This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Read online

  Books by

  Jacqueline Winspear

  Maisie Dobbs

  Birds of a Feather

  Pardonable Lies

  Messenger of Truth

  An Incomplete Revenge

  Among the Mad

  The Mapping of Love and Death

  A Lesson in Secrets

  Elegy for Eddie

  Leaving Everything Most Loved

  A Dangerous Place

  Journey to Munich

  In This Grave Hour

  To Die But Once

  The American Agent

  The Care and Management of Lies

  Non-fiction

  What Would Maisie Do?

  Copyright © 2020 by Jacqueline Winspear

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Winspear, Jacqueline, author.

  Title: This time next year we’ll be laughing : a memoir / Jacqueline Winspear.

  Description: New York, NY : Soho, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020019804

  ISBN 978-1-64129-269-6

  eISBN 978-1-64129-270-2

  Subjects: LCSH: Winspear, Jacqueline, 1955—Childhood and youth.

  Winspear, Jacqueline, 1955– Family. | Authors, English—21st century—

  Biography. | Working class families—England—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PR6123.I575 Z46 2020 | DDC 823’.92 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019804

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my brother, John James Winspear

  And in memory of our late parents,

  Albert Frederick and Joyce Margaret Winspear

  My heroes

  Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity.

  —Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

  Prologue

  It was our third visit to A&E, the accident and emergency department at the local hospital. The aggressive blood disorder that had been claiming my father’s life day by day was bringing us to our knees. Months of regular transfusions were now wreaking havoc on every bone in his body. My mother was snappy, her temper breaking down faster than his veins—and I was doing all I could to care for them both, desperate to keep the ship on an even keel even as it was crashing against the rocks. My brother, John, was still trying to come to terms with what was happening—only a few months earlier Dad had hiked for hours with John in the mountains near his home in Ojai, California, and my strong, sturdy father had kept up a young man’s pace, not even broken a sweat. His doctor had always said, “Mr. Winspear, you are one of the fittest men I see here in my practice, and I don’t mean for your age.” We had all felt quite smug—those Winspear genes were pretty darn good, weren’t they?

  Annette, the senior hematology nurse who had been our point person from day one, had called the house earlier that morning.

  “How are you all holding up?” she asked.

  “Not so great,” I replied, feeling as if I were letting the side down. We didn’t admit defeat in our family. I explained that Dad was being stoic, Mum was by turns sarcastic and argumentative, then compassionate and caring.

  “And you?” she asked.

  I shrugged, as if she were there with me. “I’m all right, Annette, but—”

  “No, you’re not, Jackie—I can hear it in your voice. You’re exhausted. It’s time you all had a break. Let’s get your dad in for a transfusion and some pain meds, and I’ll arrange for his transfer to the hospice for respite care—give you all a chance to draw breath. But you must tell him we’re not packing him off to hospice to die—just for respite. The ambulance will be with you in about twenty minutes, and I’ll be down there in A&E to meet you when you arrive.”

  I told my mother to get ready to leave, then went to my parents’ room and knelt alongside my father’s bed. “Dad, it’s just for respite care—a bit of a break. You’ll get a transfusion at the hospital—that’ll perk you up—and they’ll give you something stronger for that pain in your back. I’ll be with you all the time, Dad. Mum’s just getting dressed.”

  I helped my dad get up from the bed and steadied him as he made his way to the bathroom. I put out a fresh, ironed shirt, his best trousers and one of his favorite jackets. His leather shoes were polished. Dad was a dapper man, and unless he was working in the garden, he always wanted to be “well turned out.” Even at seventeen, when he was first conscripted into the army, he took the uniform to a local tailor for alteration because he didn’t like the cut. And now, though he could barely stand, he insisted upon dressing himself—no, he didn’t want help from anyone, and certainly no one else could pull off that all-important Windsor knot in his tie.

  At the hospital my father was wheeled to a cubicle, where Annette took his hand and explained to us that they were just getting a quarantine room ready for him because “A and E is full of people coming in with all sorts of germs—and we don’t want your dad catching anything.” Then she said she’d like a moment alone with my father. I watched from a distance as Annette sat next to Dad, their heads almost touching while she spoke to him. I’ve wondered if this was the moment she told him, “Albert, it’s almost time.” I imagine it might have been.

  In the quarantine room my mother and I sat on either side of Dad’s bed. I watched as blood and platelets drip-drip-dripped into my father’s arm, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie removed. He lay on top of the bedlinens, and I remember thinking, He’s such a smart, dear, lovely man. The plan was that as soon as the transfusion was complete there would be a short wait and a cup of tea and a pastry for Dad before another ambulance would come to take him to the hospice. In the meantime, we waited. Drip, drip, drip, blood and platelets entering my father’s body, giving us all a little more time.

  We spoke of this and that for a while, ordinary things, subjects of no great import, then Dad turned and reached toward my mother, taking her hands in his own.

  “Haven’t we had a great life?” he said.

