What I love about Jacqueline Winspear’s novels is that she doesn’t just portray the froth and fun of the 1920s and 1930s. She also probes deeper into the lives of the men and women who inhabited those times to give us a full picture of what it was like to be alive then.
I love her descriptions of life in London at that time, with its “cold-water flats”, old-fashioned buses that you could climb onto from the back (the bus conductor would walk up and down to issue you with a ticket) and the sense of a nation brought low, of the poverty that everyone suffered due to the enormous economic costs of the Great War plus the Depression that followed at the end of the twenties.
And so we have Miss Maisie Dobbs, still single, living alone in a flat in London, where she cooks herself an enormous pot of soup once a week, so that she can have a quick supper after a long day’s work.
We are in the Christmas season of 1931, and even though the Great War has now been over for thirteen years, still there are so many people who have never got over their experiences of this horrifying war. It will surprise no-one to learn that veterans were treated badly. During the war, people who had what we now call PTSD, were patched up and sent back to fight. Yes, their physical body may have been well enough to go back to France, but from the point of view of mental health, they were completely shot (pun intended.) I know that everyone was desperate to replace the approximately 9.7 million military men who had been killed, but I still think that sending such a person back to the front is the height of cruelty.
In this novel, we have one such man. An army veteran injured in both body and soul. He feels that he cannot get the government to listen to his plight. It is not clear whether the issue is just about his pension (which presumably he hasn’t received) or something else. But this man is determined to make the British government in Whitehall listen. And so he makes terrorist threats, saying that he will detonate a bomb in London.
Unfortunately, this man is brilliant enough to devise new kinds of horror. We are not just talking about Molotov cocktails or IEDs. We are talking about new forms of mustard gas and chlorine gas, which could cause devastation amongst crowds of people celebrating Christmas and the New Year. And so Maisie finds herself working during the Holiday Season of 1931 to 1932, as a consultant for Scotland Yard as the police try to catch this man before he causes massive amounts of death.
As always, Maisie comes up trumps and the whole affair ends very satisfactorily. But the reader is haunted by Ms. WInspear’s expressive writing that delineates the pain and suffering of so many of those war wounded whom the government chose to ignore. Five Stars.
