My husband needn’t have been so short today when I gave some POW all the sweets I had with me – they were mine. We had stopped to have a drink of tea out of a flask and two fair-haired lads – stupid ‘peasant’-faced children – came along. I let the window down and beckoned them and said ‘You boys like toffee?’ I felt a little twinge of real fear at the wolfish [look] in their eyes when they saw the handful of sweets I held out and, knowing boys, divided them equally. There was two coloured tinsel-wrapped chocolates – they were ‘Quality Street’ mixture – and the anxious look on one boy’s face till he got his would have drawn a rebuke of ‘Now, greedy’ from me when Cliff was small. I could only feel pity for the two grown children. They spoke quite fair English, but very slowly. I said ‘A Happy New Year, boys, and good luck’. They gave a funny little bob and one said ‘And to you, good madam’ I thought, till a little while after I realised it was ‘müdder’.
Gradually a feeling of pity rather than let-them-suffer towards POWs seems to be creeping into people’s attitude. Mrs Whittam is very kind to those at a nearby camp. They made rope slippers very skilfully and asked three packets of cigarettes for them, and Mrs Whittam gave everyone a pair for Xmas so that those poor lads could feel they were capable of earning something if it was only cigs! Yet at Canteen she was really bitter against all Germans, and very angry with me for the notion that there could be any good ones. What interests me is – nobody has a good word for the Poles and I never see anyone talking to them. Yet any I’ve had speak to me are quite nice friendly boys or men, and if our eyes have met and I’ve smiled they have seemed eager to return it. They walk about like shadows, rarely conversing, and the look in their eyes, sometimes of far horizons, grieves me sorely. Someone once said to me ‘Those Poles might have fought against us’, yet I know that same woman feels sorry for German and Italian POWs.
‘Today I was approached again by the Secretary of the Women’s Unionist Party, and asked to take the Chairmanship of a Ward’, Nella wrote on 3 January. ‘I held it for two years before the war, and did quite a bit of speaking, but always shied from a real political speech, feeling I was a sad “wobbler” and had no hard and fast conviction or the real bigotry necessary.’ Two weeks later, on 19 January, she said of this political overture ‘I don’t feel a good enough Tory to do it’. Later still, on 18 February, she allowed that the Labour government, which she usually criticised, ‘are trying to work to a goal, where no one will be hungry, and all will have work to do. I’ve a deep admiration for their ideals and aims. If I began to speak or work for the Conservatives, I feel I’d have just that sympathy to opponents that would make anything I said or did of little value.’ This sort of open-mindedness tended to moderate her Conservatism. ‘I’ve a fatal gift of seeing both sides of a question’, she confessed in a Directive Response from October/November 1948. Still, she was decidedly not on the left. ‘I’m a Conservative,’ Nella wrote on 18 October 1945, ‘or maybe a Liberal at heart, like Arthur says. Anyway, I’m not a Socialist.’
Nella’s sympathies were clearly with individualist rather than collectivist values: she wrote in her DR for October 1942 that ‘I’d rather live in a hut of my own than share a palace with others’. While she championed prudence and personal responsibility, disapproved of those who lacked foresight and was hostile to bureaucratic controls, she also possessed empathy for people stung by the misfortunes of life, and this sometimes steered her thinking leftwards. On 21 December 1948 her friend Mrs Newall said to her, ‘You crack on about being a Tory, but you are an out and out Socialist sometimes.’ This remark touched on Nella’s eclectic and flexible ideas about politics.
* * * * * *
‘What a day’, Nella wrote on 7 January 1947. ‘We woke to find all covered with snow and a cold wind that seemed to drive into the house and take all warmth away.’ The rigours of this exceptional, almost unrelenting winter persisted for weeks, with various consequences. On 18 January, en route to Spark Bridge, she noticed that ‘The flooded fields and meadows were pitiful. No dung spreading has been possible – the heaps either lay in islands or washed away. So little ploughing was possible last autumn and now, when the ground should be getting into shape, it’s under water.’ ‘Bitterly cold’ were the words she often used to describe a day’s weather. She kept only one fire going in her modern house, in the dining room; and she saw how her Aunt Sarah struggled to keep the cold at bay in her small cottage. ‘I shuddered to think of the squatters in the RAF huts over Walney’, she wrote on 29 January. ‘They could not keep fires day and night as the servicemen did – and still complain of cold and discomfort.’
