A Helping Hand by Celia Dale

Reviewed by Phoebe T

Reminiscent of the work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith and Muriel Spark, Celia Dale’s A Helping Hand was first published in 1966. Its story of loneliness, desire, and suffocating care, is just as prescient today. As Jenn Ashworth’s introduction to this new edition notes, Dale’s novel is tangled in the ‘the cold-blooded economics of care’ and the fact of how  ‘easy it is for control to seep into our relations’. The novel’s first chapter is a masterclass in suburban unease, crammed with pension books and newspapers and tapestry footstools. We meet Josh Evans, cheerfully squalid, with a fondness for ‘busts’ and bikinis; and Maisie, a lifelong nurse, in whose mouth the word ‘dear’ has the ordinary deadliness of a kitchen knife.

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. And, on a starkly sunlit day in August, she moves in as a ‘paying guest’. Josh Evans blithely carries in her suitcases; Mrs. Fingal smiles as ‘gleefully’ as a ‘bride’; and Lena and Mrs Evans make up the bed with a rubber sheet in case of ‘disgusting’ accidents. Something nasty is slotting into place.

Dale’s genius, here, is in the cruelties, joys, transactions of ordinary life. She writes about the forms which must be filled in, the foods which must be digested, the people who must be taken care of, in order to survive another day. A worthy, and highly recommended, re-issue from a voice deserving of a new audience.

A Helping Hand is published by Daunt Books, 22nd September 2022