Tuesday, 21 April. Mrs Diss was in the WVS office and as we have not met for some time for she has been so busy getting ready the Girls Canteen and Club and now she tells me that all the bother over the one Mrs Burnett started has been settled, by the WVS taking it over unconditionally. That wipes that muddling old hen out of it for she will only be on the rota if she wants to go at all. Mrs Diss has got £125 by ‘tactful suggestion’ as she puts it for WVS are not allowed to ‘beg for money’. This Club and Canteen will be grand – a big writing room, small sewing, ditto reading and wash and toilet rooms. There was an electric geyser over the wash bowl and new grates in the blitzed rooms and cream washed walls. All looked so very attractive and when finished and the furniture in will be a very homely nice place. The little Canteen will be handy and easily worked and Mrs Diss said ‘We could do well with a “mother” to see to running it. I wish often you were not so tied up at Hospital Supply.’
We had reached Christchurch door as she finished this and when she went into our office she laughingly said ‘Mrs Waite, I’ve been trying to coax Mrs Last away’. Never did a few joking words raise a bigger storm. Mrs Waite was wicked and I was accused of underhand dealing and plotting with the WVS who, after all, were a body of upstarts whose only aim in life was to strut round in silly uniforms. Things that happened in the last war between Mrs Diss’s mother and Mrs Waite were raked up and then Mrs Waite said ‘I’m sick of all this WVS nonsense. I ran this place for the Red Cross in the last war and for two pins I’d cut loose and do it again and damn the WVS!!’ I stood with my coat half off and gasped at the way she went on but Mrs Diss took it all calmly and said ‘a case for aspirins if not cold water’ and nudged me to go out in front of her and we shut the door and went into the kitchen where Mrs Lewis had made the morning tea. We did not say anything till she left the kitchen and then Mrs Diss said ‘You can tell what a sweet hell of a job it was in the last war when the old battle axe reigned supreme – and with a rod of iron! She has never been crossed and that is why her two out of three sons are failures and she has no friends.’ I said ‘Oh, she has never been like this before and she is a grand old trooper in many ways and her bark is lots worse than her bite, and she is old and rapidly getting older’, and Mrs Diss said ‘Bless your old fashioned heart. You are a bit of a museum piece, you know’ – and I could not quite see what she meant. I’m only about seven or eight years older than she is and there is not a whole generation of thought dividing us …
Later the others came in as soon as they heard the tinkle of crockery in the kitchen. Mrs Woods said unthinkingly ‘What was all the shouting about? It sounded like quarrelling to me.’ Mrs Waite started off about ‘crawling snakes’ and ‘tricks her mother would have done’ and suddenly I got angry and said ‘If I wanted to leave I’d leave. Nothing would stop me. But if you want to make me grow tired of Hospital Supply, you will start bickering and nagging. What I do when I’m not at Hospital Supply is my own concern and to talk of “liking to be where men are” in that nasty insinuating way you did when I said I would rather work in the men’s Canteen than change over was quite uncalled for. I do like men best – I’m more used to them and anyway I’ve never heard a man say as many stupid childish things to another man as you did to Molly Diss. You are a very peevish cantankerous old thing and I will not be spoken to like that.’ There was dead silence and then Mrs Waite said mildly ‘I cannot see us doing without a bit of fire for a week or two’ and Mrs Higham got up and went out. Later she said ‘I went off to have a mild attack of hysterics. Oh, if you had only been at St Paul’s and seen the way Mrs Waite has ruled for my time – and it’s gone on for 50 years and the Waites have bossed and ruled all and sundry and never moved with the times and suddenly thrown up everything when a new vicar came who was stronger minded than his predecessors. When I tell George [her husband] about the way you speak to Mrs Waite – and get away with it – he says you have been a lion tamer the last time you were on earth.’ …
I came home early. I just felt at the end of my patience and my head was starting to tick. Such a lovely evening, and now I can plainly see the buds on the old tree at the bottom of the next door garden and soon the leaves will be out. I felt shocked to find two huge piles of bread in the garage. I was so outspoken that I know I offended several neighbours who used to send their children with wicked waste of bread etc. and I could not possibly think who would have left it. With only six hens I cannot use a lot and so much of this had been kept too long and it was green mould. My husband was very angry and he said ‘We cannot put it in the dust bin. What have we to do with it?’ and I said ‘I’ll have to burn it in the morning’.
