The Winter City

Description

The conflict between personal responsibility towards individuals and concern for which is no less forceful today than when Mary Hocking wrote this novel.The Winter City is set in an Iron-curtain country where the people are on the point of rising against their Communist government. Widowed Helen Jenner and her young Canadian friend, Kate Blanchard, work at the British Embassy in the capital. Kate is infatuated with Doyle Lawrence, and EngIish journalist secretly involved with the revolutionary movement. Doyle's friend, Paul Daniels, also a journalist but a more responsible character, has fallen in love with Helen.When the revolution finally breaks out, both Doyle and Paul find themselves in situations where the most difficult decisions of their lives have to be made. Both must draw on immense reserves of courage to follow what they know deep down to be the right path.

Born in 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. Even so, when she came to her beloved Lewes in 1961, she still took a part-time appointment, as a secretary, with the East Sussex Educational Psychology department. 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. Equally, she was an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, where she found her role as 'prompter' the most satisfying, and worshipped at the town's St Pancras RC Church.

A true novelist. She writes economically and precisely ... There's insight and imagination at work in this novel -- Walter Allen Mary Hocking deals cleverly with the tensions in the Anglo-Saxon embassy circles of an Iron Curtain country on the eve of revolution ... She shows us how differently civilised people can react to danger, and gives us a dramatic idea of the tortuous labyrinth of an underground movement. Her narrative is taut and her characterisation vivid. Punch Finely told study of human relationships. Evening News