Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark Read online

  Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark

  Short Stories

  CELIA FREMLIN

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  The Quiet Game

  The Betrayal

  The New House

  Last Day of Spring

  The Special Gift

  Old Daniel’s Treasure

  For Ever Fair

  The Irony of Fate

  The Baby-Sitter

  The Hated House

  Angel-Face

  The Fated Interview

  The Locked Room

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  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 o
f 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.

  *

  Celia Fremlin’s short stories, of which she published three collections in her writing career, are superbly constructed. In only a few pages she is able to convey that desperate feeling of unease worthy of any of her full-length novels. But the short form seemed to give Fremlin special licence to throw caution to the wind, and the tales collected in Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark serve up a selection of eclectic, delectable, perfectly formed nibbles. Fremlin’s familiar theme of strained mother–child relations is explored in ‘The Baby Sitter’ and the chilling ‘The Hated House’. However, here she delves into the supernatural realm as well as the psychological.

  Another theme that seemed to fascinate and frighten Fremlin was ageing. She was moving into her late fifties as this collection was published, and the concerns of old age are discernible in some of the stories. Fremlin is careful to give her elderly characters distinctive voices, also articulating their sense of frustration and injustice very succinctly in ‘Old Daniel’s Treasure’ and ‘Last Day of Spring’, making them fully three-dimensional. But Fremlin was also adept at deceiving the reader, often by way of playing on the self-deceiving tendencies of her characters, and she uses this device with skill here, too. It’s important to note how often Fremlin manages to add dashes of sly humour, exhibited perfectly in ‘The Betrayal’, ‘For Ever Fair’ and ‘The Fated Interview’. One can easily imagine that as she wrote each of these small gems she had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek.

  Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark is a wonderful collection that showcases Fremlin’s array of talents to great effect. The short form is much less fashionable today, but Fremlin deployed it expertly to deliver delicate and bittersweet bite-sized slices of life.

  Chris Simmons

  www.crimesquad.com

  THE QUIET GAME

  IT WAS NOT Hilda who first talked of being driven mad, up there in the high flats, far above the noise of the traffic and the bustle of the crowds. On the contrary, it was her neighbours who complained to her about the stresses. “It’s driving me up the wall!” said her neighbour on the right: and “I can’t stand it any longer!” said her neighbour on the left: and “I’ll go out of my mind!” said the woman in the flat below. But not Hilda. Hilda was the young one, the busy one. From the point of view of the neighbours it was she who was the cause and origin of all the stresses. She wasn’t the one who was being driven mad, Oh no. That’s what they would all have told you.

  But madness has a rhythm of its own up there so near to the clouds; a rhythm that at first you would not recognize, so near is it, in the beginning, to the rhythms of ordinary, cheerful life …

  *

  “What’s the time, Mr Wolf? What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” Thumpty-thump-thump-thump. Thumpty-thump-thump-thump … The twins’ shrill little voices, the thud of their firm little sandalled feet reverberated through the door of the kitchenette and brought Hilda to a sudden halt in the midst of the morning’s wash. Her arms elbow-deep in warm detergent, she just stood there, while the familiar, helpless anger rose slowly from the pit of her stomach. She would have to stop them, of course; the innocent, happy little game would have to be brought once more to a halt by yet another “No!” And quickly too, before Mrs Walters in the flat below came up to protest; before Mr Peters on the right tapped on the wall; before Miss Rice on the left leaned across the balcony to complain of her head and to tell Hilda how well children were brought up in her young days.

  Miss Rice’s young days were all very well; in those days children had space for play and romping. If they were rich they had fields and lawns and nurseries and schoolrooms; if they were poor, they had at least the streets and the alley ways. But today’s children, the sky-dwellers of the affluent twentieth century, where could they go to run, to shout, to fulfil their childhood? All day long, up here in the blue emptiness of the sky, Hilda had to deprive her children, minute by minute, of everything that matters in childhood. They must not run, or jump, or laugh, or sing, or dance. They must not play hide-and-seek or cowboys and Indians, or fling themselves with shrieks of joy into piles of cushions. Except when she could find time to take them to the distant park, they must sit still, like chronic invalids, growing dull and pale over television and picture books.

  “What’s the time, Mr Wolf? … One o’clock—two o’clock three o’clock….” Thumpty-thump-thump-thump. Hilda had a vision of the sturdy little thighs in identical navy shorts, stamping purposefully round and round the room, little faces alight with the intoxication of rhythm and with the mounting excitement of the approaching climax. Before this climax—before the wild shriek of “Dinner-time, Mr Wolf!” rent the silence of the flats, Hilda would have to go in and spoil it all. “Martin! Sally!” she would have to say, “You really must be quieter. Why don’t you get out your colouring books, and come and sit quietly? Come along, now, over here at the table.” And she would have to watch the bright little faces grow tearful, hear the merry, chanting voices take on the whine of boredom; watch the firm, taut little muscles relinquish their needed exercise and grow flaccid as they sat … and sat … and sat. It was wicked, it was cruel….

&
nbsp; “Mrs Meredith? Could I speak to you for a minute, Mrs Meredith?”

  So. Already she had left it too late. Here was Miss Rice out on her balcony, hand on brow, headache poised like a weapon, and already sure of her victory.

  “It’s not that I want to complain,” she began, as she began every morning “And if it was just for myself, I suppose I’d try to put up with it, but it’s Mrs Walters too, she hasn’t been too well either, and it’s driving her up the wall, it really is, all this hammer, hammer, hammer. She’s just phoned through to me, asked if I could have a word with you, save her coming up the stairs with her bad knee.”

  Bad knees. Headaches. Not-too-well-ness. These were the weapons by which happy little four-year-olds could be crushed and broken; there was no defence against them. “I’m sorry,” said Hilda despairingly; and again “I’m sorry … I’m sorry….”

  *

  The twins had been settled at their colouring books for nearly an hour before Mrs Walters below rang up to enquire if Hilda couldn’t somehow stop that boom-boom noise? “Boom-boom-boom” the clipped voice mimicked explanatorily down the wire. “It goes right through my nerves, Mrs Meredith, it really does. I can’t think what they can be doing, little kiddies like that, I can’t think what they can be doing.”

  Firing cannon? Riding roller-coasters round the room? No, it turned out to be Sally’s energetic rubbing-out of her drawing of a cat. It wobbled the table, it set the floor vibrating.

  “No, Sally, don’t use the rubber any more, just colour it how it is, there’s a good girl.”

  “No, Martin, you must keep your dinky-car on the rug, Mrs Walters will hear it on the linoleum.”

  “No, Sally, leave that chair where it is, we don’t want Mr Peters knocking on the wall again.”

  No…. No…. No. Two lively little creatures reduced to tears and tempers, to sobbing, hopeless boredom.