"On Chapel Sands" by Laura Cumming

 A gently meandering memoir about the author's mother's childhood in a tiny Lincolnshire seaside village; drifting reminiscences in the style of Cider with Rosie but less lyrical; I often drifted away.

The hook is that the author's mother was abducted from the beach when she was three years old and discovered a few days later. The second hook is that the 'parents' from whom she was abducted were not her birth parents; she had been unofficially adopted at the age of three. There is here the makings of a potent human interest story, but these two hooks are dangled repeatedly as unrefreshed bait in the way a cheap television programme keeps on telling you what is coming up so that you don't turn over during the commercial break. My frustration was not soothed  by the way that  the author flips backwards and forwards between her own narration and the quoted narration of her mother; this is not always clearly signified (often just by a slight change in paragraph indentation) and I found myself confused, from time to time, as to which 'mother' and whose point of view I was following.

The subtitle is 'My mother and other missing persons'; I missed the other missing persons. Where were they? The focus seems entirely on the author's family, plus a smattering of art criticism. 

I found this stodgier than it should have been.

There are a couple of interesting 'facts' which seem doubtfull:

• The author claims that during WWII to Norwegian King lived in exile at Ingoldmells on the Lincolnshire coast near Skegness. This doesn't seem to be the fact. According to wikipedia, the Norwegian Royal family lived in London and Berkshire while in exile. The wikipedia entry on Ingoldmells doesn't mention the Norwegians.
• The author also states that her father taught life drawing classes and his models included an old man who once posed for Eros and a young man called Sean Connery. Wikipedia gives the name of the Eros life model as fifteen-year-old Angelo Colarossi ... who seems to have lived in later life as a solicitor's clerk in West London and was buried in Feltham in 1949 which seems to make it unlikely that he would have been available for modelling in Edinburgh.

Selected quotes:

• "The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent; so writes St Augustine." (Ch 1)
• "She taught me how to remember paintings ... first draw the frame, then summarise the main shapes and volumes in rapid thumbnail." (Ch 1)
• "Perhaps experience develops into memory like a photograph, its latent imprint invisible to us until finally fixed by conversation." (Ch 3)
• "I have never felt able to represent myself in speech, only through the merciful slowness and forgiving second chances of writing." (Ch 4)
• "What is sand but the pulverised past, ancient history in billions of particles?" (Ch 8)
• "George only appears happy in rare shots with men. He never smiles in the company of Veda or Betty." (Ch 12)

June 2022; 297 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God