March House

by Mary Hocking

The arrival of a mysterious new psychiatrist at March House, the psychiatric clinic where Ruth works, heralds the collapse of her entire world. Dr Laver is flamboyant, vulgar, possibly even unethical - but he starts Ruth on an uneasy journey through the past, in which she glimpses her parents for the first time as separate people, in which her wholesome country life seems filled with madness and pain, and in which the happy childhood she thought she had crumbles away to reveal something quite different. In the characters who compose Ruth's world - her cousin Hilda, her mother, he father's woman friend Eleanor, the mad old lady Miss Maud - the author displays all her characteristic wit, and her deep understanding of human motivation. Mary Hocking charts the transformation in the relationship between father and daughter, between Ruth and her colleagues, with great subtlety, drawing us further and further into this landscape of the mind till the final moving conclusion.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1981

About the author

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.

* Source

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

March House the psychiatric clinic where Ruth works as a secretary seems to have lost its way. It is now little more than a disparate group of professionals clinging to the debris of its former glory. The clinic having undergone reductions in their staffing levels, now await the arrival of a new psychiatrist, Dr Laver. Mrs Libnitz, a former refugee is the receptionist, she hates the clinical psychologist Iris Bailey – simply because she needs someone to hate – Di Brady the voluptuous part-time nurse has her own troubles, two kids by one man, her most recent boyfriend has just left her, while Douglas the Psychiatric nurse has dumped his wife and kids for Eddie, who he has moved into the accommodation suite above the clinic. Suddenly into their midst arrives Dr Laver, almost out of nowhere, he appears, flamboyant, rather crass and unethical. From the first there is something very definitely disturbing about Dr Laver, and the way he hones in on Ruth and her colleagues, determined to prove the genius of which he is convinced.

Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/...