  She leaned her head toward his, pulled back one hand and rested it against his cheek. He moved his head and kissed her palm. As quietly as I could, I stood up and crept away from my chair, my footfall silent as I left the room, turning the door handle without a sound so as not to interrupt their moment. Instead I stood in the hallway reading and rereading the wall-mounted instructions for evacuation in case of fire.

  Haven’t we had a great life?

  And in that moment, as I turned and focused on the red-backlit exit sign, I felt my chest ache and my breath become short, and I wondered if I shouldn’t be admitted into care without delay. My heart had swollen, and I felt a weight on my chest that took my breath away. I loved them not only because they were my parents—I loved them for who they were, for their resilience and capacity for endurance at the very worst of times. I cherished them for their love of each other, for their love of life—and of us. I would have moved mountains to keep them safe, together.

  Haven’t we had a great life?

  1

  About Me and Memories

  Memories appear in flashes of light, in short scenes, in reflections tha
t can make us laugh or bring us to tears. They might come in on a sneaker wave of grief, or be buoyed up from our past by a certain fragrance in the air, or a sound from afar. The essence of memoir, I suppose, is that it could better be described as “re-memory.” We don’t just look back at an event in our past; we are remembering the memory of what happened. It’s a bit like putting the laundry through two wash cycles.

  The whine of a chain saw in the distance brings back autumn days working on a farm close to our home in England’s Weald of Kent. Mist hangs across the land like a silk scarf—not quite touching the earth, but not rising high enough to join a cloud. Sunshine filters through, grainy, as the shades of gold change with the waning day. And there it is, the whine of that chain saw. I remember, once, walking with my father across the fields close to their new home. Dad hadn’t quite settled—it would take him a long time to feel anything akin to the love he had for that old house at the end of a Victorian terrace where he and my mother had lived for over twenty-four years and raised two kids. As we walked that day we found a hop bine growing through the hedge, a leftover from the days when the field had been a hop garden. (The hop vine is always called a “bine” in Kent and Sussex, and hops are grown in a “garden” not a field.) My father pulled a couple of hops from the bine and crushed them between his hands, then brought his nose to his palms, his eyes closed. “My whole childhood is rushing before me,” he said. Some thirty years later I watched as my brother threaded dried hops through the one hundred red roses atop my father’s coffin. Our memories of childhood, too, were woven with the spicy fragrance of the hop gardens of Kent.

  But the story really begins many years before, in London. And not the posh part.

  We are, all of us, products of our family mythology. Stories are not only passed down, but nestled in every cell. When I thought about writing a memoir, I knew I had to write my parents’ story—because I am of them. Everything that happened in my childhood—every household decision, every peal of laughter and every sharp word snapped across the table—was underpinned by my parents’ attitudes to the world around them. Those attitudes were forged not only in their youthful experience of wartime London, but by a few postwar years, the years when they were uprooted from family and became—in the parlance of their time—gypsies.

  But before I press the play button on that story, here’s something about me and memories—my first memory is of something that happened when I was six months old, or thereabouts. I distinctly remember the scene, though it lasted perhaps only a couple of minutes. No one told me about it because no one else was there, so this was not a matter of absorbing other people’s memories. The bird was there and I now believe he was a sparrow. It’s a fair bet—there are a lot of sparrows about. My memory is of being in my pram. At the outer periphery of my vision I can see the edge of the hood to the left, right and above. In front of me is the handle—way out in front of me. The covers must have been close to my chin, because at the lower edge of my vision there is a white blurring, as if a blanket had been pulled up against whatever the weather was doing. Weather is always doing something in England, and in the mid-1950s, whatever it was doing did not deter mothers from putting their babies outside, even as far away as the bottom of the garden. It was deemed good for us. It was probably also very good for mothers who needed a bit of peace and quiet.

  My attention had been drawn to a bird as it landed on the handle. I know I focused on it before I reached out to try to touch the bird. I remember feeling frustration because I could not control the hand, so the fingers kept going in and out of focus as I opened and closed them trying to reach the sparrow. I failed, because my hand came down and hit me on the forehead—my babyish lack of motor control. I had no words to think, nothing intellectual to trouble my new brain—but I remember the physicality of frustration at not being able to reach that bird. Then the sides of the hood seemed to close in and the outside world was pushed back.

  After I wrote that paragraph, I went through some old photographs until I found one of me at that age, snuggled up in my pram, and there it is, that big fluffy white blanket tucked almost to my chin.

  I have a long memory. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I believe it has something to do with the accident—it was as if the shock did something to me that left me with more than physical scars, and after I recovered it seemed that events I might have forgotten were locked into my memory bank. On the other hand, I find it funny that I can remember details from very early childhood onward, yet for the life of me I can never find my keys once I’ve put them down, or recall whether I remembered to give the dog her thyroid pill—strange that I should have adopted a dog with a dodgy thyroid, a family affliction that defined much of my childhood.

