My husband does worry me. He grows more and more detached and really I often feel I’m not a good influence for him. When he is tired out I always feel so sorry for him and do every little thing to comfort him, but at times I wonder if it would have been better if I had nagged and stormed him out of his moods. I looked at him tonight as he sat – he surprised me by a remark he passed, and I thought I knew them all. I’ve been looking forward to going into the ’drome on Saturday when it’s open for inspection when our big Savings push opens. A bus runs up to within a mile and a half. We could take the car and go nearer. Granted it’s a cold windswept spot, and it would be tiring walking round, but it’s a chance we will not get again to see anything like it. He spoke of a bad cold he had coming on, the need to go to Ulverston, how tiring it would be, and all the people who would be there, and we would ‘have to stop and talk to them’. I had that irritable feeling at myself for my weak streak when I heard myself say ‘Alright, if you don’t feel like going, we will go to Ulverston and then on to Spark Bridge to see Aunt Sarah’. I felt angry with myself when I saw the look of relief open over his face. I thought ‘Now why couldn’t you have said “Alright, you go to Ulverston and I’ll go with the Atkinsons and see the “drome”?’ …
The first chill of autumn makes me think of winter, and of winter in Europe, making me wish that America had had more of a share in war than she has. She shows very plain signs of her old grab and brag. The word ‘peace’ will have little meaning for them who have no shelter or warmth. The jaunty smartness, the fat unwholeness of the woman in the red stockings I met today, came back to me. She was one of the lucky ones. Diet and right food will bring down her puppy fat. Her courage showed in her eyes, her attempt to look fashionable, and her shaven poodle. I thought of the old ones, the little children, the displaced people who may be suffering for others’ sins and do not deserve that they should be turned adrift, back into a homeland that does not want them. I see so little signs of the brotherhood that seemed as if, when it flowered in war time, it would come to fruit when peace was signed. Arthur’s words come back to me. He said he would ‘like to retire to a desert island with a handful of congenial souls’. I feel at some time, in some former life, I’ve been a nun – sought the cloistered life – or maybe I’m the type who seeks it. I feel as if I withdraw within myself more and more in my mind. I feel so useless and little, my efforts so futile and feeble. Nothing I can do or think or say can really help the poor ones. My heart’s-ease and feeling of being worthwhile in the scheme of things passed when our dear tatty Red Cross shop closed its doors. When I could gloat over the week’s taking, thinking ‘so many poor men made happy for a little while’, it was always like oil in the lamp.
Maybe I’m war weary and a bit debilitated. Certainly things have rather got me down lately, try as I may. People seem to come too close to me, bruising my mind, tiring me inside. Little things annoy me. My worries go to bed with me, sleep lightly, wake at a touch, and are ready when I rise to keep pace with me all day. In spite of all my gay chatter and nonsense, I have no one with whom to talk things over. Come to think of it, the only one I can let me back hair down with is Arthur. We grew up together, poor kid. He helped share burdens from a very early age. Letters are not satisfactory. Beside, it’s not fair to worry him with formless little worries and fears. He has his own. My husband’s health, little half-formed worries about Cliff, a vague mist of fright and fear, a feeling of chaos all round, fret me when I sit quiet. I feel a feeble ‘lifting up of my hands’ rather than words when I pray, a feeling that God just knows how I feel and any help would be received with gratitude by me – renewed faith, a chance to help, serenity of mind that seems to have fled me for the present.
One great feeling though – I can read a book, taking interest and losing myself. The Herries† books to me are always a delight, beyond their style, bringing alive the places I love in the Lakes, peopling them with what could be the family of Rawlinsons instead of Herries, tracing resemblance and thinking of our old ones lying quiet in Hawkshead churchyard, who lived when the Herries folk lived, feeling akin.* It is a blessing when I can read. I do my duty writing and then read on into the night, when I don’t sleep, and if I wake restless, put on the light and read awhile, blessing my room to myself, the fact I’ve not to lie staring into the darkness, afraid of disturbing my husband, who needs his sleep when he has to work so hard.