Thursday, 23 April. Mrs Waite was in the best of all good humours and Tuesday was all forgotten. Mrs Wilkins had a new pair of shoes that nearly sent us into fits when we looked at them! She takes size 8s and they were gay navy and red wedgies! – anything more like coronation barges it would be difficult to find. She talked and talked of how she never looked at shoes under £3, even before the war. Mrs Higham and I smirked cattily and stuck our pretty slender sized 3s in their rather shabby scuffed shoes and never said a word. Mrs Higham is such a laugher and says she has more fun over things like that than the funniest film. She said her husband wonders how we find time to work and yet laugh so much! …
I had the afternoon tea to prepare but luckily Mrs McGregor came in and brewed tea and poured out and I hurried round and raffled two embroidered guest towels and got 14s 6d and did the rest of the rhubarb. As I went round joking and joining in all the chatter I felt the surprise I often feel at myself – there was no talk of war, there seemed no thought [of it] in all the busy happy room. I asked after sons and daughters away from home and heard all the bits and bobs of news, got a new recipe for a cake with yeast instead of eggs, had a request for a recipe for rhubarb and dried apricot jam and one for home-made salad cream, showed a machinist a trick she had not heard of – how to sharpen a blunt pointed needle with a piece of sandpaper off a match box – and talked over the possibility of another whist drive soon. But no talk of war, invasion, rationing, queues, etc. I said to Mrs Waite ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ and she said ‘I don’t know that it is. It’s an atmosphere we have created largely ourselves and I think it’s why so many come regularly.’
Tuesday, 28 April. It seems the time again for people to think ‘the war will be soon over now’. Even Mrs Waite ‘knows that this winter will see all over, if it’s not over before it starts’. Pressed for a reason she says ‘Everything points to Hitler being done’. Mrs Higham says ‘Well, when little children of ten have to work it’s a sign of something cracking up’. Of course I had to drop a brick. I said ‘Pity we could not borrow a little of the Germans’ ruthless “get down to it spirit”’ – I was really still thinking of Blackpool’s luxury [where Nella had visited the previous day]. Mrs Waite was very cross. She finds a great comfort in the shabby outworn theories that ‘Britain always wins the last battle’ and ‘fights best with her back against the wall’. She said rather crossly ‘If you are as clever as all that, tell us how long the war will last’ but I smiled and turned the subject. To have a deepening shadow on one’s heart is not a thing to talk of – or even to talk much about.
Wednesday, 29 April. I was feeling cross and edgy when the garage door opened and was let swing back in the wind and one of the few pieces of glass crashed. A boy was just tipping a parcel of bread crusts on to my clean swept garage floor – a leggy neurotic lad of about ten whose parents have taken a furnished house in the street. I felt wild and I said ‘Did you leave all that bread the other day?’ and he said ‘Yes’. I said ‘You must pick all these crusts up and take them away and not bring any more. Do you realise that if I was seen giving them to my hens I could be fined?’ Those were the exact words I used and I made him take them all away, swept the floor and came in to lay table. There was the sound of voices – an angry voice – and a tap at kitchenette door and when I went it was the boy with his mother. My goodnes
s but she was in a rage. She demanded ‘What I meant by threatening to put the police on her track – and who was I to dictate to her child and make him pick filthy crusts off a filthy floor’, and she spluttered with rage. I said ‘You say your child tells lies. I did not say I would report you but by Gad if you put any more waste bread in my garage I will do.’ Then I learned that ‘North country women were mean and cheeseparing greedy people’, that I was a ‘stuck up cat’ and thought I was ‘too good to speak to her at the gate’ and so on.
She is a Londoner – a fourth rate actress or barmaid, to put it charitably – and how a refined man, an educated man, like her husband could have even met her never mind married her has often surprised people. She lies in bed till lunch time and slops round in brightly coloured pyjamas and mules† or else red velvet slacks. Her hair is multi-coloured from bleach and dye and she has the manners and voice of the pavement. I said ‘Go out of my garage at once. There is no need for personalities, and talking of North country people’s drawbacks, a slut would be a slut if she was born in Bethnal Green or Glasgow.’ She said ‘How dare you call me a slut. I’ll tell my husband what you say.’ I looked calmly at her soiled art-silk pyjamas under her equally soiled camel hair coat and let my eyes rove over her face with yesterday’s make-up still on and her untidy multi-coloured hair in heaps rather than curls on top of her head and I said ‘Why bother’ and she knew what I meant and she turned to the poor kid and smacked his face and whirled out with him.
