Appointment with Yesterday
CELIA FREMLIN
Contents
Title Page
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
MILLY, SHE FELT, would be a good name. Quiet, undistinguished, and as different from her real name as it was possible to be.
Real? Who needed to be real, travelling on the Inner Circle at four o’clock on a Monday afternoon? Staring past the blank, middle-aged faces opposite, she caught sight of her own blank, middle-aged face reflected in the scurrying blackness of the window beyond. She almost laughed at the likeness between the whole lot of them, and at the feeling of safety it gave her. It’s because of London Passenger Transport, she mused, dreamy and almost light-headed by now from lack of food and sleep: we’re just the Passenger part of London Passenger Transport. How marvellous to be just a swaying statistic, gently nodding, staring into space! Statistical space. Nobody, she reflected, ever brings their real selves with them on to a tube train. None of us have. We have all left our identities behind in some vast spiritual Left Luggage office: and no one could guess—no one, possibly, could ever guess, just by looking—that there is one among all these glazed faces that has left its identity behind not just for the duration of the tube journey, but for ever.
The train was slowing down now, the cold, underground light of Euston Square platform was wiping her reflection off the window opposite: and the fear—familiar now, and as regular as labour pains, coming at three minute intervals throughout the day—nagged at her once again as the train sighed to a halt, and the doors slipped open. Suppose someone should get on who knew her! Suppose one or other of the station men were beginning to recognise her, as she travelled round and round the same circuit of stations, ever since seven o’clock this morning!
Oh, she varied herself for them, as best she could! Sometimes she took her hat off, and sat with wispy hair dangling: sometimes she put it on again: and sometimes she clutched it in her lap, and tied round her head a red silk square. Lucky, really, that this red silk square had happened to be in the bag that she snatched up as she fled out of the house before dawn this morning. Lucky, too, that there had been some money in the bag: a couple of pounds, anyway, and some odd silver: for she had thought of nothing—not of money nor anything else—as she tore up the basement stairs, her breath grating in her lungs with terror at what she had done. How she had wrenched and wrestled at the warped, obstinate front door, with its peeling paint and ancient, rusty bolts! Beyond that door was freedom—she seemed still to be tasting that first rush of icy air into her throat as the door lurched open. After that, all she could remember was the running. Running, running, running, the winter air searing into her lungs like gulps of fire, and her startled heart clamouring for mercy as it fought to keep pace with her terror, her instinctive, primitive certainty of being hunted down.
But she wasn’t being hunted down, of course. Who goes hunting along the South London streets at six o’clock on a January morning? And especially along a street like this, with not a light glimmering anywhere, in all those serried rows of windows. For this was not a street of bright, brisk, busy people, the sort who might get up at six to light the fire, to start the kids’ breakfast, to get to the factory in time for the early shift. No, this was a street where people lie in bed till noon: till two, or three, or four in the afternoon: where milk bottles stand unwashed and uncollected on steps and landings, and where the names printed under the tiers of bells are yellow with age, and evoke no glimmer of recognition in the red-rimmed eyes of whichever current incumbent might drag himself to the door when you ring. Un-names. Just like hers. How appropriate, then, that she, an inhabitant of that street, should be finishing her life on the Inner Circle, going round, and round, and round, the one place in all the world where you will never need a name again.
*
She roused herself with a start. Now, Milly, she admonished herself—for it was imperative that she should get used to the name, herself, before she had to try it out on other people—now, Milly, pull yourself together! You mustn’t keep dozing off like this, or people really will start noticing you! Some kind gentleman will come along and say, “Now, Lady, where d’you want to get off …?” and then you’ll have to say the name of some station, and actually get off there! You can’t say to him, can you, that you’re not going to get off anywhere, that you’ve come here to live, you’ve moved in, and you’re going round and round the Inner Circle, on a ten pence ticket, for ever?
So come, now, Milly, what are you going to do? You have spent ten pence of the two pounds thirty-five that you had in your bag. You have the clothes you stand up in, including, luckily, your outdoor coat. You are forty-two years old. You have no skills, qualifications, references. Until these last terrible months, you led a life so protected, so narrow, so luxurious, that you are soft as pulp, through and through. You probably can’t work at anything. You have no friends to turn to, no relatives, because you are Milly now, and nobody, nobody in all the wide world—must
ever have the faintest inkling that you have any connection with that woman who ran all but screaming into a London street in the early hours of Monday, January the tenth.
*
It couldn’t be in the papers yet. Not possibly. All the same, Milly felt her heart thumping horribly every time a new passenger got on the train, sat down opposite her, and unfolded before her eyes yet another copy of the back page of the evening paper.
Not that it would be on the back page. It would be on the front page, certainly, once it got into the papers at all; and so each time Milly waited, in growing trepidation, while the owner of the paper turned it this way and that, folding and refolding it as he read, until at last, with any luck, the front headline would swoop into view, often upside down.
*
Yes, it was still all right. PETROL PRICE SHOCK still occupied the place of honour. No one, yet, would be surreptitiously studying her features round the edge of their paper. So far, so good.
But what would be the headlines tomorrow morning …? and now, at last, into her slow mind, still numbed with shock, there seeped the idea that there was need for haste. What had she been thinking of, wasting the precious daylight hours crouched in a corner of the tube train like an abandoned kitten? She should have been hastening to find herself a job, lodgings, an employment card … a whole new identity. She should have done all this instantly, today, before her blurred picture began staring up at every strap-hanging commuter in London: before every employer, every landlady was on the alert, peering under the brim of her hat, wondering who it was she reminded them of …?
In stumbling haste, she sprang from her seat as the train slowed down, and hobbled on stiff legs towards the sliding doors. Which station it was, she neither knew nor cared: she only knew that she must get out—get moving—do something! The long day’s paralysis of will was succeeded now by an obsession for hurry. Hurry to anywhere, to do anything—it didn’t matter, for the obsession was just as irrational as the paralysis had been, just another symptom of shock, not a real decision at all.
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