This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing by Jacqueline Winspear: book review

This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing (2020) is a memoir beginning with the author’s grandparents in post-war England.

Jacqueline Winspear’s mother and father were two of the thousands of children evacuated from London during wartime in 1939. They married in 1949. The author grew up in hardship in a ‘thirteenth-century cottage set on a hill above the farm it served, with the railway line running along the edge of the property, surrounded by fields and woodland’ before moving closer to London with her younger brother John.

Her mother was claustrophobic, after being buried in rubble as bombs fell on London, and her pacifist father worked with the explosives unit in the war.

When the author’s mother got a government job, and her father was earning ‘decent money’, she knew the family ship was on an even keel – ‘now we were heading for next year, when we would definitely all be laughing.’ But that was not the case. The family had to face a series of tragedies.

This is an interesting account of how the events of the past affect the family of the future. Both historical and personal, it is compelling and compassionate.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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