The Diaries of Nella Last

by Patricia Malcolmson

  We went on for a little run to Coniston Lake, and I never saw my dear Lake lovelier. The bracken clad hills were mirrored on the silver surface till it was a fantasy of gold and grey, with patches of blue sky in the mosaic. My husband stopped the car to pump up the tyres as he thought the pressure too low, and I sat with the windows wide open with the sun on my face. Such utter peace and beauty. I felt it was enough for all the troubled world. No sound save the gentle murmur of a wee beck as it hurried to lose itself in the placid Lake. I could have sat all afternoon just listening to the silence, caught in the Rhythm I always feel in that quiet spot, nearer to God than anywhere else I know. I sat so quiet and still, thinking of the New Year, longing for a job of some kind. There seems so little to do in Barrow and so many to do it. Women like myself who have been busy and useful, feeling they were helping, cannot find a way to help the peace as we did in wartime. With 2,000 women on the Labour Exchange, it would not be right to do anything they could do, yet I know many who, like myself, long to do something. I felt I ‘put my name down’ as I sat – my New Year resolution formless but willing.

  We were home by 4.30. All was white and lovely with frost. It looked as if the trees and bracken clad slopes were sprinkled with a powdering of snow. I had left a good banked fire. I put slippers to warm and made tea while my husband covered up the car. We had been eating chocolate this afternoon and so did not feel very hungry. I had some good Kraft spreading cheese a friend had sent from Canada and passed on to me, and I made sandwiches and we had rum butter. My husband can always eat cake, particularly Xmas cake, but I felt I did not want any more sweet stuff. We settled down quietly by the fire. I had a good detective book I had started last week, and my husband had some bills to make out. The cat settled on my knee and all was quiet till 8.30 when we listened to Man of Property [by John Galsworthy].

  I keep wondering how Arthur’s back is, fearing he is letting himself drift into the rheumatic state which so tormented my husband and his father and really clouded their lives for years. When he was home he told me he didn’t want the piano after all, that he wanted to sell it and spend the money on something he would need for the going into their new house. Secretly I felt vexed. I’d certainly given him it years ago and often wished when they left home and there was no one to play it that I could sell it and buy the china cabinet I needed but had no room for in this small house. I could have done with the money for many occasions, but would never have thought of selling it when I’d said Arthur could have it. He said ‘Cliff can have half the money’ and I’ll see he does. Sometimes I’m appalled to see that Arthur and Edith are waiting for their money every month. Arthur never had any financial sense at all. I feel Edith could budget better if he would let her.

  Monday, 31 December, Hogmanay. Such a bitter morning. My leg ached but was quite a lot better, and I went downtown early for my rations and to pay my bill at the wine merchant’s, and was offered a bottle of whiskey and one of rum, both of which I accepted for whiskey is my standby in either gastric attacks or flu colds while my husband prefers rum, and there’s no telling what we will need before winter is over … I took the bus and went up to wish Mrs Waite a Happy New Year – and got in this time! Poor old dear. She is so disagreeable and is worried about her husband who, the doctor thinks, has something rather malignant at 82. I looked at them both. They are so difficult and aloof. No real love or friendship. No interests. I hope and pray I don’t live till I’m 80, unless I can be like Aunt Sarah or Aunt Eliza, whose mind seems to keep their body in check and who plan ahead as if they had years and years to live. I didn’t stay long. I hurried home gladly to do my ironing and some mending with my machine …

  We listened to the wireless. Mrs Howson and her husband came in for a few minutes on their way to a party, but we were in bed by 10 o’clock, feeling we would rather sleep the New Year in for we plan to go to Morecambe for a run out tomorrow and get lunch at a hotel. My husband has not used the car for business lately and he loves a good run.