In May, Nella reported various events and incidents, beyond her everyday and weekly routines: a day trip to a Red Cross meeting in Preston (13 May); her 31st wedding anniversary (17 May); a fire-fighting meeting her husband attended (20 May); Cliff’s return home for a week’s embarkation leave on 22 May; and two days later the arrival of Arthur from Northern Ireland for a family visit. For four days in May, Nella had the rare wartime experience of both her sons being at home together. ‘It’s grand to have them both here’, she observed on 25 May, ‘the piano going from morning to night at odd times and the sound of Cliff’s favourite tunes coming from down the stair as he “baths to music” from his portable gramophone.’ Occasionally she wrote about the signs on the home front of a state of war. On 22 May she remarked on the soldiers at the canteen. ‘Such ordinary looking men they looked, and some of them looked so out of place in their khaki. I felt my eyes searching for someone I could say “He looks as if he could kill”, but there was not one who had anything but a peaceful ordinary face.’
The gloom of a few weeks earlier was being partly displaced by a degree of optimism. On 24 May, Nella had reported some of Arthur’s outlook. ‘He thinks this summer will see the end of the Russian campaign and that the Germans will have to be on the defensive after that. I hope he is right. The Germans should know what conquering really means – and to have their homes destroyed and their good earth scorched as in Russia.’ Later, on 15 June, in the course of an angry conversation with Isa Hunter, a woman she disliked, she spoke of her recent changed opinions and declared ‘“I’d kill a German and never think more of it than killing a fowl”’, although elsewhere she was much more restrained.
Monday, 1 June. My husband and Arthur talked of the ‘magnificent’ raid [by over 1,000 bombers] on Cologne – it is so – and it’s right and proper that the German people should feel what war is and to see their lovely old places battered flat. But I had a sick sadness at the devil of destruction that had been unleashed on the lovely world – a devil that only seems to strengthen and grow. If only some clever man could invent some gas or something to put all the attacking Nazis and Japs to sleep till all the violence and wickedness in their make-up was either forgotten or eliminated, and all the peace loving ones could clear up the mess and try and straighten things out. Never can I feel that scorched earth, smashed cities and homes, murdered and butchered innocent people, will ‘win’. Will we go killing and battering each other till everything we know lies broken? And will it end the war? … Evil cannot be battered and terrorised out of people. They will have to think differently. They will never be compelled to act differently – it would not be real and only real things can be used to build the new world they talk about.
Tuesday, 2 June. Arthur bought me a bedside book – such an interesting one, The Wind on the Heath by John Sampson. It’s odd bits of gypsy sayings and writings collected and I felt happy about it till I saw the inscription, ‘To Dearie, who has always had more than a little of the gypsy’. Such a thing to say. I should be used to those boys’ odd views on things but I went and looked at myself in the glass. I’ve dark eyes, it’s true, but I don’t look like a gypsy. I felt a bit affronted and said ‘What makes you think I’m like a gypsy?’ and he said ‘Your passionate love of sun and wind, your interest in wild things and strange roads, the way you can sit still with your back against a tree and look as if you were part of it, and the way animals love you and you understand them so well’. I thought of the gypsies I’d seen. None of them seemed to fit that, but it’s no use feeling sore about it. I know Arthur did not mean it that way.
Thursday, 4 June. Such a marvellous summer day and work seemed a pleasure. I got up early and baked raisin bread and made pastry and from it some sausage rolls, a lemon cheese open tart and some tiny blackberry jam tartlets – and have a bit left to make a pie crust tomorrow on some tinned steak. All turned out perfect and we had soup, cold salmon mould and salad, custard and prunes and a cup of tea for lunch and as Arthur had run the vac over the lounge, hall and dining room I’d only to dust. I found time to soak and wash a new blanket – so many good things have got lost at the laundry lately I feared to send it. Arthur mangled it and I hung it on Mrs Atkinson’s line and it dried so lovely and fluffy in the sun and wind. We went out in the car and sat by the sea and Arthur sun bathed. The breeze and the sun was like a blessing and I felt I forgot that Cliff was packing up to go far away. The war – and that I should have been at Centre – all seemed to blow out of my head as I sat so sun soaked with the sweet salty breeze in my face. An old man came over the sands from setting his nets and when I smiled and said ‘It’s a beautiful day’ he stopped for a chat and we talked of tides and wild birds and fishing. Arthur joined in and we enjoyed the chat. He never thinks it is ‘common’ or ‘country bred’ to like to talk to people. He likes meeting and talking to people himself. He said ‘Your greatest charm, Dearie, is that you are always so interested in things. You never are bored, are you?’ And I laughed and answered ‘Why, my love, I was thinking something the same about you!’ …
Such a lovely happy day. I feel so much better for my happy week. Arthur has such a pleasant disposition. You never feel a strain in any way. He never thinks I’m silly whatever I say – or odd. Edith will be a very lucky woman and I’m glad she is such a dear girl. It’s odd to think that next time Arthur comes he will probably be married.
