It was a mixed crowd today – conchies, shabby pilot sergeants – we can always tell if a lad is a flyer without looking at his wings by the shy looks that follow them from the ground staff – seamen, ‘airbornes’, two downy faced lads who were on their way to their first ship and whose Navy rig looked slipping off them either because of unaccustom or being too big. Mrs Hunt is more of a mystery than ever for she really is a queer figure for an unattached female, fibroids or no. Tonight she goes to the doctors again, for a thorough examination by my doctor as well as his partner, so surely the mystery will be solved at last!
Friday, 2 October. When I hurried back to Canteen I saw three huge lorries outside and the counter full of boys demanding tea. Perhaps I felt tired and cranky but the noise and hurry annoyed me and as I tore off my hat and overcoat and threw them on a chair I said sharply ‘Please come to this end of the counter for your plates. Put your cakes on and move down here and I’ll give you tea and check your orders.’ The way those noisy lads got into an orderly line and meekly obeyed and moved off to the tables made Mrs Parkinson giggle and say ‘Oh Sergeant Major, you are a one’, but it set me wandering off down one of my crazy ‘thought lanes’! Where will all this discipline lead? Will it be good that all these lads have been trained to obey? Will it sap all initiative for their whole lives, or will there be a swing away from all order when they grow older? When my headstrong ‘spoilt’ lad went I said ‘Umph – do you all the good in the world. You will sort out your values a bit, my lad.’ It did but in some way for a long time it took [away] decision and that individualism we call initiative and left a curious mañana spirit and a positive delight in not doing little things. Things like not being quite to time when he got back from leave, risking going off to London if he was within a hitch hike, climbing a wall to get in at night, and so on. When one of the older soldiers came back for another pie I said ‘Any sandwiches to take back? I did not mean that the boys could only have the cakes on the plates you know. I wanted them served and away from the counter to let others get their tea.’ He said ‘That’s all right, mum. Here’s the list, and you can put them all together in this cloth – I know paper is short.’ And then he said a funny thing. He said ‘You have been a school teacher, haven’t you?’ I said ‘No, but I’ve reared boys’! It amused Mrs Parkinson – she was a teacher. She said ‘That’s a good one – he means you are bossy’ but the man said ‘Oh no, but there was a ring of authority in your voice and if you were in the Army you would soon get your stripes’! It amused us for the rest of the afternoon and lost nothing in the telling to the others when they came in …
Mrs Hunt has gone and taken her secret with her, whether fibroid tumours or a coming baby. Listening to the talk I suddenly realised how different it sounded. Different views were taken and open speculations as to ‘If it was a baby, who was the father?’ and counting back to just when Kay ran round with the ‘roving-eyed South African officer’. It was gossip in its freest and most ‘callous’ way, but not one word of censure or sitting in judgement was passed. Mrs Fletcher said ‘Well, I say as Mrs Last does, I hope it is a baby and nothing else’. Even Dolly Last, who is a bit spiteful, had nothing cruel to say. She married a cousin of my husband’s and is a curious girl. She betrays her inferiority complex by being down on anything or anybody who is above her in any way – looks, clothes, family etc. She is – or was till I stopped her very decisively – very rude to Miss Butler who is one of the kindest and nicest women going. She and her mother live in a huge house in its own grounds where five indoor and two outdoor servants were kept in the old days and where now they live in two rooms and shut the others up and Miss Butler cooks weird meals and quite enjoys it and struggles in these maid-less days to carry on. Her life was one long tragedy for her two idolised younger brothers were killed at 20 and 22 in the last war and also the man she wanted to marry. Her people set their faces against the match – thought he was not good enough – and she once said to me ‘You know, Mrs Last, mother might have been right, but oh if I had married and had a child to love and rear, why he would have been as old as Arthur now. I might even have had grandchildren.’ She is as old as I am and has and will have such a lot of money, but nothing else, and when her old mother of 80 dies will be quite alone.
The coloured soldier who came in last week must be stationed here and got one of the Canteen’s ‘ration card’ for chocolate or cigs. He came in today and got a Mars bar and insisted on giving it to me! I thanked him and cut it small and passed it to the rest and gave him a piece. He stood by the counter and ate an astonishing lot of tomato sandwiches and told Miss Butler he was a vegetarian.
