A Helping Hand: Celia Dale

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Mr and Mrs Evans are having a little holiday in Italy when the meet old Mrs Fingal and her niece Lena. I read this in one day and loved it for the way the author was able to depict the horrible ordinariness of a certain kind of evil. Moreover, Maisie does everything in her power to carefully discourage any contact between Lena and Mrs Fingal, citing the desire for stability as a cover for her actions. After all, with Maisie’s training in nursing, the Evanses are perfectly placed to accommodate Mrs F in their spare room – the one previously occupied by ‘Auntie’ Flo. In Helping with Enquiries there are only three main protagonists, their story revolving around the murder of the mother.

Every time the debate around assisted suicide comes up, we hear of the need for firm safeguards to be put in place to actively prevent something akin to this, where family members and ‘carers’ might apply subtle pressure to an elderly or infirm relative to sign away their life. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that the material is credited and referenced to JacquiWine’s Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. When, on holiday in Italy, the Evanses encounter resentful Lena Kemp and her ‘independent’ aunt Cynthia Fingal, they arrange for Mrs Fingal to come and live with them.It is a frightening prospect and Dale realises how easily the seam of respectability can be played by fraudsters out for their own ends. Central to the novel are former nurse Maisie Evans and her husband Josh, a middle-aged couple living quiet lives in the heart of suburbia. Celia Dale reminds me of Rachel Ingalls - both immensely tired, interested in the uncanny, subtle in their writing, overlooked but now finding a very deserved spotlight. I read A Dark Corner some time ago and have plans to reread it soon, but A Helping Hand is completely new to me.

Just as the Evanses’ plan is ticking along nicely, another player comes into the mix in the shape of Graziella – a sweet-natured Italian waitress from their holiday – in need of a place to stay. This story about an elderly lonely widow going to live with a couple who befriend her and who becomes increasingly helpless and isolated as a result of their machinations is well worth reading. I think it’s the apparent ‘normality’ of the setting that makes it so frightening -the fact that stories like this could be playing out behind the net curtains of seemingly ordinary and caring homes. Most of the characters in this novel are over 60 years old so they do repeat themselves to great effect.In fact, I wondered if you might have read it already, especially as Celia Fremlin’s name keep popping up as a potential soul sister to Dale. It’s bloodless in its entirety, yet quite chilling in its portrayal of the cruelties and interactions of everyday life.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. As Graziella bonds with Mrs Fingal, encouraging the old lady to build up her strength by walking again, she senses that something is decidedly off. Poor Cynthia is first besotted, then befuddled by Josh but he’s a lecherous old creep with eyes only for young woman and his sordid scrapbook. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. While the usual elements of a standard crime story will not be found in this novel, what happens here certainly falls within the realm of the genre, and given that this book was written in the 1960s, it remains extremely pertinent in our contemporary world which makes what happens even more frightening.Lena, for her part, is delighted to have an opportunity to offload her aunt onto someone else, leaving her free to focus on her work and entertaining men, while Mrs F can look forward to mild flirtations with Josh and some much-need company to stave off her loneliness. But maybe I've read too much of this sort of thing lately as I was definitely hoping for something darker. And yet, everything is so carefully orchestrated to seem caring in front of others – this is where the skill really comes in. Nevertheless, everything I’ve heard about her work makes me think she’s in a similar vein – all the more so as you’ve backed this up! I really enjoyed the story that is on its face rather benign, following a middle aged English couple and their elderly house guest, but what at first seems ordinary turns quietly horrific as Celia Dale unmasks what is really going on in this quiet suburban home.

What Dale does so well here is to subtly reveal to the reader the true malice behind the Evanses’ actions.Josh and Mai are having a holiday to get over the recent death of Auntie Flo who lived with them, and who left them everything in her will.