Welcome Strangers

Description

As the 1939-1945 war slows to a clumsy halt, a trembling world holds out its arms to welcome peace back home again. Alice Fairley, her friends and her family are surprised to find themselves so unprepared for peacetime. In a way, it's like starting all over again: all the things one was confident about have disappeared or changed shape somehow, while things which were acceptable, or even pleasant, now seem different, dull, irksome. Noisy whispers of spy-rings and foreign conspiracies provoke shockwaves of malice and stinging intolerance. The world has grown up. Quickly, they discover that the battle is not over yet . . . persistent spectres of duty and guilt pick their victims indiscriminately.

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 is a subtle and unusual novelist ... who deals almost relentlessly with what passes as the ordinary Financial Times Honest, shrewd and entirely convincing London Standard