Natural-Born Biddies

If Celia Dale​ is a nasty writer, then her nastiness, like Roald Dahl’s, is partly cosmetic: no boil goes unenlarged, no paunch unemphasised. Her novels (thirteen in total, often described as works of domestic crime fiction or ‘suburban horror’) display a fondness for all creatures sallow and bowlegged: a menagerie of bedraggled birds, wet fish and disgusting old walruses. Certain images – bodies that sag or shrivel with age, rings that can’t be prised from swollen fingers – are particularly representative of her tenor, and she is unusually attentive to the location (in or out?) of her characters’ dentures. The title of her first book, The Least of These (1943), is a biblical shorthand for her most enduring subject: the wretched. It ends, straightforwardly, on a crowded London Underground platform as a German bomb dispatches the entire cast of characters.

Not much is known about Dale’s life, but her author photos convey a sense of her character. In one, she wears a faintly bemused expression and owlish glasses, hands clasped craftily, campily, beneath her chin; in another, a blouse with fussy-looking bow and a doted-on feline round out an image of studied innocuousness. A clear product of the 20th century (though, absurdly, she made it a full decade into the next), she was born in 1912, the only child of the English actor James Dale (best known as the voice of the coincidentally named Jim Dale in Mrs Dale’s Diary), and in 1937 she married Guy Ramsey, a journalist and competitive bridge player. She was a devoted secretary to Rumer Godden, with whom she shares a lean style and lack of pretension, and a reader at Curtis Brown, where she was said to have read more manuscripts than anyone else in London – tottering piles on her desk, to which she would respond with notes on neat pink slips, sometimes just one word long: ‘No!’ Her nickname among colleagues was ‘kill-at-a-glance Ramsey’. It’s a picture of prissy and practical femininity, all coiffed hair and woollen skirts, which comes across, to those who have read her work, as fabricated for coyly ironic effect: how could someone who looks so proper be so very mean?

From warfare to welfare: that’s the scope of Dale’s domestic crime. Three of her novels have recently been reissued by Daunt: A Spring of Love (1960), A Helping Hand (1966) and Sheep’s Clothing (1988), her last book, which opens as the elderly Mrs Davies is scammed out of her savings by two women posing as employees of the DHSS. In Dale’s novels from the 1960s, projects of postwar reconstruction loom large. Set in the ‘pounding heart of Camden Town’, A Spring of Love travesties the language of ‘neighbourliness’ and civic responsibility as a young woman brings a dangerous man into her shared building. In A Helping Hand it’s the language of care, especially care for the old and the infirm, that is called into question. By the time of Sheep’s Clothing, with Margaret Thatcher in power, not much has changed except that scamming is harder work in a world less easily beguiled (‘There’s nothing I need that I can’t get for myself,’ one intended dupe retorts). The title refers to the pretence of ‘cradle to grave’ concern that all Dale’s criminals exploit in order to lull their victims into a false sense of security – and somewhere in the background is Churchill’s jibe that Attlee was a ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing’.

Dale’s domain is crime fiction of the welfare state in which the state and its actors are mostly absent, replaced by charlatans and frauds who will fleece an old lady for all she’s worth. Alarmingly, many of her rogues have a history of work in care homes or hospitals. Her writing has been compared to that of Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Dahl, on the grounds that her approach to cruelty is placid, even-toned. It can be hard to judge whether her sagging, decrepit subjects are the objects of her derision or her pity; in the books, misanthropy and humanism are balanced on a knife edge. Was she writing satires on the Panglossian liberalism of postwar repair – so confirming ‘the human vulturine streak’, as a reviewer for the Guardian put it in 1988 – or sly ripostes to those who fretted that welfare paternalism would stamp out private initiative?

The real ‘sheep’s clothing’ may be the Persian lamb coat that belongs to an ageing actress with hair styled like Thatcher’s – one of the grander spoils that Dale’s two scammers, Grace and Janice, pilfer from their ‘old dears’. Grace and Janice are false prophets who peddle the good news of benefits back payments (‘We’re from the Social Services … they’ve been underpaying you’) to women they’ve followed home from libraries, bingo halls and betting shops, before dosing them with sleeping pills and stealing their stashed funds or whatever trinkets – brooches, Coronation caddies, shoe buckles – they have lying about. It’s a good scheme, ‘watertight and surprisingly profitable’, and they can be certain their victims will never report them, ‘too ashamed of having been so taken in’. The plan was dreamed up by the sixty-something Grace during a stint in Holloway Prison for larceny, where she – practically minded, ‘like a nurse in an operating theatre, efficient and nicely spoken’ – met Janice, a young woman as dopey as ‘a jellyfish in a tepid sea’ but mercifully skilled as a thief. They’re strange bedfellows – literally, in their shabby one-room flat in Kentish Town – but the arrangement works.

