The Diaries of Nella Last

by Patricia Malcolmson

  The sliding roof was off the coach. The sun shone like a blessing. The cool sweet breeze smelled of sea and country as we rushed along. I never recall a nicer day out. We were home just after 7 o’clock and I rang up Mrs Higham to arrange about the morning, when we go to church in the parade the Council have hurriedly arranged. It’s a good walk for me and twice that for Mrs Higham so my husband said he would ‘chance the car out’ – I think he is feeling reckless when ‘basic’ petrol is in sight. Mrs Higham was delighted and said ‘We have got a lovely weekend for it’. Me – I’m not sure. The sunset had a thundery look, black clouds all over the horizon line. I wish it would pour all night. The gardens are looking very parched. The dining room was cluttered up with all movable light things from the front room. I’ll cover up all the other things for it’s only the frieze and ceiling and the one wall to paper in there. I laid down on the settee with the sun on me and we listened to Music Hall. I think Josephine Baker must be better when seen as well as heard or else her style is more suitable to French audiences. I noticed she got the least applause of any on Music Hall, and she left me very cold. Mrs Atkinson was not very pleased we had been off. She said ‘You might have told us. We would have liked to go.’ And I could see she thought us a bit unfriendly. To her, being alone is a penance, and Mr Atkinson was painting and the girls both out. I had to come to bed early. I’ll get no letters written in the morning. I’ll have to be up by 9 o’clock.

  The town’s thanksgiving service on Sunday, 13 May was marred by poor weather and, according to Nella, it was ill attended and badly organised. Later ‘We listened with interest to Churchill’s speech, very good and comprehensive – except for his omission of Civil Defence – but his remarks about the munition workers dropping at their benches with fatigue was more than amusing unless they act differently from any I’ve come across. Even my husband noticed that Civil Defence went unnoticed and the brave firemen and wardens would feel slighted when the Home Guard was so gloriously mentioned.’ Then she looked ahead. ‘At 9 o’clock as Big Ben tolled out its strokes I said my altered prayer, not for peace to come but that it should stay, that the Allies should be strong and not weaken, that a blessing should rest on those who love peace enough to realise it was active and not negative and must be worked for as strenuously as we did for the war.’ Like most Britons, she had little sympathy for the recent enemy. ‘I felt very glad to hear the Germans were not to be pampered’, she wrote on 16 May. ‘Making them be self-supporting is the best. We must not be soft or let them forget easily the Belsen camps and the slave murders. When I think of what our fate could have been, I would be very strict. I think the very best primary step will be that of freedom of the press and radio. The Germans as a race have had the blinkers of an isolated village shut off from the outside world, their self-importance growing in consequence.’

  Wednesday, 11 July. I’ve had a busy tiring day, but a letter from Cliff set my day in tune. He seems so happy and busy – and happier than he has yet been in the Army. He says he has more responsibility. I think the spells of inactivity in the desert, and all the weary meaningless courses which led nowhere before he left England, made a great drain on him. His restless spirit needs action to feel he is achieving something. I’d quite a deal of shopping to do, little things like Andrews liver salt and a ball of twine, and to try and get Cliff a nail file to replace one he lost. The one I lent him has had its day. I saw electric kettles and irons, plenty of heavy bottomed pans for gas or electric stoves, children’s skipping ropes with turned handles, fine lisle stockings – in a shop window, openly displayed – and some flannel pants!* Granted the latter would only have fit a youth of 14–15, but there were grey flannel bags,† which seem to have disappeared entirely. I was at Centre by 10 o’clock and Mrs Higham and I settled down to jungle jerseys and worked busily. With no interruptions I got the tricky shoulder bit fixed and tak tacked† on five jerseys before I made lunch. I’d left soup, a good salad and a little cold meat, and a wee dish of egg custard and jelly, and I brought the two latter to Centre. We feel we must make an effort to close before September for the whole building gets so damp now there is no heating. If it’s a wet spell it is damper and more dank than in winter when the heating dries out the walls. Mrs Woods had promised to come but did not turn up. I did not feel sorry, and still feel a bit snooty about the way she let me down over the shop closing and then gushed over me so for my ‘cleverness’. I suppose now that her bridge friends will have got back from their holiday we won’t see her again on Tuesdays. I got ten of our last bundle of 35 jerseys back, but Miss Heath could not get them all examined. It’s surprising what slapdash work we have had to rectify, yet everyone knows the wear and comfort of the jerseys depends on exactness of measuring slots for equipment and of making any cut in the material well bound and stitched. I often wonder when I see slipshod voluntary work if in their homes there is the same slackness.

