VMC
2 primary works
Book 222
It is 1939, and great changes come running to meet them all, snatching at their innocence and steadfast convictions and tossing them far away. Alice, Ben and Guy travel overseas, serving in the same war but on very different battlegrounds. For those who stay behind, Judith, Louise, Claire and Daphne, the struggle is to preserve the home, to keep things going, no matter what. But the sudden insecurity of the war confuses them. it gives them new strengths and fresh dreams, but leaves them still furiously hunting for a future, hoping that the old familiar beliefs will be patiently waiting for them to catch up again. In the second volume of Mary Hocking's excellent trilogy, England joins the world in its march to war, sweeping along the members of the Fairley household, their relations and friends.
Book 471
In this complex and satisfying conclusion to Hocking's trilogy the war is over, and the warriors have returned from their far-flung adventures. But London is bleak and grey, and Alice feels stifled by her job in local government. Both her sisters are married, and their widowed mother has a new husband and a new, rural life. With the savage winter of 1946-47 come the first icy intimations of the Cold War, and the betrayal that will darken the lives of friends who have known each other since schooldays.