THE PARASITE PERSON
CELIA FREMLIN
Contents
Title Page
Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch
Preface: Remembering Celia Fremlin
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
Copyright
Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch
Celia Fremlin was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 June 1914, to Heaver and Margaret Fremlin. Her father was a doctor, and she spent her childhood in Hertfordshire before going on to study at Oxford. Between 1958 and 1994 she published sixteen novels of suspense and three collections of stories, highly acclaimed in their day. Sadly, Fremlin’s work had largely fallen out of print by the time I discovered her for myself in the mid-1990s. But I was captivated by the elegant, razor-sharp quality of her writing and – as often when one finds an author one is passionate about – keen to learn more about the writer’s life. Then, in early 2005, I had the great good fortune of having several conversations with Celia Fremlin’s elder daughter Geraldine Goller. Geraldine was a charming woman and I found our discussions enlightening, helping me to understand Celia Fremlin better and to appreciate why she wrote the kind of books she did.
One noteworthy thing I gathered from Geraldine was that her mother (highly academic as a young woman, even before she found her vocation in fiction) was invariably to be found immersed in her latest writing project – to the exclusion, at times, of her family. Geraldine also told me that her mother was notorious within the home for embroidering the truth, and was quite often caught out by her family for telling ‘little white lies’. Geraldine, however, read no badness into this trait: she simply put it down to her mother’s creative streak, her ability to fabricate new identities for people – even for herself.
Who, then, was the real Celia Fremlin? The short biographies in her books tended to state that she was born in Ryarsh, Kent. Geraldine, however, informed me that her mother was raised in Hertfordshire, where – we know for a fact – she was admitted to Berkhamsted School for Girls in 1923; she studied there until 1933. Ryarsh, then, was perhaps one of those minor fabrications on Fremlin’s part. As a fan of hers, was I perturbed by the idea that Fremlin may have practised deceit? Not at all – if anything, it made the author and her works appear even more attractive and labyrinthine. Here was a middle-class woman who seemed to delight in re-inventing herself; and while all writers draw upon their own experiences to some extent, ‘reinvention’ is the key to any artist’s longevity. I can imagine it must have been maddening to live with, but it does suggest Fremlin had a mischievous streak, evident too in her writing. And Fremlin is hardly alone in this habit, even among writers: haven’t we all, at one time or another, ‘embellished’ some part of our lives to make us sound more interesting?
Even as a girl, Celia Fremlin wrote keenly: a talent perhaps inherited from her mother, Margaret, who had herself enjoyed writing plays. By the age of thirteen Celia was publishing poems in the Chronicle of the Berkhamsted School for Girls, and in 1930 she was awarded the school’s Lady Cooper Prize for ‘Best Original Poem’, her entry entitled, ‘When the World Has Grown Cold’ (which could easily have served for one of her later short stories). In her final year at Berkhamsted she became President of the school’s inaugural Literary and Debating Society.
She went on to study Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with a second. Not one to rest on her laurels, she worked concurrently as a charwoman. This youthful experience provided a fascinating lesson for her in studying the class system from different perspectives, and led to her publishing her first non-fiction book, The Seven Chars of Chelsea, in 1940. During the war Fremlin served as an air-raid warden and also became involved in the now celebrated Mass Observation project of popular anthropology, founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, and committed to the study of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Fremlin collaborated with Tom Harrisson on the book War Factory (1943), recording the experiences and attitudes of women war workers in a factory outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, which specialised in making radar equipment.
In 1942, Fremlin married Elia Goller: they would have three children, Nicholas, Geraldine and Sylvia. According to Geraldine, the newlyweds moved to Hampstead, into a ‘tall, old house overlooking the Heath itself’, and this was where Geraldine and her siblings grew up. Fremlin was by now developing her fiction writing, and she submitted a number of short stories to the likes of Women’s Own, Punch and the London Mystery Magazine. However she had to endure a fair number of rejections before, finally, her debut novel was accepted. In a preface to a later Pandora edition of said novel Fremlin wrote:
The original inspiration for this book was my second baby. She was one of those babies who, perfectly content and happy all day, simply don’t sleep through the night. Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by lack of sleep; my eyes would fall shut while I peeled the potatoes or ironed shirts. I remember one night sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, my baby awake and lively in my arms it dawned on me: this is a major human experience, why hasn’t someone written about it? It seemed to me that a serious novel should be written with this experience at its centre. Then it occurred to me – why don’t I write one?
The baby who bore unknowing witness to Fremlin’s epiphany was, of course, Geraldine. It would be some years before Fremlin could actually put pen to paper on this project, but the resulting novel, The Hours Before Dawn (1959), went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and remains Fremlin’s most famous work.