  The evacuees are all away. Mrs Fletcher’s two were amongst those many from Workington, Millom and the Cumberland villages and farms who cried bitterly at ‘going home’. Mrs Diss said if it had not been pitiful it would have been comic to see so many woebegone faces at the carriage windows. Mrs Fletcher’s boy evacuee begged to be let stay; he is a big strong lad of 12–13 and said ‘I know you would get my allowance stopped, but I’d work hard in the garden and help look after the hens and I’d not eat as much, and as soon as I leave school I’ll come into the joiner’s workshop and work. DO let me stay. Let Ethel go back. Mother doesn’t want me and I was always in the way in our flat. Please Mrs Fletcher, write and tell Mother you will let me be your boy and always live with Michael and Mr Fletcher and you.’ Mrs Fletcher had already approached the mother – it’s been a great disappointment when acute thyroid imbalance made having a family unwise [beyond their one child]. Michael has been a lonely child in spite of them always encouraging children to throng the house. John has been an ideal companion, ready for every bit of fun, and as Michael said happily ‘not going home at bedtime’. Mrs Fletcher said when the mother came on holiday she made no secret of the fact she ‘disliked boys – they were so rough and could not be dressed as nicely as girls’, but she said that he would ‘soon be earning’ and she was going to ‘have the good of him’. Mrs Fletcher was very unhappy about it. She said ‘Our Michael will never go in the business – and besides, we want him to be an architect. John would have had a good home and had good prospects, for my husband had already begun to rely on him in those little ways you rely on a son of his age. The way that lad was up to open the greenhouse in the morning, collect the eggs and “cheek” Granddad into a good humour was a pleasure to see. We all liked him and he liked us. It’s dreadful to think he will not be wanted. Before we took him to the station he was missing and we found him down the garden, staring into the meadow where the ducks are, and as he turned to leave he said ‘Ain’t ducks kind things’. Mrs Fletcher said she was going to laugh, thinking it was a joke, but saw his lip quivering. She is very understanding of small boys. She said ‘You know, I didn’t know what to say so I talked quietly of all the kindness there was really in the world, far more than cruelty if people only knew it and would look for it, and how even things like ducks, old Tib the cat, and last but not least that old crab of a Granddad of ours liked kindness and was eager to return it’. We worked on till it was a rush to get the last bus before the Yard came out.

  On Sunday, 15 July she heard a very different story about evacuees from a boatman in Bowness. He had had four children from one family, ranging from five to eleven in age, billeted on him for three and a half years. ‘They were children of people who worked in a munitions factory and who came every holiday to see them, staying at an hotel or good boarding house, dressed in the best of clothes, boasting between them they earned over £20, never gave the children a penny to spend for pocket money or sent any extra for their keep, even when they had childish ailments. Clothes had to be “wrung out of them by the billeting officer” – and at the end the
foster parents were asked if they would like to adopt the younger two, as they were girls and not likely to be earning for awhile.’

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  During the war Nella had thrown herself into work outside the home – at the WVS Centre (usually two days a week), at the canteen on Fridays and on many days at Barrow’s Red Cross shop, for which she had prime responsibility. While she had once made light of her volunteering – on 5 November 1940 she had written that her work at the Centre ‘is largely gossiping and coaxing 3d tickets out of the women for my everlasting raffle’ – her volunteer work (and it greatly expanded after 1940) actually had meant a lot to Nella. It gave her a sense of purpose; it helped her to feel worthwhile – and to be acknowledged by others. It had been a sort of anchor; it liberated her from the constraints of domesticity – ‘the cage of household duties alone’, as she once put it (15 August 1945). In many ways the war changed her life. After a shaky start in 1939, she remarked on 9 February 1944 (DR, January 1944), ‘Gradually my busy life of today took shape. Everything I could do seemed to help me to do something else, giving me more than I gave, steadying nerves and resolve.’ She no longer felt as confined – or ‘repressed’ – as she had sometimes felt in the 1930s. Her husband, she once said, had wanted her to live in ‘the shell he liked so much’, and feelings of ‘impotence’ had gripped her (DR, August 1942). Happily, her wartime work went a long way to change this. This work was varied, useful, stimulating, and mostly done with others. ‘My job – or rather jobs – are all volunteering’, she wrote to M-O in reply to its March 1943 Directive, ‘but I love them and the Red Cross shop is a great pleasure to me even if a great deal of work. I don’t feel I could ever settle down entirely to be a housewife again.’

