With No Crying
CELIA FREMLIN
“How can there be a cherry that has no stone?
How can there be a chicken that has no bone?
How can there be a thimble that has no rim?
How can there be a baby with no crying?”
(The Riddle Song, Traditional)
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch
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
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 published 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
CHAPTER I
SHE LOOKED TERRIBLY young to be pregnant, but all the same she made a charming picture in her bright, flowered maternity smock, with her fair hair bouncing against her shoulders as she stepped along the sunny pavement. The women passing by, especially the older ones, whose child-bearing days were over, would give her a quick, furtive glance of curiosity not unmixed with envy; recalling, perhaps, the days when they, too, had dwelt at the throbbing heart of things, carrying within them the whole secret of life.
Eight months gone at the very least, they reckoned, slewing their eyes quickly away after a swift, knowledgeable glance at the billowing curve of gay cotton. More like nine, really—any minute, in fact—and yet how well she held herself still! Straight as a flower, her movements easy and graceful despite that hugely bulging belly: none of that ugly, waddling, side-to-side motion usually so characteristic of these last weeks of pregnancy. Remembering, perhaps, their own variegated discomforts and disabilities at this late stage—the varicose veins, the heartburn, the endless, lumbering tiredness—they envied her still more. Oh, well. Some girls have all the luck.
*
Miranda, looking neither to the left nor to the right, was nevertheless acutely aware of the sidelong, appraising glances; aware, too, of the covert envy and curiosity she was evoking. She could even, in a remote sort of way, enjoy it; for after all, these women were all of them total strangers to her, none of them was ever going to see her again. Not one of them would ever know that under the flamboyantly voluminous smock and the carefully-contrived padding, there lay a stomach as flat as a boy’s, and a hollow, empty womb.
Deceiving this crowd of casual, passing strangers was easy, even exhilarating. There were moments when she actually felt like a young mother, with a real live baby inside her, under the warmth of those anonymous, half-admiring stares.
It was deceiving her friends that was so awful—more and more intolerably awful with every passing day. Friends who had been so kind to her, so full of sympathy; who had taken her in so readily, and without question, passionately defending her right to unmarried motherhood, silencing any hint of criticism from outsiders, and resolutely refusing to let her take her turn at carrying down the garbage. By now, they were even buying advance toys for the baby, and beginning to knit things.
And all the time this thing that she nourished inside her, this thing whose arrival they all awaited with such generous enthusiasm, was not a real baby at all, but a monstrous bulge of lies and treachery, growing bigger and bigger day by day, just as a real baby would have done.
Numb with dread, and only dimly aware of the direction she was taking, Miranda continued on her apparently cool and unflurried way through the jostling crowds, the half-envious glances and fleeting smiles pattering like gentle rain upon the carapace of her guilt and fear. In the sweltering August heat, she was chilled through and through as though by some terminal illness.
On she went, slower and slower as her destination loomed nearer. With mounting horror, she visualised the warm and kindly welcome that awaited her, inexorably, when she reached the flat: the affectionate concern, the eager, solicitous questions.
“No, not yet,” she would have to tell them, yet again: and then (she had taken to adding this of late, in desperation), “They think I must have got my dates wrong.”
And someone would urge her to put her feet up. Another would bring her a nice cup of tea, sugared exactly right … and she would feel worse than any murderer, any traitor, because these were her friends whom she must betray, not her enemies, and for her there was no possibility of any last minute reprieve. The dates couldn’t go on being wrong for ever; nor could the baby remain vaguely “overdue” much longer.
Catastrophe was upon her: humiliation beyond anything she could ever have imagined. And yet even now, even in this extremity of shame and terror, the idea of simply returning to Mummy and Daddy in their pleasant suburban house—with their pleasantly permissive principles and their vaguely Left Wing broad-mindedness about vaguely everything—never for one moment crossed her mind.
CHAPTER II
IT WAS MAY when it had all begun, one of the loveliest Mays in living memory. For Miranda Field and her friend Sharon Whittaker, it looked like being the best summer term ever. Already enjoying many of the Upper School privileges—a coffee-machine, for instance, and free periods for private study—they were nevertheless not yet properly in the grip of exams. O-levels were still a full year away and casting only the faintest of barely-noticeable shadows across the golden months intervening. In this timeless unrepeatable interlude between childhood and the b
urdens of preparing for an adult career, it seemed downright ungrateful—almost a sin, really—to be working at all hard, and so Miranda and Sharon (clever girls anyway, to whom the school work came easily) nudged and whispered their way through the sunlit, easy-going lessons, and spent the long, delicious hours of “private study” lying in the long grass that bordered the playing fields, giggling, imagining and egging one another on into being in love.
To an observer (if such there had been) looking down on them through the great white heads of cow parsley, and listening to the rapturous whispered confidences borne on the soft, sweet-scented airs of spring, it might have seemed that they were merely in love with love.
And perhaps they were. But what of it? There is nothing “mere” about this kind of love, especially if you are not quite fifteen and drunk with the returning sun. And in any case, they had each of them, according to her questing fancy, given to this abstract passion a temporary incarnation and a name from among the remote and inaccessible sixth-formers at the top of the school. Thus Sharon was madly, hopelessly in love with the school cricket captain, one Gordon Hargreaves, tall and fair, lithe as a whip, and as brilliant at work as he was at games; while Miranda, not to be outdone, had succeeded in working herself into a delicious state of unrequited passion for the Secretary of the Sixth Form Chess Club, a dark, saturnine youth with shining almond-shaped eyes and black, springy hair lifting from his scalp as if blown by some eternal wind. His name was Trevor Marks, and he played the zither as well as chess; and sometimes Miranda, catching the faint, distant twang of the instrument through the windows of the Sixth Form Common Room, would almost faint for joy standing out there on the gravel path in the sunshine, the books for whatever class she was on her way to clasped ecstatically against her pounding heart.
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