He Who Plays The King

by MARY HOCKING

  The wind surged past him; the sun glinted and danced on the steel of Sir William Stanley’s cavalry as it charged down the hill. The standard of the White Boar dipped and swayed and fell. The wind raced on in pursuit of other sport. The battalions of the sky formed and reformed. Everything was movement and change.

  Only now that the frame is set about the picture, the movement ceases, the last breath of life rattles out of the figures. They are left to history which tries to impose a pattern on the brilliant fragments, to assemble a cast of good and bad kings, of men who were ambitious and others who were avaricious, of humble folk, mute, downtrodden; all static figures in a static landscape, incapable of the turbulent emotions, the whirlwind hopes and terrors, the glorious inconsistency of the living.

  But the streams flow on and mingle with the river, mirroring meadow-sweet and heather-purpled hills and motley men and women passing over bridges, a willow decked with spring and a truant child at play under the hunter’s moon; the wind breaks the images which are tossed about like heaps of brightly-coloured glass and the river carries this living mosaic down to the sea.

  Mary Hocking

  Born 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. 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, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.

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  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1980

  This edition published 2016 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  ISBN 978-1509-8196-83 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1509-8196-69 HB

  ISBN 978-1509-8196-76 PB

  Copyright © Mary Hocking 1980

  The right of Mary Hocking to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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