  Wartime volunteering presented women with new challenges. It summoned from Nella (and no doubt many other women) talents that were previously under-exercised, and which perhaps they barely knew they possessed. Nella often felt called upon to be creative, and to use her active imagination for some larger objective, whether to solve money-raising problems or to fashion her own appealing handcrafts (mainly dollies) or attractively to present items for sale in the Red Cross shop. ‘I couldn’t bear things if I did not feel I was helping to straighten things out,’ she once wrote, ‘however small or feeble my efforts’ (2 May 1942). ‘If it was not for my work I don’t think I could go on’, she confessed on 6 October 1942. ‘Shadows crowd round me like gaunt dogs. I feel the shop and the Canteen and Centre are the stones I fling to keep them away.’ It was important to ‘get outside my home, for I can keep from thinking. It does no good at all to brood or worry and yet it’s difficult if at home not to do so’ (1 July 1942). Her work and her writing were two of her principal passions; they were ways of engaging with life on a deeper level. On 28 December 1942, ‘When I was coming home, I thought of the little shop, so loved and cared for, to others only a tatty little junk shop, to me “dreams come true”. Always have I had two intense wishes, quite apart from the two boys and purely personal. One was to write books, one to have a shop and work with people. I’ve written my “books” alright in the shape of letters! Now I’ve a shop, an extra precious one where every 10s is a parcel’ (for a prisoner of war).

  For a woman who felt this way about her wartime work, peace was bound to have a big impact. There was an inescapable sense of loss. She worried on 23 May about the possible closing of the Red Cross shop. ‘Somehow I realised more today than ever what the shop means to me, perhaps with knowing Hospital Supply will close down in the near future. Looking back it seemed so difficult to get a start to be useful and now, after 5½ years effort, I doubt if I’d have the zeal to start over again on a fresh project.’ The Red Cross shop did in fact close in June, and this was a particularly wrenching experience. ‘It’s like having a tooth drawn out in pieces,’ she wrote on 18 June, ‘instead of one good tug.’ She needed and wanted to feel of use and constructively busy; she wondered what she would now do with herself, and how she could be engaged outside the home, where her unsociable and uninquisitive husband rarely welcomed visitors. Now in her mid-fifties, how, she asked, would she find ways of consuming her time in a worthwhile way?

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  With war winding down, Nella often reflected on the changes, many of them dramatic and troubling, that the world was already undergoing and that she and others might expect with the arrival of peace. She was anxious about the challenges of adapting to a post-war existence. She worried about her sons – Cliff, who was still in the Army, had suffered serious abdominal injuries in November 1944; Arthur (now married to Edith) was still posted in, from Nella’s perspective, remote Portadown, Northern Ireland. She had doubts, too, about her diary, which had absorbed so much of her time and energy since 1939. ‘The thought struck me as I began my diary,’ she wrote on 4 May, ‘how much longer will they want them?’ ‘They’ were the people at Mass-Observation to whom she regularly dispatched her writings – ‘miles’ of them, as she remarked a few months later, on 30 August. She spent at least an hour in bed most nights writing her MO diary.

