In 'Five Days Gone,' Laura Cumming unravels her mother's mysterious abduction.
One autumn afternoon in 1929, when Laura Cumming’s mother was 3-years-old, she disappeared from the beach where she was playing with her mother. “Short fair hair, no coat, blue eyes and dress to match: That was the description later given to the police,” Cumming writes.
There were other secrets too. The Elstons were not a family that spoke openly about things. Their home, stultifyingly quiet, lay in the tiny town of Chapel St. Leonards in Lincolnshire, England “the flattest of all English counties,” Cumming writes, “the least altered by time, or mankind.”People in the village knew more of Betty’s life story than she did; their reticence to share that knowledge, even years later, renders them an uncommonly silent Greek chorus.
“Her life began with a false start and continued with a long chain of deceptions, abetted by acts of communal silence so determined they have continued into my life too,” Cumming writes. “But to my surprise, the truth turns out to pivot on images as much as words.”
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