These were grim weeks. Coal was in short supply – some women were routinely going to movie matinees in order to save on fuel – and from the second half of the month there were intermittent power cuts, which meant, among other things, that these cinemas closed. On 24 January, ‘When the laundry man brought my fortnightly parcel, he said “Go as slow as you can with laundry – if we don’t get more coal this week we will have to close down”.’ On 29 January Nella found that ‘water spilled outside glazes into ice almost at once, and when Mrs Salisbury [home helper] was doing the step, her cloth kept freezing to it!’ It was all rather dispiriting. ‘It seems as if Nature herself is part of the out-of-joint tenure of our lives’, she wrote on 6 February. ‘When blinding snow was swirling down yesterday afternoon’, observed the North-Western Evening Mail on 10 February, ‘Barrow Park resembled a scene in Switzerland’ and ‘tobogganing was in full swing’.
Friday, 7 February. The cold has been arctic – glassy roads and a bitter south-east wind that swept through unexpected crevices and doors. The screaming gulls fought over my boiled vegetable scraps and wheeled and swept overhead all day, and the starlings, tits, thrushes, blackbirds and robins fought over the sheep’s head bones I threw on to the lawn. I felt I’d no clothes on under my cotton overall. My wretched bones felt they creaked and my hands swelled with the pain when they got chilled. I was thankful I could stay indoors … The news of the cuts in electricity was a shock. I thought of the poor people who were in all electric houses or flats. As it is it will mean cinemas, hairdressers and many confectioners at a standstill in the day, and be a problem to housewives with only an electric stove for cooking.
The next day her husband joked about her fondness for making plans, saying ‘“You should have been married to Shinwell. You would have seen he never landed us in this mess. Your love of planning would have been of some use there.”’ (Emanuel Shinwell was Minister of Fuel and Power.)
Almost every day this month was a struggle – a struggle to keep warm (often not possible), to prepare food, to keep the pipes from freezing, to get out and about. (Nella was house-bound most of the time.) People’s spirits were low, their energy was sapped and physical complaints were commonplace.
Wednesday, 26 February. It was a very wild night and I heard the heavy swish of snow, but I wasn’t prepared to see it as high as the front palings. I always bring in the garden spade and the stiff brush I use for the paths if it looks like snow, so my husband dug himself out to the middle of the road where it wasn’t so bad and then got a bus to work. The snow plough had been out all night so men could get to work all right. I was surprised when Mrs Salisbury arrived, all bundled up in scarves and a big coat. I said ‘I hardly expected you this morning’. She scowled from under her ragged scarf and said ‘I nearly didn’t set off and then I thought “she’ll only try and shift this bloody snow and make herself bad” and I thought how good you always were to me’, and she grabbed the spade and brush and went snow clearing. I went on working inside and she stayed for lunch before going on to another place.
Saturday, 1 March. My husband had to go to Ulverston and we decided to go on to have a look at frozen Windermere, if the roads were not too bad. We felt a queer awe at the steel grey sheet that was the friendly rippling Lake of summer – it looked austere and remote. The sun was smiling behind a shoulder of a hill, and its slanting rays seemed to
lick out every shorn hillside, every ugly gaping gully where trees had been dragged to the road. There was not a sound anywhere. An awful stillness seemed on everything and that queer atavistic desolation gripped me. I felt I wanted to lift my voice in a wild ‘keen’, if only to break the silence. We seemed the only living and moving things left on the earth. I felt thankful to leave the unfamiliar scene. The hills around were patched rather than crowned with snow. The fields were white instead of freshly ploughed as they should have been by March, and heaps of dung stood frozen and useless. I wonder if it will mean a bad crop and harvest, with so late a season. Heavy sullen clouds rolled in from the sea, looking as if we would have more snow, and we were glad to get home to a fire and our tea, with the table drawn close to it.
Friday, 7 March. The blizzard reached us last night and we woke to find all snowed up. While my husband dug a way out, I rose in my dressing gown and hurriedly packed soup in a jar for him to heat at the shop, and made beef roll sandwiches for him. I opened the door and passed out the milk bottle to put on the window sill ‘in hopes’. Shan We seemed to lose his head – he took a header into the deep snow and disappeared, except for the tip of his brown tail. I leaned forward and heaved and we both fell backward into the hall, bringing a pile of snow. The cross-eyed look of reproach he gave me and the anxious look he gave his tail, as if surprised to find it still on, nearly sent me into hysterics of laughter – helped by the same ‘Why should this happen to me?’ look on my husband’s face as he shovelled snow. He said ‘I don’t see there’s anything to laugh at’, but as I said, he wasn’t standing where I was! Snow ploughs kept the bus routes open but two cars were stranded in our short road. I was surprised when the Co-op lorry came but the driver asked to phone for a motorised lorry to come as it was too much for the horse. Poor beast, he was getting snowed up, and I persuaded the driver to unyoke him and bring him into the comparative shelter of our path. He had a tarpaulin over his back but I offered the kitchenette matting to cover his neck and head a little, and Mrs Atkinson and I fed him bread and apples. He was a nice old ‘spoiled’ horse – he raised his shaggy hoof to shake hands. I made tea for the driver and boy and Mrs Atkinson and I had ours, and later the lorry driver.