Friday, 14 September. I felt exhausted [after a day at the canteen] when we were going home, but it was my own fault. I’d only had a very little lunch and nothing but cups of tea. The flies seemed to be over the food and the sink smelled till I went out and got some disinfectant. I felt annoyed when I had to pay 1s 6d again – really mad. I thought ‘I bought this and I’ll use it’, so poured nearly half down the sink, some down the staff lavatory, and gave a sailor the rest to use in the men’s lav – then found out the pong came from the pig tub rather than the sink! I rested and ate some bread and butter when I got in, thinking of the announcement that the WVS will go on for another two years. When we have got through all the material, and Matron’s work at Hospital Supply, we will close down, but there remains still the clothing to bale and pack and dispatch to the Red Cross Headquarters – garments sent from the American Red Cross. Then there is Canteen, and when Hospital Supply closes I will do more there if necessary, but none of us will agree to be ‘exploited’ in any way. We have worked constantly and uncomplainingly all the war years, but we will not ‘blackleg’ or do work someone else would be paid for doing.
Tonight as I sat I thought of six years ago when Cliff went off in the second lot of Militia – such a lifetime ago it seems; so many who went about then will never return. I had a sadness at the utter stupidity of war, and the blindness and complacency which allowed us to look on while Hitler armed and prepared, chuckling at his antics as we would at those of a clown’s, telling ourselves silly things like ‘the rolling stock of Germany is so outworn it could never stand any big strains’, shutting our eyes to the huge strategical arterial roads being made. My dad was an ardent admirer and disciple of Lord Roberts, never trusted the Germans, and after the last war worried over the ‘muddled peace’. It’s a terrible thought that so much can hang on the way things are handled now, and what dreadful results may come in another 25 years.*
CHAPTER TWELVE
A SORT OF PEACE
September 1945–January 1946
Thursday, 20 September. The years slipped back to six years ago, when war had only started and we were sewing cloth rugs, in very spare moments. When our minds were half crazed with fear for the future I loved talk. Men were being called up. Now it’s over, the fighting and killing part, but it’s dreadful to read of the food and fuel shortage and the winter coming on. Poor gay Vienna again facing famine, and all the Balkan states, which are only a name in the paper to us. Greeks, French, Dutch – all the same, hungry and cold. I’ve had to pinch and scrape at times, economise the rest, to make things go round, but have always managed to serve a tempting meal if it had only been baked potatoes and herrings, when the boys rushed in ‘simply starving, Dearie’ from school. There has been always a fire to welcome them home, a door to shut out the worries and hurts of the day, a bed for tired heads to sleep and wake refreshed.
When I think of those poor women who suffer twice – once for their families and then for themselves – my heart aches. I’m rather glad that Mrs Woods has not been with us all these last weeks. Today she jarred on us badly when she said that half Europe should die out including the treacherous French who had ‘let us down and didn’t deserve help in any way’. I thought as I looked at her ‘Well, after all, if we all got our deserts you might be in prison for bribing shop girls to give you extra rations and buying everything you could in the black market’. She thought Mrs Higham and I had ‘no sense of proportion’ when in answer to some girl about sending the baby bundles which might be used for a traitor French baby, I said there was no such thing as a traitor baby and Mrs
Higham said if there were a thousand bundles and she knew they were going for German babies it would be all the same! I felt a row was very near. We don’t think alike on a lot of subjects and Mrs Woods has that hateful air which many teachers have – that ‘Be quiet, silly ignorant child, don’t you hear me speak’.
