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Although Jacqueline Winspear moved to the U.S. at the age of thirty-five, Kent pervades her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood and provides prominent settings in her renowned and award-winning Maisie Dobbs series, a set of eighteen historical mystery-detective novels featuring a woman ahead of her time who is a psychologist-investigator. While these novels take place during a period from 1929 to 1945, they frequently gain depth and meaning through flashbacks to World War One experiences.

Even after re-locating to California, Winspear returned many times to beloved sites of her past, and in her 2019 book What Would Maisie Do?, she devotes a chapter to Kent. In this section, she includes the following quote from one of her friends who has just finished reading An Incomplete Revenge, the fifth one in her series: “This book is your love letter to Kent.” Agreeing with this opinion, Winspear adds that “the county of Kent appears in each of the novels”.¹

Winspear’s memoir entitled This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, published in 2020, captures her deep, abiding connection to Kent in these words: “The land where I grew tall is filled with meaning for me—it’s the land of hop gardens and apple orchards, of farms and fields, of trees to climb and streams flanked by pungent wild garlic and golden sun-reflecting celandines. This deep love of place is part of my family mythology, a delicate web across my heart. . . . I live some six thousand miles away from the land of my growing, and even from such a distance I can feel my roots in that soil. Take me there blindfolded and I would know I had come home. The air’s texture and fragrance, the sounds, the sense of light even though my eyes are closed—I would know I was where I belonged, once. And perhaps it’s truly where I belong now.”²

In this memoir, Winspear presents detailed accounts of growing up in Kent. She was born in Goudhurst in the rural Weald of Kent where her parents lived in a small 13th century home called Black Bush Cottage “in the midst of the Bedgebury Forest”.³ After a brief sojourn in London, when the author was about two years old, her parents returned to the same area, moving into the 16th century Brown House Cottage which she describes as “magical”⁴ and which was a 2-mile walk into Goodhurst. As a little girl, Winspear loved the surrounding natural world and was particularly fond of the russets and Cox’s Orange Pippins she picked in the nearby apple orchards.

When Winspear was three years old, her family moved to a Victorian Terrace House two miles from Cranbrook, a small market town that lies halfway between Maidstone and Hastings—a town she considered her “home”⁵ and one she “walked” to “once or twice each week”.⁶ She notes that they lived in the small village of Hartley, which was on the bus route between Cranbrook and Hawkhurst.⁷ While living there, she was happiest when in the fields, woods and farms, picking strawberries in summer and Kentish cob nuts in autumn.

Winspear recounts how her paternal grandfather’s family and her own father “were among the great exodus of people who left London in late summer to go to Kent for the picking of the hops”⁸ and recalls how she herself until the age of eleven, “was a part of that tradition”.⁹ Before Winspear was born, her parents worked alongside not only Londoners, but also Romany Gypsies with their caravans. In her memoir, Winspear relates this rich memory: “My father told me that when he was a boy, he was never happier than when he saw the oast houses hove into view as the family trudged several miles from the station to the farm, pushing a barrow with their furniture and household belongings secured on top.” As a participant in this hops-picking community, Winspear recalls the “camaraderie, of people calling out to one another, and of someone starting a song and everyone joining in, so it was as if the rag-tag choir had given full voice across the land, London songs echoing across country fields”.¹⁰

The outdoor Museum of Kent Life in Cobtree, located at Sandling on River Medway near Maidstone, re-creates the world that Winspear and her forebears encountered in the hops industry’s heyday. The Museum’s volunteer docents show you what the hops look and smell like, how they are grown and twirled onto poles, and how they are dried in the oast houses there. On its grounds, the museum also includes several “hopper huts” a few of which are furnished with the workers’ domestic goods. These huts provide a vivid picture of the ways the hop-picking families lived during their Kent sojourn.

The Kent hops-picking tradition constitutes a major setting in Winspear’s An Incomplete Revenge, and a visit to the Kent-Life Museum amplifies the readers’ experience of this fictional work. In today’s Kent, visitors can see how many homes which were originally oast houses still retain what Winspear calls “cone-shaped” roofs and a “white cowl resembling a witch’s hat”.¹¹

In her rural communities, Winspear learned to be independent at an early age. In addition to fruit-picking and farm chores as a child, she “continued working on farms throughout [her] school days”, and, as a teenager, took on a wide variety of jobs.¹² One of these was dish-washing at the Star and Eagle Hotel and Restaurant in Goudhurst, which dates from 1400, is still in operation, and serves an excellent lunch!

After leaving the Mary Sheafe School for Girls at age sixteen in preparation for her college education, she completed her A levels at the Cranbrook Grammar School, “a semi-private boys’ secondary school” which had just begun admitting girls.¹³ During the summer just before beginning her studies at a college in South London, she and her brother “managed to land a job together apple- and pear-picking at farms in Horsmonden and Brenchley, typical Kentish villages” not far from where they were living. Besides recalling that she “loved that last golden summer working with [her] brother,” Winspear also notes that during her first year at college, she “was going home almost every single weekend, having snagged a ride from a fellow student who lived in Hawkhurst”.¹⁴