  What I remember of the accident—which happened when I was about fifteen months old—is this: I was surrounded by grown-ups who were standing beside me around the kitchen table. I felt as high as their knees. We had company—my Auntie Sylvie, Uncle John, and cousins Johnny, Larry and Martine, who was younger than me by six months, so she was probably crawling, but not toddling. I was wearing my new nylon dress—it might have been bought in London by my aunt, as nylon dresses for little girls were all the rage because they could be washed and dried quickly. I doubt I cared about the dress, but I loved tea and I remember I couldn’t wait to be given a cup of lukewarm, milky, sweet tea in my red mug. So I reached up to the table to grab the closest handle, which happened to be attached to my father’s enamel one-pint army mug—he’d held onto it after his army demob years before, because he liked his tea scalding hot and the metal kept it that way. I can still see that handle above me and my hand stretching toward it, my fingers opening and closing as I reached up, just as I’d reached toward the sparrow.

  That’s the last I remember of the accident. My mother told me the tea was so scalding hot my nylon dress melted into my skin. My father tried to rip it off, then wrapped me in a blanket, and they ran from the cottage to the farm because the farmer had a car. We were living far off the beaten track, in a cottage in the midst of the Bedgebury Forest in Goudhurst, Kent. We had no phone, no car and no means of getting to the hospital. The farmer’s car had to struggle through mud with my father and uncle pushing, I was told, and by the time they reached the main road I was in convulsions, screaming and screaming and screaming.

  I still have some scarring across my chest where the dress was pulled away, taking a goodly layer or two of flesh with it, and another on my ribs from a skin graft of some sort. I was shot up with penicillin, which my mother always said saved my life. When I left the hospital weeks later, I started to remember almost everything that came to pass from then on, and a few things from before the accident. Hardly an event happened that was not catalogued in my mind unless I made an effort to forget it. At times I worked hard at forgetting.

  This is my memoir of a time and place in a series of vignettes, screen shots, portraits and panoramas. At first, I wanted to call it It’s All Changed Around Here, and here’s why it came to mind. Imagine this: We are on our way from our home in Kent up to London. “We” comprises my parents, sitting in the front of the Morris Traveller, plus my brother and me on the back seat, likely arguing, perhaps even with fists flying. You might ask why my brother has built a wall of toilet paper rolls between us, and it would be fair to say no one could blame him. I suffered from severe motion sickness and he just could not stand me throwing up all over him yet again.

  The car is grey with wood trim. It’s our first family car, bought second-hand, and not only does it backfire with some regularity, but the vapor of exhaust fumes coming in through the back doors makes me feel even worse. My discomfort is compounded by the fact that my father is a terrible driver, so the car lurches sideways and forward every time he overtakes another car, usually yelling that the dozy bugger should get off the effing road. Dad had let his license lapse and he’d had to take a driving test again (or maybe that was it—he’d never had a license in the
first place!), and now, not so long after he had finally passed the test on his sixth attempt, we were en route to visit our London relatives in what was supposed to be the comfort of our own car.

  Fields and farms gave way to concrete and suburbia, then to an inner city still bearing livid scars of wartime bomb sites and blitzed broken houses—this in the mid-1960s. As the names of streets became recognizable to my parents, they would say to each other, “Look at that—do you remember when . . .” and a story was told about people we didn’t know and a place we didn’t understand. Finally, as we reached our destination—probably Auntie Sylvie and Uncle John’s house in Camberwell—Dad would shake his head and say, “It’s all changed around here.” And Mum would agree and they would look about them and seem bewildered, as if a thief had crept in while they weren’t looking and stolen part of their life, something precious never to be seen again. My brother and I teased them relentlessly. We mimicked them, and as we passed this or that street we’d call out names of places we didn’t know, really, and I remember seeing my father and mother grin at each other and roll their eyes. How could we ever understand, we who had not lived in their world—a world they had left because they could not stay?

  Change is woven into the fabric of my stories, probably because when I was a child the dueling senses of belonging and being out of place were ever-present, along with a fear that the rug could be pulled out from under us at any moment. But I loved the place where I grew up, despite the fact that—like a lot of kids—I couldn’t wait to leave home, to travel, to see the world.

  Last year I returned to Cranbrook, which you could say is my “hometown”—and isn’t that such an American locution? I parked on the High Street and walked past the Indian restaurant where Palmer and White’s, the haberdashery shop, used to be. I made my way past the Vestry Hall, where the ambulance station was located when I was a child, then up the churchyard steps and along toward the old primary school. I remember, once, waiting with my mother to watch a bride walking from a ribbon-bedecked car toward the church, her arm linked through her father’s, her dress cascading silk atop a flounce of organza petticoats. As I reached out to finger the silk, she turned to me as if she’d felt my touch and she smiled. It was as if an angel had acknowledged my presence, and that I, too, could one day look so beautiful. I tried not to let my hand rest upon anything else for the rest of the day—my flesh felt sacred.