Margaret brought some magazines back. There is a decided coolness now between us. I think my remarks about the Australian pilot have offended her out of all proportion – several times she has got in a dig about such a girl ‘seeming to be good enough for so and so’. Useless to say anything. The cap has been crammed down over her ears and not just fitted. I wonder in my heart if I started a train of thought that night, if Margaret suddenly sees how many ‘friends’ she has had, how many ‘heartbreaks’. Her friend Linda is married and very sedate, rather snobbishly and slavishly so! She pauses to think how her husband – now left town – would like every little action. Margaret asked her to go to a show the other night and Linda said ‘Oh NO Margaret. Eddie would not like it, for I know you would be sure to meet some of your boy friends and they would string along.’ I looked at Margaret’s gay vital face tonight, suddenly seeing why Cliff and she didn’t draw any nearer as I’d hoped. They have both that lack of stability, that ‘snatching’ at life, always wanting the next thing. They are too much alike. I hope Margaret doesn’t keep up her offence with me. She is a sweet girl and never takes notice of my husband’s moods and silences. I came to bed early, glad my mind is settled enough to read and enjoy a book. It’s a great blessing when one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book.
Tuesday, 25 September. I feel I’ve never had such a sour attitude on life in general. I thought of the fun and laughter there used to be at Centre, even in the darkest days of war. Sometimes they say in the office ‘You are quiet’ – say it in wonder – and I just smile, but think ‘I feel quiet, I’m tired out’, and wonder if that is why others feel dim. There was such an eager looking forward to the end of the war. When I used to talk of still lean times till all got reorganised, I was looked on as a real dismal Jimmy. Now it’s over. We look forward to a winter which promises to be short of coal and food. Women who thought their husbands would be released if their job was waiting are feeling disappointed. Husbands are coming home so changed and with such altered outlooks they seem strangers. Women are leaving their wartime jobs and finding it’s not as easy to pick up threads as lay them down. Clothes coupons are beginning to seem inadequate lately when big things are needed. Meat is scarcer and nothing to replace it in the menus of harried landladies and mothers of families. Milk is down to two pints a head per week. There is so little brightness in life, and people’s heads are so tired. Speaking for myself, I feel as if anyone said ‘Tell me what you would really like to do’, I could not tell them. I could say I’d like to go somewhere where there was no bitter winds and damp to make me dread winter, somewhere where I could lie in the sun and feel warm, but I feel too indifferent to think of anything I’d really like to buy, or do, and what I do seems only like another job – all except when I come to bed and lie reading. It’s my chief joy today. I think of this tiredness magnified to the highest degree amongst the homeless ones. Sometimes I wonder if we get ‘wavelengths’ of their despair and depression. I wonder what would happen if anything like the Spanish influenza swept over the world like it did after the last war – people would die in greater numbers than even in the war.
Thursday, 4 October. My 55th birthday [she erred: it was actually Nella’s fifty-sixth birthday, as she later realised] – and Centre finally finished except for a little whist drive next Tuesday and our trip to Blackpool on Wednesday. I feel a bit dim tonight. We were down early and worked like niggers. Mrs Woods came down soon after Mrs Higham and I and helped us sort out six years accumulation of junk in the way of old cardboard boxes, old letters – Mrs Waite has a Chinaman’s aversion to destroying any written or printed matter! Carters trailed in and out for various lent things. The place got emptier. We were glad of our hot lunches – really hot with junk we had burnt and got the oven hot. Mrs Waite came in and Mrs Lord and Miss Ledgerwood would not have anything at all to do with her and kept out of the Committee room. I got into trouble with the organisers of the trip to Blackpool for having asked Mrs Woods to go with us. I said impatiently ‘Oh, don’t be daft – you invited Mrs Higham and I, and Mrs Woods is on the Committee’, and got the answer ‘Well, we like you’! They knew it was my birthday and teased me to tell them how old I was, one woman saying ‘Well, I know you are nearer 50 than 40’, and made those who knew my age laugh! …
I was home at 4.15 and before I changed or washed I relaxed on the settee and read Cliff’s letter – quite an ‘ordinary’ and newsy one. I need not have worried so with visions of him being ill. He is so happy just now in his work, he says. He would make the Army his career if he had a small private income! I’ve been astonished to hear many remarks which show the same trend – married men too who speak of living in occupied countries with their families later on … Aunt Eliza came in with some pears and a wee buttonhole of two flat clover-coloured daisies which will be the making of my clover flannel frock. She has such an eye for colour as ‘form’ – surprisingly so for an old country woman. We sat and talked. She will be 80 this December but her mind is as keen and clear as Aunt Sarah’s and her memory like a book whose pages can be turned back for reference. Surprisingly enough, tonight she talked of mother, who died at 52 – poor mother whose heart broke at 21 and for the rest of her life had little to give her second husband or her three children; who, looking back, seemed to live in a world entirely her own and preferred shadows and might-have-beens to real people. My husband said ‘If Nell doesn’t stop losing weight she is going to grow very like her mother in figure and general looks’. Aunt Eliza was shocked. She said ‘Oh No, Will – why Nell’s mother was a beauty. I’m sure Nell takes after Grandma Lord’, which, considering I’ve heard Aunt Eliza discuss the short stature and the all-round worthlessness of a family who had lived for generations in Woolwich – ‘which they tell me is London’ – I thought it a bit comic. She looks well for her change of air and speaks of trying to get a cottage in the country next summer. I thought of the way mother and her sisters had squandered money, just lately letting it drain away. I thought in that respect I was like the Lords’ family, and of course I never had any to squander. My shillings have always had to go as far as eighteen pence.
