The Climbing Frame

Description

This is the story of how a trivial event may be inflated by press, television and mere gossip into a national scandal.A small boy falls off a climbing frame in his school playground: though he is hardly at all injured, his mother accuses the headmaster of negligence. Soon the County Education Office and the County Council Education Committee are involved. Matters are complicated because the headmaster in question is in love with a young employee of the Education Office, while the Chief Education Officer, a liberal-minded man, is increasingly sniped at by his deputy, by a County councillor, and by the press.The Climbing Frame is a compelling and totally convincing novel about a subject of which Mary Hocking had real knowledge. Both the official and the private aspects of the cause celebre are presented with an accuracy and a sympathy which are beyond praise.

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 very knowledgeable, all too true account of how a small grumble, flooding through parents, schools, Education Committee and Press, can wreck lives and loves. All who attend committee meetings will recognise its sober truthfulness and compelling interest -- Phyllis Bentley