thumbnail.