Friday, 14 March. More snow, to add to the piles of frozen snow on the roads. I rose feeling tired to begin the day. I’d not slept very well. I gave all a general tidy and dust, cleaned silver and brass oddments, and took the worst of the snow off the front paths and had an early lunch. The sun shone brightly and I was downtown for 1 o’clock, to keep an appointment at the hairdresser’s. The roads were a horror of slush and melting snow. It poured off roofs where gutters and spouts were still cracked and broken after 1940’s bad winter, and queues of women stood nearby on the curb to escape the dripping eaves. That meant passers-by had either to walk under the drips or step down into the flooded gutters. I didn’t bother. I’d Wellingtons on so just splashed along, but women with only low shoes on complained to a passing policeman. The women in the queue lost their tempers and everyone shouted angrily. I thought the policeman acted really well. He said ‘Now, now ladies, it’s not my fault the gutter leaks or the sausage and black pudding is late, but you cannot expect to have these others ladies get wet – now can you?’ If he had taken a high hand, I felt the angry women would have been capable of rolling him in the slush and snow.
It was only after the middle of March that the harsh wintry weather retreated. However, flooding presented new perils; some land was under water, and many farmers were struggling to contain the damage. ‘Townspeople cannot realise the devastation of floods that take off good top soil and utterly ruin rich pasture and crop land’, Nella wrote on 22 March. ‘My husband’s insistence it’s the atom bomb that has caused the dreadful winter makes us at times wonder.’ In the evening on 28 March she and Will drove to Spark Bridge. ‘It’s pitiful to hear of small farmers I know well, who have lost over 100 sheep and lambs, and one young fellow who built a little house on a hillside had to take his children to a barn higher up, as the snow, melting, washed through their home like a river.’
* * * * * *
With the arrival of spring and summer, Nella’s spirits improved. There were enjoyable holidays – a week in Belfast (she went on her own and by plane), a fortnight in Scarborough in July – and the summer of 1947 was as sunny and warm as the winter had been bitterly cold.
Sunday, 22 June. We set off to Silecroft, at the foot of Black Combe. The hot sun after the shower of rain brought out the scent of new cut hay, honeysuckle and clover till the air was drugged with sweetness and the larks seemed singing in competition, so sweet and shrill they sounded. The sea rolled up with little waves, flopping on the shore. Bathers and happy paddling children were everywhere. A lot of German POWs strolled about, a surprising number on their own and quite plainly letting any of their countrymen know they preferred it that way. I never saw such a mixed lot, a number had such brutish faces. I felt they were the type that would look on at the Belsen camp, so utterly insensate their expressions, their huge outstanding ears and flat backed heads making them look subhuman. Yet amongst the group were men who looked like musicians, thinkers, scholars – and aimless boyhood. One, perhaps on a farm, had a working dog with him and I bet it had never known such fondling and affection. They sat in deep content, looking out to sea. They were better dressed – in dyed service clothes, but quite good fitting – and only a few had small POW patches stitched on. A number had jungle jerseys on. I thought of the WVS who had patiently put on the shoulder patches, never thinking Germans would wear them. It brought back Hospital Supply days, now so long ago. Our work and effort seem only a dream that has faded. So too has my family dream – that I had little happy boys around me. I’ve often longed for Arthur and Edith near, but a growing suspicion makes me feel it would never bring happiness to either Edith or I, unless Edith has children of her own. She will grow very jealous. I’ve always tried so hard to make her feel a daughter, but I fear she would get the music hall idea of a mother-in-law and resent Arthur’s deep love for me.
