At home he barked out brisk instructions: sit up straight, don’t play with your food, finish what’s on your plate. She wasn’t allowed to play with other children or walk the half mile to the shops by the age of 10, she had travelled no further than Skegness, seven miles away. After the kidnapping, he kept her on a tight leash. To begin with he’s the villain of the piece, because of the loveless regime in which Betty was brought up. ‘Betty’s warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through.’ Photograph: courtesy of Penguin Random House They keep on coming right to the end, with each new surprise forcing Cumming to reappraise the story and to modify her views of the protagonists, not least George.

The book is a series of revelations: one twist the reader may foresee early on (just as Betty herself guessed it as a teenager), but most come out of the blue. The real story of the book isn’t how she was taken from Chapel Sands but what was taken from her: the truth about who her parents were and why she was adopted the reason a woman approached her in her teens and said: “Your grandmother wants to see you,” when the only grandmother she had known was dead. But Cumming’s mother (now in her early 90s) has no memory of her first three years and didn’t learn about the kidnapping for half a century. The drama of Betty’s disappearance makes a brilliant opening chapter. Revelations keep on coming right to the end, with each new twist forcing Cumming to reappraise the story And far from knowing nothing, people locally – locked in “acts of communal silence” that would continue for decades – knew far more than they let on. The person who took her was a relative, not a stranger. Until Veda and George adopted her, just a few weeks previously, Betty had been called Grace. The circumstances that led to her being snatched were shrouded in secrets and lies. Not only did Betty turn up safe, in a house 12 miles inland. But this wasn’t an abduction like James Bulger’s or Madeleine McCann’s. For Betty’s parents, Veda (who had taken her to the beach) and George (summoned from where he had got to that week in his job as a travelling salesman), the next few days were a nightmare. The police were called to investigate but no one in the village of Chapel St Leonard had seen anything. It was autumn, with few people around, but after “a prolonged moment of parental inattention”, the three-year-old had gone. In 1929 Laura Cumming’s mother Betty was kidnapped from a beach in Lincolnshire.

On chapel sands book