Saturday, 3 October. Lately things do seem to have got me down. I feel worried over Arthur … I never feel his body is as strong as his spirit and he gives himself so utterly to whatever he undertakes, and undertakes things without counting the cost. I feel I am so cut off when I cannot go and see him for myself. I’m thankful for Edith, and she seems both sensible and loving. No other letter from Cliff. I tell myself that I might have to wait and wait and must be patient but today I realised how very edgy my nerves are lately. There was a ring and when I went there was a telegraph boy standing with an envelope in his hand, which if I’d reflected was a good colour as it was blue and was only a ‘greeting’. I felt I turned to stone as I stood – I couldn’t take the wire from his outstretched hand. What I looked like I don’t know but his so kind voice – not like a boy’s at all – said ‘It’s all right, mum, it’s only a greeting wire you know’. I nodded thanks as he put the wire into my hand. I could not speak, but felt a God bless in my heart for the kind boy, and wondered if he had had to deliver bad news to make him so thoughtful. It was from Arthur and Edith but if they had known the sick shock their greeting wire was to me it would have surprised them.*
Friday, 9 October. I felt a blank sadness wrap round me. I thought of all the winter ahead – the winter that started on the heels of the flying summer. The hideous Second Front bogey felt so close I could not escape. I looked at the lads’ faces – the average age could not have been more than 24. Mrs Parkinson touched my arm and said ‘What are you thinking about?’ I said ‘Oh, I don’t know. Always be glad your Ian is only seven.’ She said simply ‘I am’ and seemed to understand what I meant. She is not much younger than I am and lost one baby after another till this little boy, who is her idol. She said ‘Let’s have a cup of tea before another lorry load come in’ and we got a nice cup in peace. Mrs Fletcher had one of her really hideous appearances today – such a pity for she is a charming woman, kind and pleasant, but today her look would have frightened a child. It is some kind of goitre and at times her face swells and her eyes stand out from it like a gargoyle. I said ‘You are not well today. How long is it since you went to the specialist?’ And she said ‘Nearly a month – he said to wait a month this time’.
Sunday, 11 October. My husband worked all day in the garden for there was a lot to tidy round. The clematis hangs like two mats of mauve and purple and like Michaelmas daisies are brave and gay. Cliff loved them so. He loved any shade of purple. He is happy in the Middle East as yet for the novelty of it all has not worn off as it has with those who have been so long. I looked at the garden with its thick stemmed and branched rose trees. Six years turned since we came here, three since the war started. How swiftly time passes. Three years of war and no issues clear, no battles won – how long when we do start? … It’s to think of quiet places where trouble and strife, hurt and pain, have not gone. Yet when I’ve been on the bus and seen women who live in quiet villages Coniston way their faces look almost as strained and harassed as any others. Perhaps the old ones are right. It’s the peace within that matters. All other kinds are myths and shadows.
