As I grow older I grow more convinced in, if not reincarnation exactly, that our life here is incomplete, is only a tiny paragraph of a long book, which will have to be taken as a whole. I feel the truth of so much of my old Gran’s sayings and teachings, wondering where she learned them. Her ‘do the best you can and pass on, leaving the rest to God’ might well be a teaching for today’s problems. As I sat tonight I had the feeling of frustration I had before I got into war work proper – so much to do and no one wanted my services! Europe and its terrible sufferings might be on the moon and out of reach of our help, for all the ‘aids’ it gets in Barrow. Perhaps when Xmas, our first peacetime Xmas, gets over, it will be different. Mrs Diss said ‘Trouble of it is, you know, if we do start a “make and mend” as you suggest, we might only be helping black market crooks’. I think the Red Cross could give us a lead, for everyone could do a little and it would help as the shilling a week fund helped. So many people take the view that ‘Germany has brought it all on herself ’. I said to Mrs Woods ‘Well, there is France, and little French children’. Her big blue eyes rolled and flashed as she said ‘And for what are we to thank France, pray?’ I feel we should leave ‘punishment’ to the clever ones. The ordinary simple folk should hold out a hand to anyone in trouble or want – we are not God – and little children feel cold and frightened whatever their country or colour. It’s a very remarkable thing that amongst the people who think Germany has brought it all on herself, that France is traitor and should be punished for giving up – Belgium too in some people’s opinion – and these are the best church people I know. I shocked Mrs Woods terribly by saying ‘The kindly pitiful Christ you sing about would have been in the Belsen camp and in all the worst bombed places. He wouldn’t recognise his churches as “holy” places.’
My husband said ‘You look very sad. Are you worrying about anything?’ I said ‘I’ve got a real attack of the blues. I think I’m worrying more than I know about Cliff, and Arthur and Edith having to move, and it’s opened the door to a whole battalion of worries and sad thoughts.’ I’m glad I’m going to the little reunion whist drive tomorrow and meeting all the Hospital Supply lot. Mrs Caddy the caretaker died very suddenly. She was in the best of health and spirits when we had our last drive and disappointed because we planned to have this one in the ARP Club. She was upset a few weeks ago when her black cat dear Dinkes was run over. She cried to me as she said ‘You know, I’ll miss that cat this winter when the door is shut and the evenings are so long. When you live alone you grow so attached to your cat.’ It’s as well now he went before her. He followed her like a dog and his excited rush to greet her when she had been shopping made me hope he was waiting for her. He was a very nice cat.
Wednesday, 12 December. When Mrs Cooper went I finished off the shirt I had tacked and then hunted out all my Xmas bits and bobs, carefully packed in boxes. Cliff’s little tree carries its age very well – 25! Perhaps the great love he had for it and the fact it would not be Xmas without it has helped preserve it! I put all the little glass ornaments on and the big star and two strands of tinsel I bought out of Mrs Waite’s little hoard she gave us to sell at the Hospital Supply last Xmas. I bought a box of tiny crackers only thumb length for our last party, seven years ago. I caught my breath at the thought that only my own two and three of the girls were left. One girl died of TB – that was the outcome of going in the WAAFs and sleeping in a damp bed. One died when her baby was born – poor dear, she was the wife of one of the Boots crowd. And one was killed in our raids. The other two we lost sight of completely when their family moved to Australia. I’d forgotten Jack Gorst, though; he was there, for it was the crackers he brought in – made like little dinner rolls – that made me forget to pull the wee ones off the tree. I said ‘Never mind. I’ll save them for the next party’ – and ’39 brought something else but parties and I said to myself ‘I’ll keep them till the next party as I said’. They look a bit tired and dusty, but then, aren’t we all? I think they have little whistles or jewellery in – something hard. Mrs Atkinson said with a little sniff ‘Trust you to have something that no one else has, or can buy’. I was glad really that no one came in as I unpacked my little oddments, of paper rolled up from, I think, three other Xmases – two anyway. I trimmed the little tree with the feeling that every little tawdry chipped bauble was alive and was glad to be on the tree again, for when I’d finished I felt myself musing and gently laughing over a remembered incident, and the tree twinkled and winked in the firelight as if to say ‘Go on remembering. Memory is the one thing that no one can break or tarnish, soil or destroy. It’s your very own.’
