Monday, 15 December. I saw a funny sight and chuckled whenever I recalled it as I went round town. There is an electric light standard with a waste paper basket at our bus stop and a well dressed woman was standing at that end of the queue. Suddenly she pounced on the waste paper basket and drew out a newspaper saying ‘There now, that’s lucky. I’ve a lot of shopping and no paper to wrap things up in. Does anyone else want a bit?’ And she dispensed pieces of newspaper with the grace and aplomb of a duchess! I always take paper and a bag or two and a few rubber bands to hold small purchases together. I find them useful.
Wednesday, 17 December. There is a big house across the street from Mrs Lord’s taken by RAF for billeting purposes. A little incident I saw at the door this morning made me think BBC ‘knew best’ and made me more tolerant of Tommy Handley and Jack Train’s programme, and perhaps Band Wagon and Garrison Theatre. A huge covered lorry stopped and through the open back I could see tired, worn-out, unshaven lads who looked as if they had travelled all night and were too stiff to climb out. They started to make a move and one shouted ‘After you Claude’ and the reply was roared ‘No, after you Cecil’ and laughter broke out.* There was a smallish lad who was last and he shouted plaintively ‘Don’t forget the driver’ and everyone laughed and lurched about to limber up and numb feet were stamped. I felt a ‘God bless’ in my heart as I saw them – and it included Tommy Handley and Jack Train. It’s no use getting irritable over things one doesn’t like. If they can cheer and bring laughs they are invaluable.
Ena got her final 15s of her money draw and I talked seriously to her and begged her to go into Co-op mutual or the club they run, or else save up in the Post Office. She said ‘I believe I will and all. I got a proper fright over this money club and it’s been a job to get my own.’ She is such a clever little thing and makes and mends and struggles to keep all respectable and she cooks and follows ‘that nice Freddie Grisewood’ and ‘that there comic Mrs Buggins’ [on the radio] in a way that would flatter them if they knew!
Friday, 19 December. I’ve decided to give poor Mrs Cumming the chocolate biscuits for her two little ones’ stocking. Poor soul – she will be desperately unhappy this Xmas for her thoughts will go back. Commander Cumming’s mind must have broken for he was such a kind man and would never hurt anyone let alone his wife. Death can be more terrible when it’s suicide. She said plaintively that ‘There was not even a sweet or chocolate to be had’, and now I remember she gave me a huge box of chocolates either last Xmas or the Xmas before, to raffle at Centre, and I made about £1. I got out all my Xmas treasures for my little artificial tree for centre of table and I’ll put a bunch of holly in the corner and put all Jack’s ‘Mickey Mouse’ lights on. To other people the glittering balls and ornaments would look like rubbish but I’d not change them for gold and jewels. They are alive – with ‘memories that bless and burn’. The saying that ‘God gave us our memories that we could have roses in December’ is truer to me every year – memories that grow stronger and are more real to me than the ugliness of today.
I’m a lucky woman to have such a memory garden where even the weeds were only little ones and had flowers on them. Always the boys had such nice friends and they always kept the two rules I made – no quarrelling and no dirty dishes left for me to wash the next day; then they could do as they liked. Ted was such a quiet thoughtful boy. He was older than Arthur. The year before war broke out I bought some tiny crackers – only finger length – for my little table tree. When it came to take them off Ted said ‘Don’t spoil the look of the tree. We have had so much and rather wrecked the look of the table and the big tree. Let’s keep the wee fellows till New Year’s Day.’ I think they all went to a dance. Anyway, the ‘wee fellows’ were never pulled but went away in the box for another year. Ted had no mother. He always said with a wry smile that he ‘never had one – only a granny’ and I never asked questions. He said once he was ‘never a kid till he met the two Last boys’ and had never hung his stocking up till he was 26 and slept at our house and shared the Xmas fun. Dunkirk took Ted. There are only my two boys and Jack Gorst left now from that last party – that party when the shadows cast on their faces by the candles that Cliff loved for party teas upset me so that I waked my husband and the two boys by wild sobbings that I could not explain and where I felt a strain to keep all going as usual and felt glad when they went home. I was glad it was Canteen day. I’d have wept all afternoon – and that’s no use to anyone and I’d only have had a headache.