Thursday, 26 June. Mrs Higham had been down to the Social and Moral Welfare this morning and was a bit downcast. She spoke of two ‘wasted’ young lives and blamed mothers going out to work and their not having a home life. She is like me and bigoted about the importance of home and mother for young things. The curate came. He is so deaf he wears an ear appliance and has odd mincing ways and affectations. I looked at him as he girled and gushed, with the feeling I could ‘throw up’, and when he said ‘What is the matter with dear Mrs Last?’ I could have leapt in the air. I felt he was the answer to ‘Why Christianity has failed’. Thank goodness he didn’t stay long. I shuddered to think he was going to a living of his own shortly. He is called ‘little Tom’ in the parish. I prefer dignity and someone to respect. I looked at him and thought of the dignity and reserve of my two cats! When he had gone, we talked of the lost dignity of the clergy, wondering if the ‘jolly good fellow’ attitude had been the cause of a lot of the casualness of today. Mrs Higham always causes a little resentment in me when she insists I am a Christian. I say ‘I’m not, you know, and haven’t been since I was a girl of 12–14’, but again today she said ‘Nonsense – you are one of the best Christians I know’, and went on to talk of our war years together and said ‘Only a Christian could have said that – or done so and so’, as if conduct depended on any creed.
Wednesday, 2 July. I went down town for some cat bits, the last I’ll be buying for some time, and then went on to Walney. Talk about salons and witty and interesting talk in them – I’d back Ena Whittam’s tatty untidy kitchen against any. If it’s not politics – Ena is Secretary of the Women’s Unionist branch for Walney – it’s a discussion on clothes or domestic economy, and there is always her sister and several friends drifting in, and Wednesday afternoon, when they expect me, seems their At Home day. I was later today and found them deeply discussing of all things – Lesbianism! I sat and laughed and my amusement and my �
��Well, well, and all respectable married women’ didn’t offend them. Maisie, one of Olga’s friends, had had a book on sex sent from America, and a chapter was given up to the subject. I could add little knowledge, beyond knowing several ‘kinkies’ and having a strong suspicion of a few more. Maisie spoke of a ‘somewhat unhealthy curiosity about private parts’ – she is a solemn eyed little mother of two children and her husband is even more solemn and is a Youth Club Head – paid post. She said ‘I don’t quite see why you laugh, Mrs Last. It’s a very serious subject.’ And when I said ‘So are the Pyramids’ she stared. I could tell she thought it a phase of modern times. I thought of the utter ignorance of my young days, and the horror there would have been if such subjects had been discussed openly. I thought how much better it was nowadays when curiosity was not a crime.
Sunday, 27 July. After the 9 o’clock news we went and picked the raspberries that had ripened and I got a 1 lb jar and ½ lb jar filled and covered with sugar syrup to sterilise tomorrow. I felt I didn’t want to leave my quiet fragrant garden to come to bed, and my little Shan We felt the same. He had been out with me, but plainly showed he loved the cool grass to roll on and the mystery of shrub and bush to play his own little games of hide and seek. The evening seemed to carry on the sweet nostalgic memories called up by the lovely music and opening tune of To Let.* Were Edwardian summers warmer, times more gracious, or only so in memory? To each his own.
My earliest Victorian memories are of being a somewhat spoilt crippled child, of plump women who seemed to jingle with what they termed bugle trimming, a vague smell of caraway seed, quite a few parrots at different houses where we went – how I hated and feared them, dear knows why – of lots of men with beards, of flannel petticoats and the weirdest washday articles on the line, too much to eat, and horrendous stiffly starched pinafores which were a stern test of a little girl’s niceness in keeping them clean. I was nice once for quite a while, till my horrified mother found out I was leaving it folded on a shelf in the pantry as I went to school, and donning it as I came in. Perhaps the fact I could walk without a crutch when I was 11, began to go off on business trips with my father when I was twelve – five years or so after Queen Victoria’s death [Nella was actually eleven when Victoria died, in 1901] – made for a ‘lightsome’ outlook, a quickened interest in life. The hoof beats in The Forsyte Saga, the perfect, perfect productions of a land where it was always summer thrill and hold me as nothing ever before on the BBC. Did fires burn more brightly, people always sing sweetly old ballads when asked out for the evening? Were the new fangled Viennese bands that were brought from London to big garden parties in the country so very good? Were there so many raspberries, damp fragrant mushrooms, juicy blackberries – and so many wild sweet chestnut and walnut trees? And do children now ever discover the rows of Dickens, Thackeray, Dumas, Harrison Ainsworth, Scott or Bronté on the higher shelves of the bookcases?
The Diaries of Nella Last Page 35