Under my well thought preparations and my plans I’ve a sadness which takes keeping down. Perhaps it’s because of Cliff and his future. Perhaps thinking of Arthur and Edith flat-hunting. They talk of young folks having families. I see no chance as yet of Arthur starting a family in any reasonable comfort, and he is 32 and life passes so swiftly. Just as a clock often begins to go fast as it nears the end of its spring, and needs complete winding or it will stop, I feel we all are going faster. I’d like to talk over, or rather listen to clever competent people talking about, this loan from America. I feel America has not acted like a good neighbour at all. My husband says that when travellers come round so much is ‘written off’ their catalogues and they tell him ‘all is for export’. The New Year is going to be a shock for people. Things will be very tight and on the whole more difficult than in the war years, for there will be so many more civilians and so many less things to buy. I feel America is laying the foundations of resentment which will recoil on her, whereas she could have laid those of real comradeship, and in life there are ‘no rewards and no revenge – only consequences’. I feel it’s the fact we have a Labour Government, that if Churchill had still led, things would have been a lot different. Rightly or wrongly, the USA Government fear Attlee and despise Harold Laski.* It would have been better if he had been in the hotel in Barrow when a bomb demolished it. He is that most unfortunate of men – one who does not know when to speak and when to hold his tongue, and in a public figure it’s the unforgivable sin. The fact too that he is a Jew is unfortunate. I’ve often been astonished at the mistrust and real hatred of Jews in quite ordinary men in the street.
Friday, 14 December. I was talking to such a nice lad in Canteen today, well spoken and with that indefinable air of ‘background’. We spoke of demobilisation. He hopes to be out by next June. He’s 24. He joined up at 17½ because he was out of joint with the jarring course he had embarked upon, and the Army offered a grand escape. His uncle has since died – his father died when he was small – and he has absolutely no idea what he will do. He thought he might ‘go in the building trade’ for he will have to help his mother. A boy in a nearby street was a ticket collector on the railway. Now he is demobbed a Major – acting Colonel when he came out – with a dainty expensive looking wife he married when a Captain, and they have a little girl of two and another expected any time. I thought of housing problems as well as work and ‘adjustments’. I felt the Saturnalian ‘Lord of misrule’ was in charge of this lovely earth and its misused treasures. The dire feeling that lies like a bank of heavy snow clouds in my mind seemed to deepen. When Big Ben tolls I feel my heartfelt prayer urging ‘Please God, bless the young ones’ … We older ones have had our day, have made or marred our lives, but we did have chances. Any courage we possess was rooted in ‘security’ of some kind – home, Church, or faith in the ‘clever ones’ who seemed omnipotent.
Till I die I’ll remember the morning after our worst raid, when roofs and windows all went aground – tiled roofs. I felt I walked about in a daze. With a curious lack of any noise or talking or movement, except a persistent tinkling sound, like the little temple wind bells we once would buy, it was falling shovelfuls of glass as everyone swept it up and put it in heaps. Sometimes in my mind I feel and hear that tinkling noise, when I think of the shattered lives of so many, of the senselessness and the utter foll
y of war, when no one wins. America has won this war, but in a short time she will have a bigger depression than ever before. She has no soul and is too young a country to understand the problems of the old world. And there’s a thing people tend to forget. One of the strongest cornerstones in American society as a whole is bitter resentment, either to their own country or another, which compelled them to seek a fuller life overseas. There is a deep hidden fear in Americans. That is why so many of them bluster and brag. They are not ‘used to things’. Prosperity hurts them as much as the poverty and hardship which sent their fathers wandering, but shows in their love of being top dog.
I rave. It’s after 12.30 and time I slept!
Cliff was now at home.