Thereafter Fremlin wrote at a steady pace, publishing Uncle Paul in 1960 and Seven Lean Years in 1961. Those first three novels have been classed as ‘tales of menace’, even ‘domestic suspense’. Fremlin took the everyday as her subject and yet, by introducing an atmosphere of unease, she made it extraordinary, fraught with danger. She succeeded in chilling and thrilling her readers without spilling so much as a drop of blood. However, there is a persistent threat of harm that pervades Fremlin’s writing and she excels at creating a claustrophobic tension in ‘normal’ households. This scenario was her métier and one she revisited in many novels. Fremlin once commented that her favourite pastimes were gossip, ‘talking shop’ and any kind of argument about anything. We might suppose that it was through these enthusiasms that she gleaned the ideas that grew into her books. Reading them it is clear that the mundane minutiae of domesticity fascinated her. Moreover, The Hours Before Dawn and The Trouble-Makers have a special concern with the societal/peer-group systems that adjudge whether or not a woman is rated a ‘good wife’ and ‘good mother.’
*
By 1968 Celia Fremlin had established herself as a published author. But this was to be a year for the Goller family in which tragedy followed hard upon tragedy. Their youngest daughter Sylvia committed suicide, aged nineteen. A month later Fremlin’s husband Elia killed himself. In the wake of these catastrophes Fremlin relocated to Geneva for a year.
In 1969 she publ
ished a novel entitled Possession. The manuscript had been delivered to Gollancz before the terrible events of 1968, but knowing of those circumstances in approaching Possession today makes for chilling reading, since incidents in the novel appear to mirror Fremlin’s life at that time. It is one of her most absorbing and terrifying productions. Aside from the short-story collection Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (1970) Fremlin did not publish again until Appointment With Yesterday (1972), subsequently a popular title amongst her body of work. The novel deals with a woman who has changed her identity: a recurrent theme, and one with which Fremlin may have identified most acutely in the aftermath of her terrible dual bereavements. The Long Shadow (1975) makes use of the knowledge of the Classics she acquired at Oxford; its main character, Imogen, is newly widowed. Again, we might suppose this was Fremlin’s way of processing, through fictions, the trials she had suffered in her own life.
Fremlin lived on in Hampstead and married her second husband, Leslie Minchin, in 1985. The couple remained together until his death in 1999. She collaborated with Minchin on a book of poetry called Duet in Verse which appeared in 1996. Her last published novel was King of the World (1994). Geraldine believed that her mother’s earlier work was her best, but I feel that this final novel, too, has its merits. Fremlin marvellously describes a woman who has been transformed from a dowdy, put-upon frump to an attractive woman of stature. The reason Fremlin gives for this seems to me revealing: ‘Disaster itself, of course. However much a disaster sweeps away, it also inevitably leaves a slate clean.’
Though Geraldine did not admit as much to me, she did allude to having had a somewhat mixed relationship with her mother. This, in a way, explained to me the recurrence of the theme of mother–daughter relations explored in many of Fremlin’s novels, from Uncle Paul, Prisoner’s Base and Possession right up to her penultimate novel The Echoing Stones (1993). One wonders whether Fremlin hoped that the fictional exploration of this theme might help her to attain a better understanding of it in life. Thankfully, as they got older and Celia moved to Bristol to be nearer Geraldine, both women managed finally to find some common ground and discovered a mutual respect for each other. Celia Fremlin was, in the end, pre-deceased by all three of her children. She died herself in 2009.
To revisit the Celia Fremlin oeuvre now is to see authentic snapshots of how people lived at the time of her writing: how they interacted, what values they held. Note how finely Fremlin denotes the relations between child and adult, husband and wife, woman and woman. Every interaction between her characters has a core of truth and should strike a resonant note in any reader. Look carefully for the minute gestures that can have devastating consequences. Watch as the four walls of your comforting home can be turned into walls of a prison. Above all, enjoy feeling unsettled as Fremlin’s words push down on you, making you feel just as claustrophobic as her characters as they confront their fates. Fremlin was a superb writer who has always enjoyed a core of diehard fans and yet, despite her Edgar Award success, was not to achieve the readership she deserved. As Faber Finds now reissue her complete works, now is the time to correct that.
Chris Simmons
www.crimesquad.com
Preface: Remembering Celia Fremlin
I first met Celia Fremlin at the end of 1969. I was newly arrived in London, a recent graduate from Swansea University, working for a publisher and aspiring to be a writer. Celia was a leading light in the North West London Writers’ Group and the first meeting I attended was in her house in South Hill Park, Hampstead. (Already I had reason to be grateful to her, because she had judged a Mensa short-story competition and awarded me second prize.)
My first experience of Celia’s writing was, I think, her reading of the first chapter of Appointment with Yesterday, sometime during 1970. I was transfixed: certainly it was the most vivid thing I ever heard in my attendance at the group. Celia was writing about people who seemed completely real, whose experiences could happen to anyone. The shock of recognition was extreme. Here were women in their own homes, with noise and kindness and fear and desperation all astonishingly true to life. And there was wit – we always laughed when Celia read to us.