Saturday, 20 December. We took a parcel of shirts and socks to the Sailors’ Home and some books and I got one of the biggest shocks I’ve had since the war – and that includes our blitz! I went in as usual and in the little cubby hole of a canteen, which leads to Mr Dickinson’s office and which I always just walk through, there was a woman in a white apron very much at home. She came forward to speak – and it was the ‘woman in the bus’ and whom Inspector Thompson said was ‘under observation by Intelligence Office and who was a suspicious character all round’. I feel sure she recognised me and when Mr Dickinson came out of the office and took me through I had a good opportunity of making sure it was the same woman, and also seeing how at home she was. When I went out my husband said ‘What ever is to do?’ so I must have looked upset and when I told him he said ‘We had better go round to the Police Station. The Sailors’ Home is one of the last places in Barrow where a suspected spy should be.’ I asked for Inspector Thompson but he is off ill so saw another Inspector who is taking his place, called Cotton, and the sergeant who took my statement and he said ‘My God’ and they looked at each other and then said ‘Thank you very much. We will get in touch with Inspector Thompson immediately.’ I felt so upset. I thought of that bad woman like a spider in a corner, listening to the sailors talking and, who knows, perhaps hearing vital scraps of news about ships coming and going. I was not frightened this time – not like last time. I felt I’d have helped take her away from that kind peaceful place where the Port Missionary tries so hard to make a home for sailors and seamen and where shipwrecked men are cared for.
Wednesday, 24 December, Christmas Eve. Ena was telling me of her Xmas shopping and the presents she had bought her three little girls and her husband’s two little boys. She had bought house slippers and said she had to pay a little extra on each pair and the postage too for the four pair and it meant she had had to ‘strike herself off the list for anything new’. She had talked so much about a new blouse and she is such a brave little thing. I could not bear her to be disappointed so I gave her my shell pink ninon† blouse. It’s a nice blouse and nearly new but it’s more for Ena’s age – it was a bit too young for me, anyway. I gave her a little pot of homemade jam and a jelly to make for her eldest girl who had insisted on coming home for Xmas and had helped the farmer’s wife with whom she is evacuated pluck chickens and ducks and had saved up for her bus fare and to buy a little present for her mother and father. She is a nice little thing – only ten and while ‘being sure there is no Santa Claus’ has a wistfully sneaking hope there is! She looked longingly at my little table tree and there was little to give her for it only had glittering glass ornaments and some tiny finger length crackers on it. I said ‘Would you like one?’ and she nodded and I passed her one and said ‘I don’t know if there is anything in, dear – open it and see’ but she did not and later said confidentially ‘I’m putting this in my stocking for a little surprise just in case Santa Claus does not come to our house’. I’d given Ena a lovely rosy apple, a bar of chocolate, two chocolate biscuits and a shortbread one and some Xmas paper and ribbon to tie them up in, and Ena had the slippers and the stepfather had got a writing pad and envelopes and some pencils …
A neighbour has lost her son – a lieutenant in the Army and only 22. It must have been an accident for they brought him home and he was buried today, Xmas Eve. This is their second son to go and their third and last boy is an air pilot. He went to school with Cliff. It looked so sad to see the milita
ry escort standing there, mostly lads themselves, and think of all the boys going – going with all their bright hopes and ambitions unfinished.
Nella sometimes encountered the reality of personal loss. On Boxing Day this year, when she was at the canteen, she noticed ‘one lad’ who ‘seemed so dreadfully ill and dazed and his two pals had a “protecting” air toward him. One of them came back to the counter for more tea and told me he had just got in from Hull where he had been to the “funeral of his family”. To my look of surprise he whispered hurriedly “His father, mother, and brother and sister were all killed when a bomb fell at 11.30 in the morning on their house – and it was his father’s first week on nights for over a year and he was asleep.”’ She again encountered this sailor at the canteen on 20 February 1942 and he was not in good shape. ‘Now there is a “big eyed” look about his thinner face and he has really maddening fidgety tricks, like tapping with his spoon on his cup all the time or lightly kicking the counter front. He never sits down and drinks cup after cup of tea – one girl asked him if he had a hollow leg! … I suggested he had a tonic. He said “I’m not going near that Medical Officer again if I can help it. I’m not ill, you know – and I know it as well – so why should he say what he did?” Pressed for an explanation, we gathered the doctor had implied he was “doing a bit of lead swinging”.’
