'Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more bypath meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.' So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Christine felt bound to agree. 'My wife can do anything,' Vinson said. Even if 'anything' meant getting used to the size and pace of his country, America? Wearing a sycophantic smile for the wife of Admiral Hamer (who wore patent-leather shoes like bananas) Because Vin hoped to be promoted? Having a cold Turkey and a cold ham at every party? Smiling through The inevitable silences of marriage? Was Vinson what she really wanted? Even on the cold, bleak days when nothing went right, the crazy neighbour called while Captain Decker was having cocktails, Vin's mother had an appendectomy during a thunderstorm, she lost out on the TV quiz and she and Vin quarreled Bitterly? In No More Meadows, Monica Dickens unravels the threads of a very real marriage, with her inimitable warmth and sense of idiosyncratic character.
Author
From the publisher: MONICA DICKENS, born in 1915, was brought up in London and was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her mother's German origins and her Catholicism gave her the detached eye of an outsider; at St Paul's Girls' School she was under occupied and rebellious. After drama school she was a debutante before working as a cook. One Pair of Hands (1939), her first book, described life in the kitchens of Kensington. It was the first of a group of semi autobiographies of which Mariana (1940), technically a novel, was one. 'My aim is to entertain rather than instruct,' she wrote. 'I want readers to recognise life in my books.' In 1951 Monica Dickens married a US naval officer, Roy Stratton, moved to America and adopted two daughters. An extremely popular writer, she involved herself in, and wrote about, good causes such as the Samaritans. After her husband died she lived in a cottage in rural Berkshire, dying there in 1992. http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/page...
