Maisie Dobbs author unravels family mysteries
Way before she wrote her first Maisie Dobbs mystery, at age 48 — there are now 15 in the bestselling series and a 16th on the way — Jacqueline Winspear began working on a memoir.
“Memoir has always been one of my great literary loves. There’s something about memoir where the personal reflects the universal. I can read a memoir by someone who has a completely different background than mine, and yet I can see a reflection of my own experience in that memoir,” she says.
She was not a published writer at the time, although that was a childhood dream, and she just couldn’t find a way to make it go the way she wanted it to.
“It ended up in the third drawer, somewhere lost in my computer,” she says with a laugh from her house in Ojai, Calif. “I returned to it after my parents passed. There were stories I wanted to tell and I think maybe I couldn’t tell when my parents were alive.”
Those stories, of growing up poor in the post- World War II English countryside with few children around except her younger brother, are lovingly and movingly told in “This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing” ( Soho Press), which was released in November.
The title comes from one of her father’s favorite sayings, one he’d repeat whenever the family hit a rough patch.
Her parents, Albert and Joyce, left London after the war to make a life in the rural Kent countryside. After working on farms, her father eventually took a job with a commercial painting and decorating business. Her mother was an executive in a government office.
Albert was a soft- spoken animal lover. Joyce however, was a different story. “My mother seemed to have her fists balled all the time,” Winspear writes.
But her mother was a storyteller — “She’d make her coffee, light another cigarette, blow out her first smoke ring, and she was off, back into the past,” she writes — even if Winspear later found out that some of her stories were not true, leading to a deep feeling of betrayal.
The stories she heard — of her paternal grandfather, left shellshocked from his service in World War I; of her father’s assignment to a demolitions team in Germany during World War
II; of her parents’ time living with Romany Gypsies; and of her mother’s evacuation during the
London Blitz at age 12 with five of her siblings, and the abuse at the hands of her caretakers that haunted her for the rest of her life — fascinated and scared her.
“She made it into a great adventure, which as a child is, whoa,” she says. “One of my favorite games was pretending we were running from the Germans.”
Her family’s experiences helped inform Winspear’s
Maisie Dobbs series, which follows the exploits of Maisie Dobbs, a World War I nurse who becomes a psychologist and investigator after the war and described as “every bit as brainy and battle- hardened as Lisbeth Salander” by NPR’s Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan.
But it wasn’t until after her mother died in 2015 at the age of 88 that Winspear began to realize the legacy of her family’s trauma born of war, and how it had helped shape her.
“I started getting more and more fearful of riding my horse. And I love riding. I mean, I love horses. It’s my thing. And it was escalating. It wasn’t getting better,” she says. “I was even thinking of selling my horse.”
Instead, she went to see a sports psychologist in Marin.
“He asked me about other fears and when I had experienced fear. And that’s when I told him when I was a kid I used to hide under the bed, in case the bombers came at night and we’d all be dead by morning. These stories my mother told me from a very young age, probably to really get her stories out from inside her, she had shared them with the person who was with her all the time, and that was me,” she says. “And he told me, ‘ I believe you’re suffering from secondary PTSD.’ ”
It made sense that fear would envelope her after her mother’s death. That realization helped Winspear to get back in the saddle — atop her horse and in the pages of her memoir.