Thursday, 1 January 1942, New Year’s Day. I don’t know what I said or how I looked but last night but my husband gave me a bit of a shock this morning for when he came down he said ‘A Happy New Year! What would you like to do today for a real change? I think it’s time you had one!’ I said ‘Lunch out and go to Morecambe’ – in joke, really, but he said ‘Right, we will’ and we went. I got up and ready – and all ready – and the hens fed and the fire banked to be ready to poke into a blaze when we came in and we set off at 10.30. It was such a nice soft day and the sun shone at times and I felt so thrilled to have a day out. We had lunch at Carnforth – roast pork, sprouts, carrots, potatoes, kidney soup – and I had custard apple and my husband had custard and plum pudding. It was beautifully cooked and served at a hotel and was 3s 6d a head. I do love a meal out and it’s such a long time since I had one so I enjoyed it more than ever. All was quiet on the roads and the shops shut in Morecambe but we went round Lancaster and the shops there surprised and delighted me. I love shop windows and there was not one shuttered or ‘masked’ – all as usual. Lovely furs and clothes, cakes, fancy goods, silver and curios, although no display of sweets, chocs, or cigarettes. In Morecambe, instead of hundreds of airmen getting grounded in ‘foot work’ there were WAAFs wherever one looked – girls and women of every shape and size and few looking better for uniform or trying to all ‘move together’. Men generally look better for drill and discipline but women rarely do.
We called round at my in-laws to wish them a Happy New Year and I nearly started the year by quarrelling! One of the two of my husband’s sisters was in and the talk turned on eggs. Her husband earns at least £9 a week for he is a very good electrician in the Yard. She said ‘I’m lucky for I can buy all the eggs I want and get for our Flo as well from Millom from a chap Stan knows. I pay full price of course, 3s 6d a dozen.’ I said ‘The price is 2s 6d, Elsie – that woman could get into trouble’. She said ‘Don’t be so damned daft. She would not let me have them for 2s 6d when she could take them to a packing station and get 3s 6d.’ When I explained she got vexed and I could see she thought it ‘another of Will’s wife’s odd ways’ so I turned the subject. She is one of many I hear of and who cannot see they are ‘doing anything wrong’ or being a little black market on their own.
Friday, 2 January. The conchies all clumped in to Canteen bringing a dreadful smell of oil for they were unloading it at the docks. They gulped their hot tea and asked for a sandwich to eat on their way back to the docks. I despise conchies and won’t cook for them for they get regular meals and no ‘double guards’ but somehow this lot has grown to be ‘my’ conchies and as such I have a grudging feeling that they will have to be looked after – and there is not much comfort in a beet sandwich. I took a thick slice of bread and butter, spread it with beans, squashed a potato cake on and another slice of bread on and wrapped it up and said ‘How’s that?’ and a chorus of ‘Same for me, please’ went down the line. I said ‘You must hold it by the paper and not touch it with your oily hands. It would not be good to get that oil in your mouth.’ Men are children. They all talked at once and wanted to tell of worse things they had handled and talked noisily and praised the tea and thanked me for their ‘okey-dokey’ sandwiches! One of the helpers said ‘Fancy you making a fuss over that bunch. I thought you hated conchies.’ I said ‘I dislike a quitter of any kind but “hate” is too strong a word to use to that lot. I feel like a school marm toward them. Although their “principles” are not mine, they are doing a job and a very dirty one at that, today. Thinking things over, Mrs Hunt, I believe I dislike them less than many in the Yard who flew there and dug themselves into good jobs at the first hint of war.’ There is a cousin’s wife of my husband’s at Canteen and she kicked my shins till I could have yelled and afterwards said ‘When you drop bricks, Nella, do look where they land. Mrs Hunt’s husband, son and [daughter’s] husband are all among the “fliers” you talked about.’
