Family Circle

Description

As a child, Flora (nicknamed 'Pug') used often to visit the Routh family at Lewes. She returns as a young woman, to help the parents with their daughter, Margaret, who has had a nervous breakdown mysteriously linked with Katmandu, and is being treated by the local doctor. Margaret's brother Timothy turns up unexpectedly from abroad: her sister Constance is the mainstay of the household. But it is their parents on whom Pug's attention is most often fixed. They had been figures of great power and glory to her as a girl: Mr. Routh is now a radio personality, a man up to his elbows in countless good causes, whose winning charm is steadied by his wife's good sense, her equal devotion to him and to her multifarious public duties. Gradually, though, Pug begins to see through the facade of this perfect couple to the characters beneath it. When the family becomes involved in a scandal, the utter self-deception of Mr. Routh and the almost sublime self-centredness of his wife are at last mercilessly exposed.

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.

Mary Hocking can be relied on for clear observation and a firm story -- Christopher Wordsworth A good bluff study of vanity and hypocrisy, its best ingredient being Miss Hocking's confident and subtle handling of a mental crack-up Observer Mary Hocking is a most accomplished writer and should be more widely known than I think she is. She is writing in the Jane Austen tradition of social comedy with a moral purpose and this is, perhaps, her best book -- Nina Bawden ... an uncommonly well-organised stimulant for the heart and head New Statesman