Family, art and the quest for identity are major themes as a set of photographs are the impetus that leads the daughter to try to track down the mystery of her mother's life. I listened to an audiobook, the narrator is Ms Cumming herself, and I truly enjoyed listening to her steady, not-that-hasty readingģ.5 A mother and daughter search for answers in this unusual memoir. I seldom turn to memoirs, but I am happy to have read this one, and a thank-you to the Authoress for all emotions this book stirred in me. The story in which voices from the past and pictures gradually complete the puzzle that consists of hundreds of pieces. After years of silence, secrets and allusions, Laura Cumming decided to investigate what really had happened on the beach in Chapel, a small sea-side village, and this was the beginning of unravelling incredibly complicated family history. This all sounds like a plot of a good thriller, however, it is even better than that, since the little girl was Ms Cumming’s mother. This story had a happy end, even a double one, as the little girl had no memories of the event as she grew older. Laura Cumming found the inspiration to write this memoir in a story of a 3-year-old girl who was abducted in 1929 from a beach, and was found safe and sound after five days. Compulsive, vivid, and profoundly touching, Five Days Gone is a masterful blend of memoir and history, an extraordinary personal narrative unlike any other.
Using photographs from the time, historical documents, and works of art, Cumming investigates this case of stolen identity with the toolset of a detective and the unique intimacy of a daughter trying to understand her family’s past and its legacies. In Five Days Gone, Laura Cumming brilliantly unspools the tale of her mother’s life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. For many years, while raising her in draconian isolation and protectiveness, they also hid the fact that she’d been adopted, and that shortly after the kidnapping, her name was changed from Grace to Betty.
This was not the only secret her parents kept from her. To the contrary, they deliberately hid it from her, and she did not learn of it for half a century.
The incident quickly faded from her memory, and her parents never discussed it. There were no screams when she was taken, suggesting the culprit was someone familiar to her, and when she turned up again in a nearby village several days later, she was found in perfect health and happiness. In the fall of 1929, when Laura Cumming’s mother was three years old, she was kidnapped from a beach on the Lincolnshire coast of England. Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Velazquez Laura Cumming shares the riveting story of her mother’s mysterious kidnapping as a toddler in a small English coastal village-and how that event reverberated through her own family and her art for decades.
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