  Tuesday, 1 January 1946, New Year’s Day. Winter has come, very decidedly. It’s been a day of heavy frost and really bitter wind. We set out about 11 o’clock and in spite of my fur coat, rug and woollen stockings I didn’t feel very warm. We stopped for lunch at the Carnforth Hotel and had a surprisingly good lunch – turkey and plum pudding and as good soup as we would have had at home, roast and boiled potatoes, carrots and sprouts and an excellent cup of coffee, for 5s 6d a head. We passed three cars and a big lorry that had been smashed up recently. No doubt the roads were bad last night. Everything was quiet at Morecambe except for people going off to a football match and children being taken to a pantomime matinee. I didn’t see one place offering hot lunches. Generally if they are, a board is placed outside hotels. We were back home at 4 o’clock, and wanted to be off the narrow winding roads of the Levern before the sun went down and frost seized on the roads. We had banked the fire with slack† and it soon was poked to a large blaze, and I’d left our slippers by the side to get warm … All round sounded quiet as I made tea … I think all the festivities were over last night. Never in peace time before the war were so many people about in taxis, cars and on foot between 2.30 and 5.30.

  I keep wondering and wondering what will be the effect if the loan to Britain doesn’t materialise. Prospects didn’t look too rosy with it. I always thought a few bombs should have fallen in America – real big ones! Last war the same. They lost men like all countries but as a percentage it was not proportionate, and again they seem to have ‘all the money in the world’. All the brave talk of a ‘new world’ seems to be dying slowly. People have not changed one bit. Many in fact have turned selfish and self-seeking, and grown hard and bitter. Me – I never put a lot of reliance on ‘uplift’ talk. We could start something, plant a tiny acorn which we might not see beyond the seedling stage, but that it is the best we can hope to do … Nowadays many talk as if atomic energy was kind of philosopher’s stone to turn everything into something new and wonderful. It may well be so – in material things. But that prayer ‘And renew a right spirit within us’ is the real and only solution in human relationships. I’d hate to live in a world where I had only to press a button. If I had a job to do outside my home I’d be grateful for any help, but the world is largely made up of everyday folk like myself who have to weave their lives and jobs and efforts for home comfort into one whole pattern, and not only have bright tinselly bits all over but the solid yarn of service and the joy that comes from a job you have done in your own particular way. ‘Beauty’, ‘the Arts’ and ‘appreciation of literature’ etc. come after. They are the parts that show – the simple things the foundation.*

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DARKNESS AND LIGHT

  February–September 1946

  Saturday, 9 February. It was bright sunshine this morning, and when I looked out of the dining room window I saw a little flash of gold in the border and I put on my coat and went out to look at it – my first crocus – and beside it three frail snowdrops danced and nodded in the keen wind. The crab apple tree plainly shows tiny buds, and the rambler roses have had leaf buds for awhile. I felt as always the miracle of spring, of life from seeming death. All was quiet except for the crying gulls overhead. My little garden seemed a precious thing as I walked down the path, already in my mind’s eye seeing the colour and beauty of what will soon be. The stirring life shows in little weeds and tufts of grass in the crazy paving, the bulbs pushing through and that uplift of bare branches before the buds break through …

  Inside me I’m growing very old, and it’s as if I feel a ‘wide vision’, less tendency to worry and fret, to ‘tell God all about things’ rather than to pray. There’s a lot of truth in the old saying ‘It’s the happiest time of your life when your children are round your knees’. I feel I would have been a happier woman with a ‘long’ family, with young things still to love and cherish and not just a little mog of a cat, wise and kindly as he is. As I lay back in the chair tonight I felt a gr
eat sadness on me, not altogether flu after effects. I don’t like the blueish patches on my cheeks and lips if I have any exertion. I hope I am not going to have to step aside from any little I could do to help. There is so much to do and life slips so swiftly by.

  I tried to talk to my husband and tell him what was in my mind, but he only looked blankly at me. He said ‘I cannot see what you are worrying about. You have done more than anyone else I know. You should be glad when you can take things easy.’ I suppose he is right to a certain extent, but I feel torn in two sometimes when I think of the frightened, homeless people, of hopeless mothers with little hungry children, of homeless cold old ones. I feel I’ve a wailing wall in my heart. If I could only feel I was helping. I realise more and more the goodness of God when I was able to work steadily through the war, through the worry of Cliff’s illness, and the weary weeks when he was so out of joint with life. My husband said ‘You must start going to the pictures in an afternoon like other women’, but I feel when it’s warmer weather I’d sooner work in the garden than go to see pictures I’d no interest in. It’s alright if it’s a good picture, but we do seem to have had poor ones lately on the whole. Unless anyone was in the habit of going they would not have been attracted.