Kent locations appear right from the beginning of the Maisie Dobbs series. In Book One entitled Maisie Dobbs, we are introduced to Chelstone Manor in Kent, the country property of the Sir Julian and Lady Rowan Compton. After working as a servant for the Comptons in their Belgravia London home, Maisie, at age fifteen, becomes the personal maid and companion to the Dowager Compton who resides at Chelstone’s Dower House. After Sir Julian’s mother dies, Dr. Maurice Blanche, Maisie’s beloved mentor, purchases the Dower House, and in the years while he lives there, Maisie visits him to imbibe his special words of wisdom. When Dr. Blanche dies, he bequeaths this home to Maisie, and even Maisie’s widowed father, Frankie Dobbs, ends up residing in a cottage on the Chelstone estate when he takes on the job of tending the Compton family’s horses. In her memoir, Winspear informs readers that she places the Chelstone property “just north of Pembury in Kent and due south of Tonbridge.” However, she “imagines” the main residence “to look something like Pashley Manor near the village of Ticehurst in East Sussex, which is close to the country’s boundary with Kent”.¹⁵ Today tourists can visit the sumptuous gardens with their great variety of sculptures on the grounds of Pashley Manor and find, in their gift shop, some of Winspear’s writings.

In this first Maisie Dobbs novel, while visiting Chelstone Manor, the female protagonist reminisces about the war and visualizes Kent’s cliffs of Dover in the following words: “. . . sitting alone in the gardens of Chelstone, Maisie wondered about the war, and how it was that such blooms could give joy to the soul, when one only had to stand on the cliffs overlooking the Channel to hear the boom of cannon on the battlefields of France.”¹⁶ In another flashback, when Maisie, having joined a nursing team on the front in France, is granted a leave to return home in February, 1917, these are her sensations as she enters Kent via the sea from France: “She breathed in waiting for sea saltiness to give way to the clear air of Kent. Oh, how she ached to see her father, to be drawn into the warm, steamy atmosphere of Mrs. Crawford’s kitchen. In France, she had dreamed of Kent, of apple orchards in full blossom, primroses and bluebells carpeting the woodland, and the soft countryside stretching out before her.”¹⁷

When Maisie’s father is asked by Lady Rowan to live on the Chelstone property, he tells his daughter, “It’s not as if I’m a stranger to Kent, ‘aving been down there picking the old ‘ops every year when I was a bit of a nipper meself.”¹⁸ Billy Beale, Maisie’s loyal assistant, also tells Maisie that he is familiar with Kent because every autumn he, his wife, and children sojourn there to pick the hops. Billy’s presence contributes greatly to the mysterious case that Maisie is solving in this novel, a case involving a wounded veterans’ retreat set in an isolated area of Kent. On one of her driving trips to investigate this retreat property and its owner in June of 1929, Maisie experiences a brief reprieve from her somber thoughts when “The hedgerows, small villages and apple orchards still full of blossom [work] their magic upon her”.¹⁹

The rural ‘Weald of Kent’ in late September in 1931 pervades the atmosphere of An Incomplete Revenge. In this novel, Winspear brings readers directly into this world, telling us “that the senses are teased more than at any other time, with the hops, sweet apples, and earthy hay”.²⁰ In this work, the author shows us how “Verges along-side the road were still full of hogweed, showing off cream-coloured fronds of tiny petals, interspersed with the delicate shepherd’s purse, its fragile heart-shaped leaves shimmering . . . as if to hide behind the last of summer’s pink common mallow”.²¹

As Maisie drives along to Hawkhurst as a part of her investigations, she goes “through village after village resplendent in the midst of a varied and colourful harvest. She [sees] apples almost ready for picking as she passe[s] the orchards, with sweet Cox’s Orange Pippins hanging heavy on branches and hearty bitter Bramleys just waiting to be sliced into a pie”.²² As a part of depicting the Kent hops-picking community, Winspear provides a detailed account of Romany Gypsy culture in agricultural Kent and makes numerous references to Michaelmas daisies which are symbolically woven into the mysterious main plot. Maisie’s investigations focus on a place called Sandermere Estate not far from Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells and Chelstone. Through her skillful detection, she eventually uncovers the villainous estate owner’s crucial link to numerous unsolved theft and arson crimes occurring within the Kent village of ‘Heronsdene’.

In the seventh Maisie Dobbs novel, Mapping of Love and Death (2010), Chatham’s School of Military Engineering and Chatham Dockyards (Naval base in the Napoleonic Wars) play a part, and once again we follow Maisie as she travels from London southward on the Old Kent Road.

Although Winspear didn’t begin her historical fiction-writing until her mid-40s, her Maisie Dobbs novels series proved an overnight success. The first book, published in 2003, became a national best-seller, and Winspear went on to win several prestigious prizes for novels within this series. While creating these works, she not only drew upon her vivid memories of Kent but also returned there frequently. So many details within these works as well as her autobiographical writings convey her profound attachment to this area, and her set of eighteen novels vividly portrays the social, economic and psychological realities faced by women, men and children in Kent within the post WWI and WWII years.

Bibliography:

Winspear, Jacqueline. A Dangerous Place (Book Eleven). Harper/Perennial, 2016.
Winspear, Jacqueline. An Incomplete Revenge (Book Five). Henry Holt, 2008.
Winspear, Jacqueline. Maisie Dobbs (Book One). Soho Press Inc, 2003; John Murray, 2004.
Winspear, Jacqueline. Mapping of Love and Death (Book Seven). Harper/Perennial, 2010.
Winspear, Jacqueline. This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing: a Memoir. Soho Press Inc, 2020.
Winspear, Jacqueline. What Would Maisie Do? Inspiration from the Pages of Maisie Dobbs. Harper/Perennial/ HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.

References