‘No family, no strings’ is Grace’s mantra. The plot benefits from the women’s anonymity among neighbours ‘seldom seen’. The curtain-twitching nosiness of decades past has given way to careless disinterest, though even the old – nostalgic for nicer, sugar-borrowing days – know now to keep their doors on the chain. When the scammers botch a job, they can rest assured that the police – led by a superintendent with the eyes of a ‘sagacious hog’ – will botch the case. It’s only when Janice meets a man that Grace sniffs trouble. For if there’s a flaw in their scheme, it’s the flaw in all criminal schemes: other people.

The appeal of Dale’s writing is clearly the same fetishisation of English nastiness that bolstered the interwar ‘golden age’ of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): ‘It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.’ Dale has no truck with being glib about the grim – take infant mortality: ‘lived for four days and died like a little skinned rabbit’ – but she has none of the kitschy charm of arsenic and old lace either. She was a late inductee to the Detection Club, and it shows: cyanide in a teacup has been switched for sleeping pills in Bovril. The novels feel dated even so, as if they were all written before the 1940s were out. The covers of the new Daunt editions offer a pastiche of postwar stylishness – driving gloves and a clasped leather handbag; a Hopper-like photograph from Bob Mazzer’s Underground of a woman in a neck scarf in a nearly deserted Tube carriage; a black-and-white photograph of a couple cutting a cake, his head cropped out of view and the camera trained on the knife – but there’s no such glam in Dale’s scuzz, none of the seductive entropy of Soho sleaze. Dale’s England is determinedly – interminably – drab: a land of supermarket cheese counters and John Lewis carrier bags, rendered in meat-and-potatoes prose with neither eye nor time for beauty.

Nowhere drabber than in A Helping Hand, which mostly takes place in a ‘featureless’ London suburb:

The land that stretched around them was as featureless as themselves: fields of drab vegetables, sports grounds belonging to some nearby factory, a rubbish tip, a display ground for caravans, or just ground – stony, sparsely grassed, scattered with coltsfoot and shepherd’s purse, bounded by slack wire. And beyond it, flatter than the sea, flatter certainly than the Sahara, the unseen, omnipresent, vast void of the airport.

Hatred of suburbia has long been matched by a ghoulish caricaturing of its inhabitants – ‘mean and perky little houses’ for ‘mean and perky little souls’, as Clough Williams-Ellis had it in 1928. ‘Mean and perky’, in that order, may describe Maisie and Josh Evans, Dale’s couple who hatch a scheme to take in ‘dear old souls’ as ‘paying guests’ in their spare room, before tricking them into altering their wills and then chivvying them along to their natural ends. Maisie, like Grace, is the brains; Josh is the soft touch. Poor old Mrs Fingal is the sorry case (we know this because she doesn’t walk, but ‘toddles’) and the next lamb in line after the ‘blessed release’ of their previous lodger. The three meet on holiday in Rimini, where Mrs Fingal’s niece is all too willing to outsource her aunt’s care. If we didn’t already sense that Maisie and Josh were wrong’uns, the final giveaway might be when they’re described as ‘solitary Anglo-Saxons’ beneath the beating Italian sun. Dale has a fondness for English amateurism and eccentricity, but this doesn’t detract from their essential dastardliness. In a slightly mawkish way, it’s a kind-hearted Italian girl who offers the novel’s one reprieve.

The rest of the book proceeds at a routine pace: Mrs Fingal ‘toddles’ (and sometimes falls), Josh dotes on her, sweetening her up, and Maisie is irredeemably cruel at every turn. There’s a final-page twist, but it doesn’t do much to dispel the air of queasy determinism that lingers over all Dale’s books. They aren’t whodunnits or whydunnits. Can they even be called crime novels at all? They’re like the less interesting cousins of one of those nouveaux romans in which we’re told a crime has been committed, though nobody can find the body or any of the clues. The sequence of events is relayed in such a matter-of-fact tone that it’s sometimes easy to forget what the matter is. Her non-mysteries may come down to this: how long can we keep on keeping on?

Dale died in 2011, two weeks short of her hundredth birthday. (It might have been the horror of the century that killed her: ‘You must tell me when the dog is past it,’ she would say to her friends.) She was in her late seventies when she wrote Sheep’s Clothing, but the elderly come out of all of her books badly, as if she were hell-bent on undermining whatever dignity Christie’s Miss Marple had secured. Comparisons to Spark, a gerontophobe of the highest order, are as inevitable as they are unfortunate. Spark understood, in Memento Mori (1959), the structural fun of a novel about old age: it stops the plot. It’s not clear what age portends for Dale, beyond growing old. There’s a literalism to her work that veers into essentialism, especially about depravity: the helplessness of the helpless, the greediness of the greedy … Perhaps it’s hard to read anything further into her ‘old dears’ because her young are narratively resistant too (take Janice, a ‘born no-hoper’ for whom prison ‘saved … the effort of having to make decisions about anything’). Yet the earlier A Spring of Love, described by Dale’s original publishers as ‘a detective story of the heart’, is something close to a Bildungsroman.

