Garry does seem to have aroused conflicting feelings in Nella, for the following day she returned to praising him (although mainly because he had been a support to Will). ‘I’ve realised this week how much I owed Garry, how odd his ways and worshipping love for my husband; and the feeling if I went to the hairdresser’s or into shops, he wouldn’t be waiting tense and irritable. Instead, he would have been strolling in the sunshine – if any – with Garry on his lead.’
Wednesday, 31 August. I rose in a poor way. My husband had a wild nightmare. I’m often puzzled at his real terror that he has lost me and cannot find or reach me. In some queer way that particular fear has been worse since Arthur came for his holiday [earlier that month]. I was putting water into the birds’ bath when Mrs Atkinson called over to tell me a neighbour up the street had had to go to the Roose Hospital, where old or those really sick people are taken when nursing at home, for one reason or another, grows impossible. He has been a very hard drinker – a traveller for a local wine and spirit firm – and a very overbearing, dominating man since I’ve known him, about 20 years. We all feel torn for his second wife, a lot younger than he is, and they have a dreamy, gentle boy, thin as a lath, and like his mother, about worn out. That gave me a sadness, and added to my worry. I tidied, missing Mrs Salisbury, and made a cup of tea before we went down town. I needed shopping for myself and Mrs Atkinson before going to the chiropodist’s at 11 o’clock …
At 3.30 my husband began to wonder what we should do. I knew whatever I suggested would be wrong so I left him to make up his mind, and packed cheese sandwiches, flasks of tea and cake and agreed we should go to Lakeside and sit by the landing stages, watching the boats and Lake steamers. Only another fortnight and the steamers will cease to run. Two long special trains stood in the station. The last boats down were packed with hot, rather noisy people, who rushed to the waiting trains as if the guard had blown his whistle and they would be left. Such noise and bustle and hurry, and then the two packed trains drew out. The men on the steamer sluiced and scrubbed the decks, after the steamers had been manoeuvred into their place for the night. The row of parked cars, whose owners had been having tea in the hotel or cafes, thinned out till only four were left. Over the quiet, glass smooth Lake there seemed to be a wand waved. Slowly in the distance up the Lake, big sailed yachts appeared. From the near end, small ones glided, one with a scarlet sail, like a lovely flower as its image, mirrored in the still water. Looked like the other half of a wide petalled flower. Small youths from a YMCA came out in rowing boats, handling them surprisingly well. Fishermen appeared in skiffs and small boats and anchored, or at least stayed their oars, and began to fish. Peace and serenity ruled. The stress and bustle faded as if it had never been. We came home reluctantly, feeling we left little irritations behind. One of those still days that Walpole so loved about Keswick, and which he described so well.
While Nella’s most vivid writing was largely over by the mid 1950s, she actually continued with her diary until 24 February 1966, a little over two years before her death (Will survived her by a year). In 1959 she turned 70, and age was catching up on her. There were, though, moments of buoyancy. Earlier that year she had written in a way that both hearkened backwards, partly with satisfaction, and took a degree of pleasure in the present (which she no longer found so readily attainable). That morning she was eager to get a letter from Cliff in Australia, for which forewarning was likely to come from the latest dog in the Last household.
Saturday, 3 January, 1959. Such a queer little dog, as if he knows how important the postman is to me. He softly growls in his throat when the postman is on the other side of the road! This morning I’d given up hope of a letter, when Sandy ‘pointed’ like an old gun dog, softly growling. I looked out of the front window and sure enough the postman was going up the other side of the road, and it was over five minutes before he was at our door. Cliff sent a snap of his car and the welcome news he had got his Terylene curtains. He has my love of ‘luxury’, of good things, and gives them a care to last. His joy in his nylon dressing gown, and even more these ‘super curtains, Dearie, perfect from either inside or out, so beautifully, perfectly made’ etc … He made us laugh when he went on ‘I know you will be amused, but you are growing into someone between a fairy godmother and a clever craftsman’. As I said sadly to my husband, ‘Umph, one who cannot kick herself into cutting and making a simple dress for herself’. I went out feeling like the Queen of Spain, so glad Cliff had got his curtains and Xmas parcels.
It was biting cold. I got celery and extra leeks and we went into the covered market. My husband said ‘Do you see that odd looking couple over there? The woman looked hard at you as if going to speak. Do you know her?’ I shook my head as I looked at the really grotesque little fashion plate, far too plump for the skin tight, too short skirt, lovely girlish little fur coat, only just below the waist, and a really comic ‘wig’ hat in fine feathers, as she tottered shakily on stiletto heels. But as I drew alongside and she turned I recognised a wartime colleague who helped for a while in Canteen. Quite a good worker. She never let us forget her husband was ‘Admiralty’. She seized both my hands and gushed to the tall man at her side ‘This is Mrs Last, you’ve heard me talk so much about and her love of the Canteen cats, Bodger and Tiny Tim, who went on to a minesweeper.’ She lost her husband in the war, and married again, and her home for a while has been in Africa. Her husband had a slight accent, which I couldn’t place, but he looked a very nice, kindly man – or did I think so when from our short conversation he showed himself a cat lover! I knew his wife had had a colourful life from childhood. Her father was an Army officer, and she was born and lived the first few years of her life in India. Granted, she tended to exaggerations. I loved to hear her talk in Canteen. Her love of ‘colouring’ a narrative had extended to her war work in Canteen – well into a year, if my memory serves me right – but anyone could have been forgiven if they thought it was a round of gaiety. I reflected a little wistfully that we did laugh quite a lot at times.