Tuesday, 20 October. I am often surprised at my attitude to beautiful things since the war. I’ve so often looked at lovely clothes, jewels, furs etc. and wished I could have them, particularly if they were my own special taste or colour. I look now in a detached way hard
to define – unless I think I’d like an article for Edith or Arthur. In some queer way I feel I’ve no interest in possessions, not even my own bits and bobs of ‘treasures’. I keep my house shining and clean, but then it’s a debt I owe to it for the comfort it brings to me. But where I used to think ‘I’ll have my walls always cream’ or ‘If ever I can save enough for golden or russet velvet both sides curtains, I’ll get them for the dining room and lounge to draw across the window recess and cut out draughts’. I never give ‘tomorrow’s morrow’ a thought. My damaged walls have ceased to worry me – they never did very much anyway. It’s as if when I said ‘I’d be a soldier as long as my Cliff was’ it was a vow stronger than I realised and one which grew stronger. I don’t really think about the war a lot, or have grand ideas of the importance of what I’m doing in my own way to help. Rather is it as if I’ve stepped onto a moving platform that slowly, very slowly, moves onward, always onward. As if I cannot carry much luggage and know it’s little use acquiring more. Very odd altogether …
As I waited for the return bus, streams of tired, dirty, trousered girls and women streamed past from the steel works. Such ordinary little girls and women – no Amazons among them. I thought of the inferno that is a steel or iron works and looked at their filthy overalls which showed they were real workers. I looked at the strange assortment of clothes worn – fancy coats and hats over dirty overalls and ragged pants where heat had destroyed the fabric. They seemed so unlike some of the women I knew. One very dirty oil smelling woman stood in the queue by me. She looked so tired, so tatty. Her bare ankles looked dirtier even than one day’s work would make them, her nails were broken and dirty, her hair bleached by heat and straggled over her damp face. I thought of Isa, perfumed, creamed, massaged, in her lovely clothes, of her mad obsession about silk – real silk – stockings. It’s an odd world, even odder than it ever was in its ‘unequality’. I used to think the blurb in the papers was true – that the war was levelling people. Not a bit of it. It’s making people more unequal – the bombed and the not bombed, the free people and the enslaved, the sheltered and the lonely wives and sweethearts, ones with money to throw about and ones with not enough to go round. I felt I should not complain that my back ached. I felt mean to feel rattled with my irritating day. I stood aside to let her get on first so she could get a seat inside and not have to climb on top.
Friday, 23 October. Such a lot of our familiar faces seem to have gone from Canteen, but a nice friendly lot come in their places. If we are laughing together they try and join in and beg to share a joke. We had had such a good laugh at a remark of Miss Butler’s. Mrs Fletcher brought a book out of the reading room and said ‘I’d be ashamed to see such trash about. Put it in the salvage box. It’s filthy. Reading it would do one no good.’ We teased her on her knowledge of pornographic books and someone wondered who wrote them. Miss Butler looked up and said innocently ‘Well, I’ve always understood it was old maids’. Coming from her it was so unexpected and when she heard our laughter she went on in a Rosa Dartle manner ‘But do tell me – something about inhibitions or repressions, isn’t it?’
Wednesday, 11 November. I said I was going for Arthur’s pillows and bolster and my husband said he would come. We had such a pleasant evening for Mrs Martin’s brother, Russell Stenhouse, was a wonderful man whose life in every part of the globe is reflected in little treasures in his sister’s house. He had twelve medals, DSO and bar and rewards for valour from French and Russian governments as well as our own. I looked at his brave kind face, so resolute, so strong in all his photos, whether studio or snap shot, and thought of the waste when his busy useful life came to an end when a raft capsized after his ship had been sunk in the Red Sea. Arthur’s pillows and bolster took my breath away – huge down beauties, such a marvellous gift. I said ‘Really Mrs Martin, I cannot possibly thank you. I hope some way I can return your kindness and generosity.’ Mr Martin looked up and said ‘Nay lass, she says they are a return for your bright gay company at Centre, when she was so depressed over Russell’s going. I know all your jokes – even the rude ones – and I’ve passed many a good crack on, you know.’ I heard my Dad’s quiet voice – ‘Let me play the fool’ – and his explanation of ‘the world’s stage’. ‘No one is interested in your bother and worries, Dearie. They have enough of their own, you know. Cultivate that gift of laughter you have, my dear, whatever you may feel like inside.’ I think it is a gift. I am often surprised to find I have gifts. I always longed so to be clever and do things, but never had the education, for when young I was lame through an accident and had to ‘run wild’ on Gran’s farm because ‘I thought too much’, as the doctors said. Such an odd thing to say, really. Now when I can joke and be pert it smoothes many a rough place – and keeps things together at Centre.
With private motoring abolished, the Lasts’ car was laid up for the duration, and Nella had hardly been out of Barrow since July (except for a couple of brief visits to Spark Bridge). On the sole occasion in late 1942 when she did venture further afield, the day’s outing prompted her to write spiritedly and at length.
