by MARY HOCKING
Linnie suggests we should come down at the end of the week, since you are not allowed visitors before the operation.
I pray for you all the time, as I sweep the yard and dust the sitting-room; I go to sleep praying for you.
Our love,
Constance
Sussex
June, 1986
To be read to her even if she seems to be unconscious Our darling,
Do you remember that you once said to me when I had been worrying away at the nature of belief, ‘God brought me into the world and He will enable me to live my life and die my death.’ I should like to add some flowery touches of my own, but that is not your way. Fergus and Toby and I are coming to join Linnie. There will be someone beside you day and night until you come through - wherever that may be.
Our dearest love,
Constance
Norfolk coast
September, 1986
Dear absent one.
There has to be a time for last words, I told myself. There has always been so much time for words; it isn’t possible you should slip away, your last words written to Dominic on taking silk - ‘I always knew you would go far when you showed me how to open those wretched little cream cartons with a flick of the thumb-nail.’
It seems not so very long ago that we promised ourselves to come here again and walk together on the pebble beach before we were encumbered with children. But the tide ran out before we had the time and I walked alone on the beach today, looking to where you came headlong on the donkey that morning when he wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t even bring you to the mind’s eye.
I should like to pronounce a valediction, but what would I say? Someone spoke eloquently at the memorial service - your publisher, I believe. He painted a glowing portrait of a woman I didn’t know. What kind of a life did you have? I wonder. Perhaps this is a question we should not ask. The living is all that matters.
It is midday now and I am sitting on the little stone wall that
runs towards the harbour. Colour has drained away and one can hardly tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. A level light over all, the light you loved which casts no shadow. I can’t take in the fact that you won’t be there in that untidy study, waiting to open this in the evening, ‘when it is quiet and I can have it all to myself, as you used to say.
Pray for me,
Constance
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 1989
This edition published 2016 by Bello
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Copyright © Mary Hocking 1989
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