  Tuesday, 21 August. I wonder how long before it looks like peace in Japan – and is it really peace or will it all break out again, or linger like a festering corroding sore for years, like the war in China? Vast countries like that are not like we are in Europe. Little things grow dearer and dearer to me. Sometimes I feel I run the danger of ‘clinging too closely’ to things and by experience I know how foolish that can be. The little wood fire I made for my husband to have his supper by (for I know he always feels chilly after perspiring and working outdoors), the gleaming bits of brass I’d found time to polish tonight, even my bread and gingerbread, seemed ‘real’ in a world of shadows and doubts. I feel the everyday jobs and my little household gods are more real and convincing than ‘big news’, which my tired head doesn’t seem to grasp. I said once at Centre ‘I feel like a piece of elastic that has been stretched and stretched and now has no more stretch – and cannot spring back’. They laughed, but several said it was a pretty good description of their own postwar feelings and I can tell Arthur has somewhat the same reaction. More and more do I feel I must take each day as it comes, do the best I can and lay my day aside, taking up the next. Sometimes I feel so dead tired, like a burnt-out shell, craving only to relax and rest. Then my mind rises and rebukes my tired body – says ‘so much to be done, so little time’. The stars shine brightly tonight. I love stars. They make me feel trivial and unimportant – and are so stable. I don’t wonder the old ones thought Heaven was ‘above the bright blue sky’.

  Wednesday, 22 August. The dusk fell quickly tonight and there were no stars in the overcast sky. It’s grand to think that this winter will have no blackout, that bright lights will be in streets and from lightly curtained windows. How remote the last six years are becoming. It’s odd to realise how Cliff has lost such a slice from his life, turned from a charming if headstrong boy to a man who shows his apprehension of life and having as yet no stability of a settled place in the community, by moods, and a general look of strain. He has all his limbs. I think of the poor ones who came back handicapped so badly. I pray so deeply for real peace – for ordinary people who ask so little of life beyond simple needs, food and shelter for their families and a little for small enjoyments. I search for details of factories ‘turning over’ or opening, contracts received, but it’s not very often I feel satisfied when I’ve read the papers. I read today an article written by an American armaments man, who urged America to ‘go underground’. I recalled an article of Naylor the astrologist written when big underground shelters were being made in the beginning of the war. He said a time was coming when we would put all works and factories – and people would live in huge blocks of buildings – built deep down and air conditioned. It made me feel terrified at the time. I so love the freedom of fresh winds and air.

  Tonight I thought of the dreadful new bomb – we will always live in the shadow of fear now. With the dawn of new and comparatively ea
sily made and handled weapons, no country will ever be safe, however big their armies and navies. Only by change of thought and heart can civilization be saved. Old sayings are real truths – ‘Put not your trust in Princes, or any sons of man’ – more vitally real than ever. And what change of heart can be expected today – bitter hatred, chaos, broken faith, lost ideals are poor foundations. I feel again this world of ours has blundered into a beam of wickedness and unrest. Call it Uranus the ‘dark Planet’ or what you will, it’s some evil force that affects all. I’ve a deep sadness over my mind and heart like a shadow, instead of joy the war is ended. I tell myself impatiently that I’m tired out, that I’m run down, and I rest as much as I can, coming to bed early, but it does not lessen the shadow. I go and work in the garden and leave a little of it there and when the bright sun shines I feel I ‘lift up my hands’ to it in delight, but cannot stir the heavy dead weight shadow off my heart for long.

  Wednesday, 29 August. I used to think how happy people would be when the war was over, but beyond thankfulness that it’s over, I see few signs of the brave new world. People are beginning to have that fear they will be paid off. Women are not settling down very well after being at work. I hear many cases where they have lost touch with little children who have learned to do without ‘Mam’ and turned to a Granny or older sister, of wives and returned soldier husbands feeling the strain after living apart. After the last slump a lot of people in Barrow who had considered their job secure in Vickers got a nasty shake-up when they were sacked. I hear odd remarks or parts of them, which show how women’s thoughts are on ‘whether Dad will get the sack’, if this or that department is busy or likely to be. The stocks lie stark and empty – no big keels laid to make Barrow people feel secure. Only Sir Charles Craven’s keenness and foresight kept Barrow being like Jarrow or similar dead shipbuilding towns. He is dead now and things are different altogether.* Little sleeping worries have risen after six years when work was assured for all comers. People ask the prices in shops lately. There’s none of their ‘Give me a couple of pounds of those’ but rather it’s ‘How much a pound?’ and a consideration before saying how much is required, and flowers are not quickly bought regardless of price. The moneyed folk are beginning to see that war jobs don’t last forever …