Saturday, 28 November. I always have the trick of opening the landing casement each morning and drawing the blackout, look out to see what kind of a day it is, and breathing deeply the sweet morning air. This morning was no different – till a quite mad idea of a day out seized me, on a Saturday when all bus travel was difficult! I hurried round and as I’d cut off odd bits of meat from my so unattractive looking half shoulder of mutton and made a stew ready for today, I only had to slice potatoes and cook them and then turn the lot into a basin and stand it in water in a pan by the fire, feed the hens, and lay the table, and I just managed to catch the 9.20 bus to Ambleside as it passed the street corner. I did not dare think of Coniston and the change of bus at Ulverston so went to Ambleside in a through bus. It was a packed bus as it left Barrow but a boy gave me a seat and he sat on a box. It was grand to see all the landmarks we had passed so often in the car and the newly painted and erected signposts made me think of old happy times when war was only a bogey. Freshly ploughed fields, following gulls; huddles of sheep on stubbled fields of marygolds; gold of bracken and clinging oak leaves; carts and ‘trees’ of long timber on the creek of Morecambe Bay as we went through Greenodd; bright yellow chrysanths in sheltered gardens; feeding cranes in the river – little odd loved things I miss so now. Two Canadian airmen sat in the seat in front and we talked of fishing and places of interest we passed. One came from Manitoba – must be a big inland part for he had never seen a railway or the sea before he left to join the RCAF.†
I love bus travelling and wondering about people – whether the old man with the pheasants had shot them, if the fierce looking ‘aristocrat’ I remembered driving a lovely Rolls liked ‘going common’, if the sad white faced girl without the wedding ring was the mother of the whimpering baby she carried so indifferently, if the quiet faced couple – the man with ‘wings’ – were newly married and if it was a snatched honeymoon – I noticed their little weekend case in the rack above their heads. Bowness, Windermere and Ambleside, so smug and affluent with well stocked – lavishly stocked – shops! Toys, silver fish, lovely flowers, sweets, bunches of grapes, tomatoes, mushrooms. It’s something like over dressed tabby blondes with discontented faces and marvellous furs. People go in and out – a man with an old fashioned wooden leg and a thin half starved looking dog, a woman with a gorgeous fur coat with a shawl collar fringed with tiny animal paws – most peculiar – a poor half witted boy stained with blue from the blue mill, school girls, giggling and noisy after a hockey match, a clergyman with a most unclerical face, a man in shabby farming clothes with the face of a saint. Old fashioned country folk, in and out they went. I would have liked to wander round Ambleside but the bus came back in half an hour and the next did not come back till five hours later and it would have been difficult to fill in the time, besides the risk of not being able to get on the afternoon bus, so I came back by 1.30 feeling as if my
glimpse of the hills and Lake had been a dream.
Late 1942 marked a major shift in the fortunes of the war. For the first time in over three years the momentum favoured the British – along with their Soviet and American allies. Nella had for months been convinced that this would be a long-lasting war, even as many of her neighbours and friends allowed themselves to imagine that the conflict would soon be over. While she continued to be determined to keep wishful thinking at bay, she did write on 7 November of ‘the marvellous news from Egypt’ (Rommel had been defeated), although such good news from afar might easily be tarnished by bad news close to home – on 23 November she learned that one of Cliff’s school friends had been killed in the Middle East. There was little doubt that the Allies were now taking the offensive against their enemies. Talk of possible invasion receded, and most people sensed that, sooner or later, Britain would achieve victory.
Nella tried to live as much as possible in the moment. ‘More and more do I try to live in “today”’, she wrote on 26 December 1942 (DR†). ‘Rather a paradox to say I work hard to forget the war when all my activities are connected with it, but there it is … To look ahead brings fear and terror to my mind and confuses me and I feel it best not to think for long ahead.’ She returned on 9 January 1943 to reflections on her own state of mind. ‘I’m often amazed – and amused! – how quickly life seems to adjust and adapt itself nowadays, how I take everything in my stride and find a place for it in my “design for living”. Nothing seems to have power to really upset me for long, no extra work to be a burden.’ She tried to have faith in a higher purpose – and spoke of ‘the Hand of God’. ‘If I’m very tired and the worry bogey gets through my defences it makes me glad of my “escape”, makes me glad of the little wall between me and the terror and despair which is on the other side.’
The Diaries of Nella Last Page 23