  Tuesday, 12 February. I had a little weep over Cliff’s letter today – a bright somewhat impersonal letter with the ‘sting in the last’ when he signed himself ‘Your wabbit’. The years rolled away and I recalled the first time I’d called him that. He was an infuriating baby, and my husband never had any patience with children. I was ill after a major operation and Cliff had grown really beyond them all, only good on the occasions he had been brought in the Hospital. That particular night the wild shrieks and my husband’s loud angry voice had distressed me terribly and I could not rise and go downstairs. I’d only been home a few days. Suddenly the bedroom door opened with a crash and a wildly yelling and kicking baby was hurled on my bed – poor lamb, he was only 19 months old – and my husband shouted ‘I can do nothing with the little devil. I feel like killing him.’ I reached down and patted my angry baby and said gently ‘He is not naughty, Daddy. He is only a tired little wabbit who wants to cuddle up to Mammy wabbit.’ He stopped roaring, looked a bit surprised, and then nodded as he crawled, slippers and dirty play overall, into my bed, and cuddled up. Later I drew his clothes off and he slept all night as he had first laid down and somehow I’d found the way to quieten his tantrums. I think he found things too much for him at times. As he grew up there was always a mood he had called ‘wabbitish’ and I always tried to plan a little outing or try and find his ‘worry’.

  Wednesday, 13 February. My husband and I had a little laugh when we recalled the time Cliff was born and I was so ill for weeks, unable to get my strength back at all. I had a queer eccentric doctor, who relieved other doctors and lived in one of the loveliest old houses I’ve seen, with a charming wife quite twenty years younger than he was and two clever children, one at Eton and the girl at Girton … He said [about Nella] ‘She should have champagne, oysters, beefsteak – tempting food. These nervous patients are the devil you know. Give me a person who likes to eat, every time.’ As I lived in the New Forest, had no pull with any tradesman or knew no one likely to be able to get any extras, we just dismissed the whole idea but out of his own cellar he brought all kinds of wine beside champagne! – and all kind of little dainties, crisp red apples and grapes from his own growing. He said ‘I like North Country folk – they always put up a good fight’, and then used to sit and tell me of his years as an Army surgeon … He had everything in life, but looked back wistfully to, and clearly enjoyed, his war work – and I never got a bill. He said when Cliff was so tiny ‘Oh, he will grow; we’ll make a soldier of him yet’, never realising how true his words would be.

  Norah’s husband, who had served in the Navy, was about to return from Australia, and the couple were to move into a house at 24 Ilkley Road.

  Friday, 15 February. Margaret came in for awhile. She seems to have lost a lot of her gaiety somehow – like most of us lately! Norah and Mrs Atkinson are cleaning Norah’s house up the street. They have got a shock to realise it might be months before Norah gets her furniture. She has not got her dockets yet and then there is often a wait of up to six months. None of us had realised that. Norah thought of being able to have all ready when Dick comes home at the end of March. My husband was busy book keeping and all was quiet. I’ve got out a piece of Jacobean embroidery I started before the war and had forgotten about. Its gay wools are cheerful to work with, but there is a great deal of counts in it and my hands tire of close stitching and holding the frame. I wish it had been a tray. I could do with a new one.

  Arthur and Edith are finding how tiresome it is to be waiting for builders to finish a house. They relied on their word it would be finished by the middle of February, and the roof tiles don’t seem to be on yet and then there will be a lot to do inside. The prefabs at Barrow are a laughing stock. If they are all like these in the country, there’s a deal of time being wasted. The plumbing arrangements which were supposed to be so simple that one man could assemble them and connect in eight hours have taken a man three weeks for the first one and he is still at it.

