The story starts with every parent's nightmare. A mother takes her three-year-old daughter to a nearby beach. They bring biscuits, and a bucket and spade. The mother's attention wanders for a minute to gaze at the sea - just a minute - and when she turns back, the child is gone.
How could she have disappeared? The beach, to begin with, is completely flat. A broad sheet of spotless sands, sprinkled with angel-wing shells, it seems to stretch forever in both directions. There are no coves, dunes or rocks where an adult could hide a child; everything stands in open view.
This three-year-old child was Laura Cummings' mother. Growing up, she was always called Betty, though she changed it to Elizabeth as an adult. And indeed, though she did not find this out for decades, she had begun life with a different name: Grace. The history of her early years, of which she had no memory, was painstakingly investigated by her daughter, and it would reveal an amazing story, with as many twists and turns as any crime novel.
Three days after her disappearance, which must have been agonising for Veda, her mother, and George, her father, hastily recalled from wherever his job as a travelling salesman had taken him, Betty was found and taken home. The story of where she had been, and why she had been kidnapped, when it was finally uncovered, would reveal an extraordinary web of secrecy and hidden feelings, discovered only in increments by her daughter.
The childhood Elizabeth could remember was one of extreme restrictions:
She was not allowed to play with village children, or travel the half mile to that mecca of forbidden shops....Betty must stay in the garden, behind a hedge as high (in my mind) as the forest in 'Rapunzel', or remain glumly indoors with Veda.
George kept her on a tight leash at home too. It was a household which seemed to the child to have very little love in it, at least on her father's part. Meanwhile there were mysteries that seemed strange and insoluble to the young girl: why did the local baker deliver bread to all the families in the area but leave out their house? And what should she make of the woman who approached her on the school bus and whispered 'Your grandmother wants to see you?', when the only grandmother she knew was dead? This puzzling episode precipitated one revelation for Betty - George explained she had been adopted, though nothing was said about her other family.
George, with his harsh rules and inexplicable decisions - the worst of which for Betty was when he removed her from the grammar school where she was excelling and sent her to work in a dark, airless cubicle in the local post office - seems for most of the book to be the villain of the piece. Elizabeth left home at eighteen, became an artist, never visited her home and refused to go to his funeral. But over the years, through Cummings research and some fortuitous discoveries, a rather different picture emerges.
This beautifully written book has multiple layers, one of which is made up of long extracts from a memoir Elizabeth wrote for her daughter when Laura turned twenty-one. At this point her mother knew nothing of the kidnap, but the life she recounts reveals much about her early years in her home, and about village life. And then there are the family photos, black and white shots of a growing child. Cumming is a distinguished art historian and art critic for the Observer, and it shows in the sensitive way she reads the photos. One of these made its appearance very late on in Cummings's investigation, and proved in many ways to be the final piece of the jigsaw.
This is a truly exceptional memoir, written with great love and empathy. I enjoyed it more than I can say, and can't recommend it highly enough.