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The mind has mountains
Tom Norris has problems of his own, and chief among them who is he? It is a time of general stress and strain, for Tom is Assistant Education Officer to the South Sussex Council, and the County Hall, long threatened by wind and rain on its bleak headland, is about to meet its destruction at the hands of a Boundaries Commission. Where can its strange and unnerved inhabitants find another refuge? While Tom pursues his quest for identity and purpose, he reluctantly takes into his office Phoebe Huber, and otherwise rejected member of staff whose meek manner conceals a formidable gift for subversion. Tom begins by feeling sorry for Phoebe, but chaos is her natural element and she is better qualified than Tom to live in it. As little by little she takes possession of him, the South of England is hit by one of the worst blizzards in living memory. The snow blots out the familiar landscape, order breaks down both inside and outside the County Hall, the boundary between reality and fantasy grows indistinct, the wolf returns to the hills.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1976
5 people want to read
About the author
Mary Hocking
32 books8 followersBorn 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.
* Source
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.
* Source
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 1, 2017
n several Mary Hocking novels that I have read, Hocking’s concerns seem to be to explore the issue of mental health, it is one of her more serious concerns that her popular novels like the Fairly family trilogy are less representative of. The Mind Has Mountains is certainly one of Hocking’s more serious and ambitious works, set against the backdrop of extreme weather conditions and the uncertainty of county council restructuring.
Tom Norris and his wife Isobel live in a large house in a small Sussex village, Isobel stays in the village with her charity work, the WI and her garden while Tom leaves each day to do battle in the County Hall of South Sussex.
“Although it was only late September there was a rasp in the air this evening that was not entirely due to woodsmoke rising from a bonfire. Tom Norris, who had intended to go for a walk by the river, turned back at the end of the village street. There were only a few cottages in the street, most of the larger houses stood farther back at the end of cart tracks which their owners, who were not hospitable folk, had made no attempt to surface. There was no one about in the street. The bus service had been cut off several years ago and since then the village had reverted to the isolation it had known most of the years since Doomsday.”
Tom is the Assistant Education Officer for South Sussex, but now as well the usual office politics, the stresses and strains of life in local government, Tom and his colleagues are threatened by the boundaries commission, who are seeking to get rid of South Sussex county council parcelling up its various parts between the East and West Sussex.
In his spare time, Tom is a writer of children’s books, and his imagination is fuelled by the landscape around him, and the tantalising idea that the wolf could return to the hills.
Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...
Tom Norris and his wife Isobel live in a large house in a small Sussex village, Isobel stays in the village with her charity work, the WI and her garden while Tom leaves each day to do battle in the County Hall of South Sussex.
“Although it was only late September there was a rasp in the air this evening that was not entirely due to woodsmoke rising from a bonfire. Tom Norris, who had intended to go for a walk by the river, turned back at the end of the village street. There were only a few cottages in the street, most of the larger houses stood farther back at the end of cart tracks which their owners, who were not hospitable folk, had made no attempt to surface. There was no one about in the street. The bus service had been cut off several years ago and since then the village had reverted to the isolation it had known most of the years since Doomsday.”
Tom is the Assistant Education Officer for South Sussex, but now as well the usual office politics, the stresses and strains of life in local government, Tom and his colleagues are threatened by the boundaries commission, who are seeking to get rid of South Sussex county council parcelling up its various parts between the East and West Sussex.
In his spare time, Tom is a writer of children’s books, and his imagination is fuelled by the landscape around him, and the tantalising idea that the wolf could return to the hills.
Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...
Displaying 1 of 1 review