by MARY HOCKING
Alice raised her face to the sun and for a few minutes, perhaps only a second, she had that feeling, usually associated with the edge of sleep, when the mind relaxes its hold and the spirit floats free of its prison. The sun is warm, the world is greening, it is now. It is always now.
A small child on some purposeful mission stumped between the shrubs and a white Sealyham bobbed up and down with a rocking motion like a sailing boat making its way across the grass. A blackbird fluted. In one of the houses fronting the park a typewriter was in use behind an open window. Alice took her notebook from her handbag.
‘I’ve been sitting in Holland Park and something of tremendous importance came over me,’ she called out to Ben when she entered the house.
‘And what was that?’
‘It went, as soon as I tried to write it down.’
‘Perhaps it will come back if you set your mind to some mundane task – like cleaning the paint brushes.’
Mary Hocking
Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.
Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.
The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the `Fairley Family’ trilogy – Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers – books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.
For many years she was an active member of the `Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.
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Copyright
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1986
This edition published 2016 by Bello
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1509-8191-88 EPUB
ISBN 978-1509-8191-64 HB
ISBN 978-1509-8191-71 PB
Copyright © Mary Hocking 1986
The right of Mary Hocking to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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