Seven Lean Years Read online

  Seven Lean Years

  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

  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 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

  LAURA LAY STILL, putting off the lovely moment of waking. She did not need to open her eyes to know that the sun was pouring in through the nursery window, for the feel of summer was everywhere. She could feel it in the air, on her face—even in her very limbs under the sheets and blankets.

  And there was going to be something specially lovely about today. Laura struggled for a moment in the effort of remembering, and then it all came back with a rush. Yesterday, Nurse had given her and Bessie a piece of material for their doll. Not an old, faded piece cut from someone’s discarded summer dress, but a whole yard of crisp, brand new muslin scattered with tiny rosebuds and their tiny, intricate leaves. This afternoon it would be too hot for a walk, so she and Bessie would be allowed to sit under the old mulberry tree and make the dress—a dress of glorious and perfect workmanship. Lying with her eyes still closed, Laura seemed to see already the impossibly even gathers; the fascinating little puff sleeves that would, surely, come out right this time. And, to add zest to it all, Dick would be there, just back from boarding school. He would lounge at their feet, teasing, flicking at bits of grass, standing Jemima precariously on her china head, and feigning an impossible degree of male ignorance about the construction of the dress. The long golden day stretched before Laura as far as she could see…. Almost, it seemed, like the length of a whole lifetime….

  The energy of anticipation gathered in her muscles like wine, and Laura knew that she could lie still no longer. She must spring out of bed now, at once, and let the splendid day begin.

  Spring out of bed? But why was her back so stiff? Why were her limbs so slow? It was almost a minute before she had even managed to hoist herself into a sitting position … and her eyes opened on the clean, cream institutional walls. Nurse was gone; Bessie was gone; the rose-sprigged muslin dress had been stuffed into some rag-bag more than seventy years ago, and she, Laura, was left, finishing her days here in this Home for Aged Gentlewomen.

  Laura closed her eyes again for a minute, and felt the imagined energy ebbing from her limbs. She did not feel particularly sad; these sort of awakenings were becoming more and more familiar to her, and she knew that as soon as they had brought her her cup of tea it would be all right. And, after all, there was something pleasant to anticipate today. What was it, now …?

  “Good morning, Mrs. Rivers! Ups-a-daisy! Oh, what a be-autiful mo-orning!”

  The cheerful, though pasty-faced young woman propped Laura expertly against her pillows, and thrust a cup of tea into her hand. These girls never realised how difficult it was to hold things steady when you had only just woken up. No one’s hand steadier than Laura’s for, say, morning coffee, but just now it was terribly hard….

  Never mind. Only a little slopped into the saucer this time, no ugly stains on the sheets; and anyway, the young woman was bustling round the room now, noticing nothing.

  “There you are! A lovely sunny day!” she pronounced, flinging open the curtains with a gesture of achievement, like a successful cook opening the oven door on a beautifully risen cake. “We must get you up quickly, my dear, today, there’s a lot to see to. You are a lucky girl, aren’t you, your son coming to fetch you tomorrow! The others will be green with envy!”

  So that was it. Of course. Laura took another sip of the good hot tea and remembered it all. Leonard was coming to fetch her away tomorrow, fetch her away for good. Though Leonard wasn’t her son, of course; only her stepson. More and more often of late Laura had found herself forgetting that she had never, after all, had a child of her own. Neither Leonard nor Ellen … neither of them was hers. Sipping greedily at the scalding, revivifying tea, Laura felt blessed clarity of thought returning. Of course: Leonard and Ellen were engaged; that must be why she had the feeling that Ellen was her daughter just as much as Leonard was her son. Really, of course, Ellen was Dick’s daughter—young Dick, who was old Uncle Richard now. Laura found it possible, most of the time, to believe that the years had somehow so swiftly tricked and cheated her into becoming an old woman, but not that they had done the same to Dick. Not to gay, teasing, selfish Dick, who had been like a brother to her at first, and then, afterwards …

  But she must not allow herself to slip again into daydreams of the past. It was the present that mattered, even at eighty-five; the exciting, demanding present. For tomorrow—or, at latest, the day after—she would see Dick again. And Ellen. And the old, beloved home where Dick still lived.

  Laura sipped again at her tea, and pictured the meeting, knowing all the time that her picture was false; for, try as she would, she could not see Dick as anything but a fair-haired, laughing schoolboy.

  *

  On that same June morning, Ellen Fortescue woke suddenly, with the old familiar feeling that it must be late; that the alarm must have failed to wake her.

  Then she remembered. She was no longer
working at the office. It was nearly a year now since she had come home to look after Father, and her life was no longer regulated by alarm clocks, but by the needs and whims of an old man and an old house—and, above all, by the demands of the tenants—the perfectly reasonable demands.

  For the tenants were reasonable—Ellen was adamant with herself about this, for it would never do to become one of those landladies who spend their lives immersed in a sense of grievance. She had resolved, right from the start, always to see the tenants’ point of view—but how could she have foreseen that the tenants would have so many different points of view, from all of which she would have to see simultaneously? That it would be like trying to look through the right and wrong end of a telescope at the same moment; like reading two books at once, one with each eye?

  After all, it was still early; only five minutes to seven. There were no sounds yet from Melissa and her family above. Ellen listened tensely. If only the silence would go on for another five minutes, then the Butlers in what had once been the drawing-room wouldn’t complain of having been woken before seven by thumps and jars from overhead. Not that Melissa’s children were badly behaved—that would be a very landlady-ish thing to think—but after all there were two of them, and you couldn’t expect children to walk when it was possible to run. Indeed, the same could really be said of their busy, efficient mother, who managed, by spending her life with one eye on the clock, to keep a full-time job as well as running her home smoothly and well. It had seemed very hard to have to complain to Melissa about so admirable a virtue as early rising—Melissa liked to have her family up and dressed by half-past six—but what else could you do when the Butlers were so insistent—so justifiably insistent—on their right to sleep undisturbed till seven o’clock?

  Ellen sighed. Did other landladies go through these heart-searchings on behalf of their tenants? Or was it that she was new to the job—and perhaps quite unsuited to it? And yet, when the doctor had said that Father shouldn’t be living alone any more, this had seemed the only sensible course—that Ellen should give up her job and come home, and make up for her lost salary by letting off the house in rooms and flats. For it was such a big old house, and quite apart from the need of money, it had seemed wicked, in these days of housing shortage, that so much space should be occupied just by one old man and his daughter.