OPINION:
THE CARE AND MANAGEMENT OF LIES
By Jacqueline Winspear
Harper, $26.99, 336 pages
She wrote letters that transported men living in the shadow of death in the French trenches to the fragrance of a kitchen in Kent.
She wrote to her husband about how she was still cooking the meals he loved in his absence, describing the fragrance of rosemary, the richness of gravy, how sultanas added sweetness to a rabbit dish and how she poured everything into a big brown bowl with a little sherry, but adds she would wait for him to come home to share a glass.
They were her love letters, and that was why men soaked in blood and mud urged Tom Brissenden to read his wife’s letters aloud. They were a link to the world they had left behind for the horror of World War I, a world to which most of them never returned as their names joined the millions of casualties.
The letters Kezia Brissenden wrote to her husband ache with memories. That is why they remain important 100 years after the war ended, because what they conjured up in their gentle simplicity is so poignant that it is difficult to read without tears.
Jacqueline Winspear, who is known for her Maisie Dobbs mysteries about a former wartime nurse who becomes a private detective, has moved into another sphere with this book. It is by far the best writing she has ever done, and it is memorable for its reliance on what was left on the home front as the men disappeared to France.
Letters to and from families, especially those from young soldiers, are among the more heartbreaking documents at the Imperial War Museum in London, and their emotional impact is what Ms. Winspear has captured. Her plot is basic. Kezia is a teacher newly married to a farmer, and her knowledge of cooking is more intuitive than gourmand. But she cooks to please him, as well as everyone else on the farm, and she applies sometimes exotic drifts of imagination to her culinary creations.
Fortunately, her husband, Tom, is delighted and fascinated by the flavors and fragrances of his kitchen, and she notes his tastes and notes whether she is overspicing, especially with rosemary. When he joins the army and winds up in the hell that is the war in France, complete with a sadistic sergeant, Kezia’s letters describe what she is cooking and ask for Tom’s opinion on how she did, occasionally mischievously asking about an especially tasty dish, “Can you smell it?”
He replies with compliments mingled with suggestions about how savory the dish should be. His reactions are shared by the men in the dugout around him, half starved on miserable army rations and eager to allow their imaginations to accept the delicious dishes invented by Kezia.
It is a sad book, as though it has the flavor of death about it. It emphasizes how much the war has an impact on the country, on plowing beautiful woods and commandeering farm horses. The young and the too old offer themselves up for the slaughter in France, and there is an interesting vignette about Thea, Kezia’s sister-in-law, a pacifist who risks her life when she becomes an ambulance driver at the front.
It is as though no one escaped during those dreadful four years when the lists of the missing and the dead dominated the news and the minds of those at home.
The development and growth of the young wife, Kezia, is marked not only by her ingenious use of cooking as a way to keep in communication with her husband, but by her efforts to keep the farm going despite shortages and lack of manpower. She enlists the women of the village to do what the missing men had done in the fields, and to be practical, wears her husband’s boots and pants in an era when such garb was unusual. She works with the remaining men who are physically unable to go to war and seeks their help. She agrees to have Frederick, a young German prisoner of war, become part of the farm labor.
Perhaps the most poignant passage is when Kezia cooks a meal for the German, who is embarrassed and uncertain about sitting down at the table with her as she sits in what was her husband’s chair. It is the same day that telegrams have arrived from the war office.
Jacqueline Winspear is to be congratulated on a moving and remarkable book.
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and The Baltimore Sun.
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