Saturday, 3 January. It’s high time some system of pooling tradesmen’s vans and lorries was made compulsory. It’s really shocking how some tradesmen waste petrol, and here in Barrow there is no check or stint of petrol. If a painter or plumber has a trailer on his car for business purposes he just asks for and gets all the petrol he wants. That means all his friends can get odd coupons for joy riding. Those trades people who went out of town during the blitz and who bought or rented cottages and go backward and forward must use transport petrol and when I see the overlapping of milk alone in our district I always think of the petrol waste. There is one delivery that makes a detour of over a quarter of a mile to deliver milk to one neighbour who recently moved here and who ‘always has got her milk at Crow farm and couldn’t change now’. The thing that has always shocked me ever since the war has been the joy riding of cars and buses to Lakes – by the registration plates, coming from a good distance. By the papers Canada is cutting out all private motoring and South Africa and Australia making drastic cuts in petrol but we have gone on and on wasting petrol. Although our little Morris is the joy of my life and about the only pleasure I have, I still say that more drastic cuts could and should be made. We don’t seem to have that ruthless cooperation yet. It’s as if our leaders are afraid of the people and their reactions to war changes. Celery was very dear today – 1s 2d and 1s 3d a stick – and I felt very glad ours was big enough to dig up …
We got the decorations down. There is no Twelfth night party now to keep them up for. All my tawdry but dear glass balls and Jack’s Mickey Mouse electric lights are packed carefully away and I rolled up the best streamers of crinkled paper in case I cannot get any next year. I had a ‘wonder what will have happened before these come out again’ but a feeling of relief that Xmas was over and behind me. I’ve felt somehow as if I’d been ‘playing a part’ these two weeks for I’ve been gay on top but underneath I’ve felt a sadness rather hard to explain. Perhaps the boys not being here, and my husband is not at all well and needing all the vitality I have to spare to keep him going – all my care and thought as to food and that ‘giving in’ to keep him happy, or at least not miserable.
As 1942 began, Nella’s mood was, indeed, sometimes low. On 6 January she was ruminating on her sense of unimportance. ‘I can do nothing for any of the boys – not even make them a cup of tea. Nothing at all. They have all gone, all of them, and if they come back into my life will be so different as to be strangers.’ She was – at least temporarily – overtaken by a sense of loss, and anxiety for a precarious future. These, of course, were tumultuous, uncertain and, for many people, deadly times. The following evening, 7 January, as she heard Big Ben tolling the hour before the nine o
’clock news, ‘I could not form sentences in my mind. I felt a sadness and futility and a feeling that we were all part of a whirling chaos, each whirl taking us further away from stability, security and all we know – or did know. To “pray for peace” is to ask a miracle – like the prophet of old asking the sun to stand still. And if “peace” was granted it would leave a tiger that had tasted blood rampant – in the Nazis and Japanese.’ There was, she acknowledged, no way out of war and all its miseries. And she was critical of the ‘wishful thinking’ of those who had persuaded themselves – unrealistically, she thought – that the tide of the war was turning in Britain’s favour, and that the conflict would soon be over (8 January).
Friday, 9 January. When I got down to Canteen there were two lorry loads of reproachful soldiers who told me it was ‘a minute to two and no kettle boiling, Mum’! I sent one flying for the milk and one for the key and when we all went in they took blackouts down, lit gas radiators and helped get out cups and saucers and joked and laughed as I counted out biscuits for they had no time to wait for toast. I often get laughed at for my fussing over plates being hot and knives and forks matching and not a huge knife and a little fork. Our cutlery is terrible and ranges from three-pronged country forks to tea knives with coloured handles bought from Woolworths. Today one of the lads got a plate and said ‘Give us 1d of those beans’. They were only plain boiled and I’d not added the tomato soup square that colours and flavours them and I said ‘Alright, they won’t take a minute to heat’. He said ‘Don’t bother, I’ll have them cold’ and as I very doubtfully spooned them on a plate I said ‘I’m sure these won’t be good for you’ and a laugh went up and one said ‘What about kidnapping such a jewel and taking her off to our camp? It would be a change to get a hot hot dinner.’ And turning to me he said ‘Have you ever eaten cold hash or hot pot?’ and I said I had not and they said ‘Wait till you are in the Army’. Such a dear crowd of gay boys. I felt a ‘God bless’ in my heart as they stamped out so laughing and gay …
The Diaries of Nella Last Page 16