Friday, 5 June. We went out to sit by the sea on the Coast Road. Arthur stripped off to a pair of swim pants to get ‘sun browned’ in spite of all I could say, for the sun was terrifically hot and I felt my forearms scorching where the sun touched them as I sewed. Happy soldiers and ATS girls from nearby camps laughed and frolicked and when I felt gasping in the heat I suggested we walked over the flat sands to meet the tide. There was a tiny breeze to temper the heat and we walked over a mile and then when we got to the sea sluggishly rolling in we walked back in the edge of it. Arthur was alright with only his swim pants but I had to kirtle my skirts and was laughing gaily and a nearby soldier said ‘Now then! You playing truant? What about the Canteen?’ As I was dressed in a summer dress and big white hat shading my face and he could only have seen me bare headed and in a green overall, I said ‘How do you know I go to Canteen?’ and he said ‘By your voice and laugh’! I kept telling Arthur he would suffer for his ‘cooking’ and there was a lily fair ATS girl in a skimpy bathing dress who will be in real agony tonight I feel sure. We picked Arthur’s sandals full of cockles and I boiled them for the wee chicks and they lov
ed them and we felt sorry we had to come home for tea.
As I unlocked the door I saw a buff telegraph form on the mat and I felt my heart nearly stop – I’m getting queerly nervous about telegrams nowadays. As I bent I saw it was addressed to ‘Nella Last’ and I felt puzzled. I seem to have a few names. My name is really only Nellie but it seemed such a baby name when I grew up and I used to see it on programmes when I was an elocutionist that I dropped the ‘ie’ and somehow it got a letter ‘a’ instead. Formal or grown up friends called me Nella, old friends Nell or Nellie, closest ones D.D. or Dearie, from the name Deirdre my mother wanted me christened and which was used at home, and by Arthur. I get Mrs W. Last and Mrs N. Last and can almost tell at a glance where the letter has come from, or from whom, but a wire with NELLA stumped me. Arthur looked over my shoulder and said ‘Aha, be sure your sins will find you out’, for Isa told him a ridiculous and much exaggerated yarn of ‘an admirer’ I had at Canteen – just for fun really, and to make a general laugh.
When I opened it, it was I who laughed – and Arthur’s face was a study. It ran ‘May I come? Agnes.’
Agnes Schofield, an ex-girlfriend of Arthur’s who lived in Blackpool, had been trying to reconnect with him since August, clearly with marriage in mind. She had already twice visited 9 Ilkley Road when Arthur was not there (on 12–14 August 1941 and 10–12 April 1942), trying to endear herself to his mother, and had also written her letters. These meetings were a strain for Nella, who disliked being leaned on but sympathised with Agnes’s loneliness and desperation to find a mate. By June her sympathy had largely vanished. ‘Agnes was so different in every way’ from Edith Picken, Arthur’s intended, Nella had written on 2 May 1942. ‘Brought up with money in a town where money talked – Blackpool – she has different values and outlooks. I can never forgive her for the look of desolation on Arthur’s face as he went to Ireland, realising that Agnes “preferred friendship only”.* Why should Agnes only find out her mistake when Arthur had found happiness in another girl?’ Nella claimed that Agnes had rejected three of her son’s proposals for marriage. On this occasion, after viewing the telegram, ‘I sat on the stairs and laughed myself nearly into hysterics’. ‘There was a pre-paid reply and Arthur said “Stop acting the goat like that and help me word this wire in return”, and we sent “Sorry Agnes, quite impossible”.’
The Diaries of Nella Last Page 19