Its protagonist, thirty-something Esther, is negation incarnate – ‘hopeless’, ‘never made anything of herself’, ‘been nowhere, done nothing’. She loves only her late grandfather, from whom she has inherited the landlordship of her building, where she now lives with Gran, ‘a shapeless untidy little figure’ who stores up news clippings about the discreditable deeds of celebrities ‘as a squirrel stores nuts’ – a good divorce is better than a good murder – and who doesn’t think much of Esther, whose virtues (domesticity, prudence, steadfastness) are the wrong ones. The pair’s boredom is offset only slightly by entertainment from the tenants upstairs, always fighting, and the overseeing of Grandad’s shop. Then Esther meets Raymond. He is – to use a term from the book’s egregiously titled BBC miniseries adaptation from 1983 – ‘Mr Right’. An orphan, winningly ‘pleasant’, a real charmer. Nobody is happier than Gran, who prepares for his introduction at Christmas dinner in a mad flurry of tinsel and mistletoe, for both she and Esther know that the ‘great mad openness’ of the season has brought with it ‘the possibility of hope’. Finally, prodigiously, ‘he had come.’

Next is the ‘promised land’ of marriage, where Esther finds herself looking at the world through brighter eyes (especially at babies, ‘shrill and raw in their bodies’). When she catches herself in the mirror, she is staring out of ‘the same pale, nondescript face’, except her blankness is no longer a sign of ‘emptiness but completion’. It’s not long before Gran has had enough of it, and wondering how they’ll ‘dispose’ of her, or – worse – move her in with a ‘dreary collection of old bags, outlawed like herself by the young’. Even Dale must be bored by the doldrums of domestic bliss, given the glee with which she chucks their upstairs neighbour, Gloria, down the stairs:

She lost her balance and her needle heels caught in the rug and she fell, screaming, tied by her narrow hem, the beads flying out and banging behind her neck, into and down the twilit staircase, down and round, banging and twisted, the stairs a nightmare of inversion, flying upwards past her, her head below her legs, flying and falling, catching at banisters that tore from her fingers, a shoe striking her face as she fell and the thin clatter of her overthrow making a silence round her one shrill scream.

It isn’t long before the cracks in Raymond’s character appear: a little white lie in the form of a made-up aunt; the ‘quaint and sad’ fact of how ‘deeply, obsessively’ he loves money; his more than garden-variety misogyny (the natural result of ‘the defection of his mother and his illegitimacy’, everyone agrees); his treatment of the two shop-owners, whose business he wants to take over, and his loathing for the couple upstairs, particularly poor Gloria. And when the police later come calling with news about his past wives – well, nobody with eyes of ‘butcher’s blue’ was going to have the hands of a prince.

In the end it’s Esther’s ‘wracked composure’ and ‘dumb goodness’ that rouse the ‘respect and pity’ of a defence lawyer, though ‘respect’ is a merciful choice of word. It’s hard to encounter any of Dale’s women – clueless and dotty, easily romanced and easily duped, without wit or grace, natural-born biddies committed only to ignorance – and not feel a little rebuked. In her introduction to A Spring of Love, Sheena Patel recognises Esther (‘as if she were a friend of mine’) as a young woman adrift in London, but she’s hardly a Rhysian heroine. And yet, it’s true, as John Betjeman put it in his review of one of her earlier novels, that there’s something ‘convincingly dispiriting’ about Dale’s work. She doesn’t have the meddling authorial command of Spark, her nastiness isn’t really as penetrating as Dahl’s, and her sentences are anaemic when set beside Brookner’s, but by some sleight of hand, swapping crime for misfortune, she gets to you. Her childish characters bludgeon you with their naivety and helplessness and, so unable are you to sublimate this helplessness into dignity, you end up giving in. As one of her ‘dears’ prattled on, I found myself writing the word ‘attritional’ in the margin.

A Spring of Love ends with poor, wretched Esther determining that she has been ‘blessed’ by her misfortune. This is a reference to the novel’s epigraph, from which the title also comes: ‘A spring of love gush’d from my heart,/And I bless’d them unaware.’ Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was moved by the watersnakes he found coiled beneath the shadow of a ship, writhing in ugly splendour. ‘O happy living things! no tongue their beauty might declare.’ There is a sense, more keenly felt here than in either A Helping Hand or Sheep’s Clothing, though it lurks beneath the surface in both those later works, that Dale’s nastiness has sentimental ends. It is born not out of straightforward misanthropy, but a curiously perverted – or absolute – strain of humanism: nobody is undeserving of pity.