Tuesday, 18 December. Cliff looks a lot better. He had been working hard before he came and I feel he is worrying a little about getting a start when he is demobbed. I hope he gets into interior décor and likes it. He has a queer streak of instability that has stayed from childhood and not been outgrown with his somewhat artificial life in the Army. Seven years nearly out of his life by the time he is demobbed – six and a half at any rate – and at the most important time. Maybe he would have had somewhat muddled values if he had not gone in the Army. He is very like my father’s family. I see it very plainly when he is talking – that under their circumstances he too would have saved the world, to ride the crest of the waves, or sink below them.
I told him a few things of my father’s family as we sat yesterday, more as a hint of where his footloose fancy can lead than anything else. They were all East India men, sailors or traders, up to my great grandfather’s day, who ‘saw these new fangled engines being used freely – even put in ships, maybe!’ – and advised his sons to learn all about them. Some made good. My grandfather was one, but never happy. He married early and got tied down with responsibility. I recall him as a darling old man who loved to read of foreign parts, and his collection of oddments bought off sailors were a joy to us children and a curse to his wife and daughters. One of my father’s brothers ‘rode the crest’ and crashed, and spent 20 years on the Cape breakwater for illicit diamond-buying, a savage sentence only possible those days of DeBeers’ monopoly in South Africa. I feel my Cliff has so much hidden conflict from his ancestors. I try to be patient when he gets difficult, praying always he will be ‘true to the best in himself’. Beyond that, there is little to be done. Any influencing has been done when he was growing up and any lessons learned then may be remembered.
For Nella, December was to be a month full of sociable pleasures. On the 17th Cliff had a visitor, Jacques, a French-Egyptian friend, who delighted his mother. ‘I felt my laughter and the feeling of happiness in my little gay decked house had recharged me,’ she wrote that evening, ‘making me more vital than I’ve felt for a while. I like bustle and happy people round me. I don’t mind work, and dearly love to see people round my table enjoying the food I’ve cooked.’ She enjoyed the fun and ‘happy faces’. ‘I felt the war years and worry had rolled back like a soiled curtain and let sunshine in to flood my little house.’ Then, on the 20th, Arthur and Edith arrived from Northern Ireland, bringing all the family together for this first peacetime Christmas.
Sunday, 23 December. My husband had been writing as usual on a Sunday morning and as the sun shone, Cliff said ‘You all go out, I’ll get the table ready’, and knowing how he loved arranging things I went off gladly for I felt a bit whacked. We went round Coniston, always my choice if I’m asked. The Lake lay remote and grey, but a strong sunset drew tearing red fingers of pinky red across it as if trying to rouse it to friendly movement. Its light touched the hills to gold where the bracken dried so valiantly this year. Arthur said ‘The bracken must have been a glory this year. Even now it’s more colourful than I remember it.’ Somehow I felt it was the last touch to our happy Xmas, to take that little loved run out.
Everything was ready. I had only to brew tea and cut bread and butter and scones. I felt all the war years – my anxiety of last Xmas – and dreams that it could never have been. The little tree in the corner, the lights lit round the arch of the bay window and the plentiful spread would have all been pre-war, only my lads were men and only Edith’s and Margaret’s faces fresh and girlish. I had a bit of sweetened milk for cream, rum butter and loganberry jam, Xmas cake, chocolate biscuits, mince pies and shortbread. My cloth with the embroidered holly hocks picking up the red of the little tinsel baubles on the tree. Happy laughter and gay voices. Even my little cat purred extra loudly and blinked happily from someone’s knee. He is growing too heavy to nurse for long and gets passed round! We pulled the little crackers – and everyone who did not take sugar in their tea insisted on a sugar lump to suck, saying it was ‘the next party’. I’d saved my crackers, as I said. Seven years old or not, the tiny things went off with quite a loud pop, and wee lead charms were in each – tiny horses and spinning wheels, squirrels and horseshoes. Everything was soon cleared away and we started to play Pontoon† for a while, but got so interested we played till 10.30, when I made supper as Doug had ordered a taxi for 11.30 … I love parties – best in my own home.
