Man Overboard

Lieutenant-Commander, the hero of this novel, is axed from the Navy at the age of 36, one of many thousands obliged to re-plan their lives as the result of cuts in the armed services. A widower with a small daughter, he has no experience or knowledge outside submarines and the Royal Navy. His whole life had been that of a sailor since he joined up direct from school at the beginning of the war. This is not only the story of his struggles and adventures when he tries to find some way of earning his living; it is the story of his difficulty in adjusting himself to an unfamiliar civilian world. Monica Dickens’s novel is the story of all such men in any of the services who find themselves so rudely thrust into the ordinary life of their country which, though they have served unselfishly, they find they are ill-equipped to live in. Written with the lighter humorous touch of some of her earlier books, it is a sympathetic presentation of the human side of one of those mass adjustments forced on society by the changing nature of the world and its affairs.
Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in—she was expelled from St Paul’s Girls School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge—Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939. Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but the majority of writing continued to be set in Britain. Her book of 1953, No More Meadows, reflected her work with the NSPCC and she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children’s books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals, and to some extent children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.