  Tuesday, 19 February. Everything seems to have conspired to irritate or worry me. No letter from Cliff to say whether he had yet got his washing, gramophone or his watch he should have received yesterday morning. I’d one phone call after another, two tedious people to pay bills, and my milk boiled over – all over the stove – and then to put the cap on things I put some garden rubbish on the fire my husband had left to blow over the rockery and set my chimney on fire! Luckily no policeman was about and the thick cloud of smoke blew away, but I got palpitations so bad I felt I’d choke and had to lie down. Luckily I’d got my casserole of mutton out of the weekend meat, leeks, celery and potatoes and had made the steamed date pudding yesterday so I’d only soup to heat and sauce to make. I sat and cleaned my bits of brass and silver so that tomorrow I could bake a cake and work with Mrs Cooper a little.

  I was down town for 1.30. I left my lunch dishes in water so as to have plenty of time to walk slowly to the bus stop. My hairdresser has another girl and is booked up for weeks except for odd appointments. No more perms can be ‘pushed in’ for three weeks. I said ‘It’s odd, after Xmas and so long before Easter. You are generally slack, aren’t you?’ She said ‘Yes, but don’t forget women are getting ready to meet demobbed husbands and many certainly need a perm. They have put off and put off, often if working, with not much time.’ The heat of the cubicle made me realise how much better it was to be first customer in the morning. I booked my usual appointment for Saturday morning week but had to take it at 10 o’clock instead of 9.

  This time I have needed house slippers for months and the ones I made have got completely done with wearing them so much lately, so I bought a new pair today, deep blue leather ones with a bit of black fur round, and at one time I’d have got better ones at Marks & Spencers for their ‘ceiling price’ of 4s 11d – and [now] paid 14s 9d and five coupons. The awful felt and cloth things for four coupons made me realise how valuable a coupon was when people would buy gay trash for 23s 9d if they could spare one wee coupon! All the fish had gone, but when I saw the huge cod heads and kipper boxes I felt I didn’t want either herring or coarse fish. I’d have liked a bit of plaice or a Dover sole. There was lots of sweet biscuits about, but I didn’t get any. I’ve only 14 points left after getting raisins, for most of my points go in tinned milk, beans and peas, cornflakes – since I’ve had a little with my Bemax† for breakfast and supper – and dried fruit. I was lucky enough to get a box of Braggs charcoal biscuits. I used to always have them if I ‘felt my tummy’. Little things like charcoal biscuits and rest after meals did more good than anything.

  I was glad to get back home, and I had a rest till teatime, glad indeed I had got in when I did for a shrill wind sprang up and brought heavy rain showers. I did cheese on toast for tea and there
was baked egg custard and bottled damsons, malt bread, whole meal bread and butter, honey and plain cake. There seems a lot of misunderstanding about the clothes coupons – amazing the people who think they are extra, not having listened properly to the broadcast. Even Mrs Atkinson had it wrong, saying what a ‘good help’ it would be, when underclothes are simply ‘fading away’. I wangled a few coupons off Cliff, thinking of Margaret, but before I could spend them – with being ill – he sent for his book back, but I told him I’d like a few later if he could spare them. I badly need a few new towels. Wartime ones have not the wear in them that the pre-war ones had, and perhaps the laundries don’t use the soap they did, relying more on chemicals which would rot fabric. Giving our Lakehead Laundries every credit due though, they have been marvellous. They are a big firm, travelling the outlying districts, but the van men and shop (receiving) people never leave them. Several have been [employed there] all my married life and it’s like the small business, which I prefer. I can tell there will be a pretty good change over of grocers and butchers when rationing cards are issued again. Due to general unrest and memory of wartime unfairness – often no fault of the shopkeepers – women seem to have reached the end of their patience and feel any change will be better than going on.

  The laundry service that Nella remarked on this day had been lauded several years before, in her DR for May 1939. ‘Here in this district’, she said, ‘we have the most wonderful laundry I’ve ever struck. It operates all over the Lake District from Carlisle to Ingleton in Yorkshire. Generally a monopoly makes for indifferent service but not in this case. Clothes are beautifully and carefully washed and there are three services to pick from. I choose the middle … They are washed as well as the first class but only flat ironed. At that the shirts etc. are better finished than high priced services in most laundries I’ve used in different parts of the country. By this service I find it cheaper to send the bulk of my wash rather than have a washerwoman.’