Four decades would pass before I could understand something of what was really happening in Celia’s life at the time we met. It was an unpublished memoir by her daughter Geraldine that finally enlightened me. But at those meetings there was never any mention – at least in my hearing – of Celia’s daughter Sylvia or her husband Elia, both of whom had died by their own hand the previous year. It was as if these were, understandably, taboo subjects. Celia’s son, Nick, lived in the same house, with his wife Fran and little son. Their second baby, Lancelot, was born during those years when we often met at South Hill Park. (In due course Nick would publish a novel of his own, Tomorrow’s Silence, in 1979.)
I have always resisted attempts to connect a writer’s life directly with his or her work: to do so can often diminish the power and value of the imagination. But in Celia’s case, I have always believed that her novel With No Crying would never have been written if Sylvia hadn’t died. The novel is, essentially, about the deprivation and grief that the wider family experiences when a child is lost. It is very well plotted – perhaps the best of all her work. The ‘message’ at the end is honest and wise and sad. It was not published until 1980, and – I believe – not written until a year or so before that, which was over ten years after the agonising events of 1968.
Celia’s short stories are perhaps more telling in some ways. They are certainly unforgettably good. Those in her first collection, Don’t Go To Sleep in the Dark, are the ones I especially remember. Many of her stories involve sunlit beaches, couples on holiday, people out in the open air. This contrasts with her novels, which are usually set indoors, often in the winter or at night. Darkness and light is a strong theme in all her work.
I was lavishly praised and encouraged by Celia in my early writing endeavours and I’m in no doubt that she was a real influence on me, if mostly subliminally. She was also very affectionate with my two baby boys, when they arrived in the mid-1970s. When we moved out of London, she came to visit us several times with her second husband, Leslie. She read my first published novel and wrote an endorsement for it. I last saw her in 1999, shortly before Leslie died.
I am highly delighted that Celia’s books are being reissued. Her ability to capture the combination of ordinariness and individuality in her characters and their relationships, which readers find so compelling, is something I have tried to emulate. I have no doubt that these books will find a large audience of new readers, who will wonder why they hadn’t heard of her before.
Rebecca Tope
Rebecca Tope is a crime novelist and journalist whose novels are published in the UK by Allison & Busby. Her official website is www.rebeccatope.com.
CHAPTER I
“IT WAS A cry for help,” the young woman told him, nestling contentedly against her pillows. “Suicides nearly always are, aren’t they, and that’s what mine was. So come on. Help me.”
Martin raised his eyes from his notebook and looked at his subject uneasily. This wasn’t the idea at all.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not a social worker. I thought they’d explained to you? This is research that I’m doing. I’m working in the Department of Social Psychology on a research project about depression, and it would be of the most enormous help to us if you’d …”
“I don’t want to be of enormous help to you. Why should I? I’m the one who attempted suicide—right? And so I’m the one who ought to be helped. Not you.”
From the well-stocked fruit-bowl on her bedside locker, she selected a nice plump grape and popped it into her mouth, watching him the while beneath lowered lids. He fumbled with his papers, trying to find her record sheet.
“Ledbetter, Ruth. Aged 19, unemployed. Formerly Psychology student at Mendel College, dropped-out during second year. Admitted to hospital 2.30 a.m. on Monday Feb 2nd having ingested massive overdose of M
ogadon …”
Mogadon. That labelled it phoney, right from the start. Everybody knows—well, a psychology student, even a dropped-out one, certainly should—that it is virtually impossible actually to kill yourself with Mogadon. In fact, the whole thing was quite splendidly typical, almost a text-book case. Typical age, typical restless life-style, typical choice of non-lethal drug. It should have been a marvellous interview, if only she’d be more co-operative. After so inauspicious a start, Martin wondered if it was worth while going on? If she was going to act up like this, expecting to have her answers wheedled out of her syllable by syllable, it might be better to scrap her here and now. Chalk her up among the “Don’t Knows” and be done with it?
“Well?” she said. Her pale, pointed little face, still yellowish from the overdose, was tilted challengingly in his direction, and with this small bit of encouragement Martin decided to plough on.
“Look,” he began, “Look … er …” (What was the damn girl’s name? Ruth. That was it.) “Look, Ruth, I don’t want to worry you if you’d rather be left alone; but if you could bring yourself to answer just one or two questions. Like—well … What actually was it that finally drove you to this … well … this very drastic …?”
“Can’t you say ‘Suicide’? You suffer from a lisp, or something? ‘Suicide, suicide, suicide!’ Go on, say it! That’s why you’re here, for Chrissake, because I’m a suicide! That’s the only reason why you’re talking to me at all. It’s a bit late in the day to be pretending you’ve never heard of the word!”
Frowning slightly, Martin took it all down verbatim. There was no way this was going to fit into any of his categories, but at least she was talking, that was the main thing. He set himself to probe further, using the method proper in a depth-interview, which is to follow along the lines which the subject himself had opened up.
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