Daniel Come to Judgement

Description

When President Aluwawa purges his country of foreign helpers Daniel Kerr, a micro-biologist, returns to Yeominster, feeling displaced and dispossessed. Yet he has a family there. His wife, Erica, more used to his absence than his presence, and two children, Emma and Giles. But family togetherness is short-lived, for Daniel has a gift for disruption, and it is a relief when he is posted to a research unit at Brocklehurst. But Brocklehurst is not his scene and he resigns on grounds of conscience, thus providing the press with a new sensation. Finding a job teaching at his son's school, he becomes entangled in a controversy over a bypass, and when the Yeominster Conservation Society fails in its object, the schoolboy revolutionaries take over traffic control and for one memorable day the life of Yeominster is turned upside down. In a manner which is thoughtful, lucid and humorous, Mary Hocking relates personal problems and private causes to social problems and public causes, neither easily coped with, or avoided.

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.

... highly entertaining ... Northern Echo ... a fine and kind novel ... The Times