Monday, 24 December, Christmas Eve. Mrs Whittam was very upset. Her best friend’s daughter had been cut to pieces on the railway line and she was going to her funeral. Such a bright clever girl who worked in our Public Library and whose fiancé shot himself a few weeks ago. He was in the RAF and badly injured but they ‘repaired’ his poor face and his other injuries mended, but later he found himself going blind. A letter, not published, was to her mother, begging forgiveness but saying she ‘could not face things without Bob’, saying she knew she was acting wickedly in killing herself but that she chose that way to be with him – that ‘it would never be Heaven unless she was with him’. Another of war’s tragedies – one among many that we will not hear anything about …
We all felt we would like a breath of good fresh air and went in the car over Walney. I walked along the beach. The huge waves rolled and crashed. Suddenly I felt my old love of the sea return. I felt as I looked that in spite of mines yet around in some places it was sweet and free, that the fear and menace of death had passed, leaving the ordinary risks and turmoil natural to it. I had a few calls to make – two on old people who visit Aunt Eliza and are over 80 … I called on Mrs Waite, taking her some mince pies and a piece of Xmas cake, but though I could see movement in the dining room as I went up the path, I was not let in. I scribbled a Xmas message on the wrapping paper and came away. They are very odd and must be a great trial to their sons’ wives …
All the buses are stopped for Xmas. They refused flatly to even run a skeleton service to enable people to visit or go to church. It’s odd how high handed public servants like dockers and bus people can be. They say NO and that’s that.
The following days featured customary seasonal celebrations, exchanges of gifts (including a single banana for the whole family from Australia, ‘which had ripened perfectly’), socialising with family and friends, and a lot of time preparing food and eating it – detailed accounts were provided. The Lasts enjoyed a goose for Christmas dinner, and Nella got ‘a really lovely diamond ring from my husband’ – he probably valued her, in his own way, more than he sometimes let on. On Christmas afternoon she visited the hospital where she had volunteered during the war, and later had fourteen people for tea, with even more visitors in the house in the evening, many of them people of her sons’ generation, and very much in a party mood. ‘I felt I could have sat down and howled for sheer happiness,’ she wrote on Boxing Day morning, ‘for joy that in spite of everything young things could laugh and be gay.’ Later that day they had ‘a little run in the car’ and at five o’clock were entertained by the Atkinsons for tea. ‘Not a single thing has spoiled or marred our Xmas’, she thought (written early the next morning); and during that day, the 27th, she prepared a hearty breakfast for Cliff, who was taking the morning train to London, saw My Friend Flicka at the cinema, and in the evening saw Arthur and Edith
off on their train and boat to Belfast. Returning from the station, ‘I felt as if my little house still vibrated with love and happiness, laughter and gaiety. I felt as if all my little worries had been sorted out tidily … I feel I have got things a little more in focus. Perhaps I’ve laughed a few mulligrubs away!’ Nella, while introspective, liked to be with people and to feel socially connected. The next evening, 28 December, after attending a party that included a concert, she noted that ‘Me – I’d rather talk and listen to people talking than any “amusement”’.
Sunday, 30 December. I felt really thankful it was Sunday. I could hardly bear to stand on my right leg. [She had twisted it at the canteen the previous day.] After I’d had the tea and toast my husband brought up, I knelt in very hot water in the bath and bathed in it, afterwards rubbing it well with wintergreen, and it was a little better. I had a very busy morning with letters and rose at 12 to make lunch – good mutton soup in which too were some goose bones. There was cold mutton, as tender as chicken – a nice chunky bit of chilled mutton, and much better meat than I’ve had lately – chutney and whole meal bread and butter, egg custard and bottled apples and then a cup of tea when I made some to put in the flask to take out. All was white with frost. It never lifted all day, and we went to Spark Bridge to wish them a Happy New Year and take a jar of good dripping, a bit of marg, a glass of sherry each and a big slice of Xmas cake.
The Diaries of Nella Last Page 30