I made some little felt shoes and got them on seven dollies. They are coming on very nicely. I’ve a pile of odd bits of material from Centre, too, I can piece up for very wee ones’ nighties and I’ll make some little dressing gowns of crazy patchwork from my good scraps of pastel-coloured crepe de-chine and silk. I’ll find plenty to do alright, but I would like to find something where we could work in company. It’s no use worrying. I had a job to ‘break into the war’ but I did it.
Bed seems pretty good to my aching back and wretched bones and I’ll read when I’ve written two letters.
Saturday, 6 October. It was such a queer foggy morning and when I went to the hairdresser’s for 9 o’clock the cars and buses all had lights on full. I cannot be in a good mood with myself. For the first time, getting my hair permed irked and fidgeted me, but it’s a very good one and will last. It was my husband’s birthday gift so cost me nothing either. When I came home at 12 o’clock, the sun was shining brightly and people thronged the streets. The sun, the heaps of celery, pears and apples, tomatoes and boiled peeled beetroots, and meeting so many children and young people happily munching apples or pears as they walked in the sun, seemed to give such an air of happy prosperity, quite like the pre-war days.
It always seems odd to me to see queues for shoes, but an incident I heard the other day made me wonder if it was people’s greed that was partly to blame for the shortage. Favoured customers get a ring when Joyce or good branded shoes come in and one woman who, before the war, would never have had more than three pair of shoes wa
s heard to boast she had 15 pairs of shoes that had never yet been mended and were ‘as good as new’. My husband, who never in his life owned more than one fountain pen, now has three. He had one from Arthur as a present and passed on the one I bought to Clifford and was heard to say he ‘could have done with a spare one’ and was offered two at different times and took them. I said ‘You cannot use more than one pen at once’ but he seems to like to see them! I’ve noticed many little incidents like it at different times and feel it’s one of the chief sources of everyday things being scarce. I had enough soup to heat and we had potted meat, celery and tomatoes, whole meal bread and butter.
We decided to go to Kendal for our last little outing before the clocks were put back, and have our tea out. It was a glorious day for motoring, bright and clear and golden brown leaves softly falling like snow and drifting along the roads into heaps. I dearly love Kendal, its old hotels and buildings and its general air of peacefulness, only marred by the heavy North Road traffic thundering through. I think it should be by-passed from the narrow streets. I could have bought fat hares and rabbits, trout or mackerel, and the shops were so well stocked. I saw china and crockery I never thought to see again, and the antique shops had things of beauty and usefulness, not ugly museum pieces. I looked at chairs and presses, gay china and lovely glass, thinking [Hugh Walpole’s] ‘Judith Paris may have owned things like that’, and laughed at my whimsy when I realised they would have come from every corner of England. I saw my first television set but was not very thrilled. The screen was so tiny, any performers would have looked like dolls …
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