Five days gone: the mystery of my mother's disappearance as a child

"In the fall of 1929, when Laura Cumming's mother was three years old, she was kidnapped from a beach on the Lincolnshire coast. 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. The incident quickly faded from her memory, and her parents did not tell her it took place. To the contrary, they deliberately hid it from her, and she did not learn of it for half a century. It was not the only secret her parents kept from her. For many years, while raising her in draconian isolation and protectiveness, they also obscured that she'd been adopted; that her name changed from Grace to Betty; and that both events occurred in 1929, the same year as the kidnapping on the beach. In Five Days Gone, Laura Cumming brilliantly unspools the tale of her mother's life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. Using photographs from the time, historical documents and works of art, she investigates this case of stolen identity with the toolset of a detective and the unique intimacy of a daughter trying to understand her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. Compulsive, vivid and profoundly touching, Five Days Gone is a masterful blend of memoir and history, an extraordinary personal narrative unlike any other"--