EPILOGUE
Nella Last’s diary can be read on many levels, and perhaps each of her readers is attracted to her writing for different reasons. What are some of the features of her diary that give it such vitality?
First, Nella was a sensitive and shrewd observer of her society, and she had a way with words that allowed her to present memorable portraits of life around her. Some of these portraits were of noteworthy events – the launch of a ship, gatherings of men in uniform, a wedding, holidays outside Barrow, a suicide – and her thinking about these events sometimes sparked memories and ruminations. Nella had an eye for unusual happenings and unusual people, however ‘unusual’ might be construed, and she often allowed her reflections on these incidents and people to gallop off in unexpected and interesting directions. Her world was in many ways unremarkable, but she was able to bring zest to this everyday world – the squabbles in which she participated; conversations on the street or with a visitor in her sitting room or with Mrs Salisbury or at a wartime workplace; nagging frustrations and inconveniences; shared laughter; instances of personal tribulation or disappointment or tragedy. Hers was a small world, a world revolving around family, friends of her sons, neighbours and other women who like her worked as volunteers during the war, although we also see that she knew scores (perhaps hundreds) of Barrow’s residents by name, some of them from schooldays, and was able readily to recall their families’ circumstances from decades earlier. Strikingly, too, when Nella did remark on larger public affairs, her remarks were likely to be astute and clear-headed. While she was less prone than most people to comforting illusions about, for example, peace and prosperity, she did endorse very strongly measures for practical reform, such as the Beveridge Plan for the foundation of a welfare state, and she struggled to empathise both with former enemies and with peoples traditionally seen by white Britons as inferior (notably black people). Through her writing we get vivid sightings of a domestic culture being in certain
respects transformed, though on the whole fairly quietly, during the 1940s and early 1950s.
As well as observing the present, Nella also reflected on the past, and her memories – she owned to having a good memory – were usually precise and pointed, notably about everyday life in the early twentieth century. On 1 June 1953, the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II, she and Will ‘looped round rather a poor quarter on our way to the Library, small terrace houses mostly tenanted by men who work at the Iron and Steel Works’, and she compared the ‘few draggled streamers of flags’ on view, and the ugly ‘pieces of coloured plastic pennants’, with earlier celebrations she had observed. At ‘other Coronations – even when minor royalties came from time to time to open a big bridge over the Walney Channel, open the Technical School, etc. – some of the short drab streets were turned into a fairyland, beautifully decorated, with wooden trellises over the fronts of the houses, and fresh boughs, fern and flowers covering all.’ Her contrasts of past and present were sometimes nostalgic, at other times matter-of-fact. ‘In my younger days the whole attitude of sex was toward that of something that had to be conquered,’ she remarked in her reply to M-O’s July 1939 Directive, ‘something unnatural and unclean. I was married in ignorance and it was not until I’d had a baby that really the “full facts of life” were understood.’ On New Year’s Eve 1948 she recalled that ‘The last day of the old year used to be a busy one, with people coming in to “get out of debt and start the New Year well”. Now the superstition is dying or dead – few came today.’ She more than once recalled having been an intense, bookish, inquisitive child, and some of her most vivid memories were of the weeks she had spent as a girl at her grandmother’s farm. On 10 January 1956 she recalled her childhood role as a reader to others in this rural district. ‘I was a welcome guest as I reeled off poems learned at school or outlined the plots of books I read. Country children used to be taught to “go and read a chapter for old so and so” for so many old people never learned to read. I can remember the delight when I took David Copperfield and read every darned word by a peat fire with the wind howling and making some tall old trees groan.’
Nella was also an observer of herself, and her diary was a key outlet for self-exploration – and also for self-revelations that were probably rarely if ever disclosed anywhere else. One of these revelations concerned the tension, or at least contrast, between her inner self and her social persona. Others tended to see her as vivacious, energetic and cheerful; she commonly saw herself as drained, worried and prone to melancholy. On 10 December 1939 she tackled this issue head-on. ‘I wonder if there is such a thing as a really calm and serene person. People say to me that I’m “never rattled”, “always gay”, “don’t look on the black side”, etc. But I DO. Down inside me there is a black well in which such bogeys and demons of despair and depression live. I heap little stones on to the well-lid to keep them hidden. If I looked down into the well I’d see drowning men, harried starving women, and little children twisting in torturing gas, so I WILL NOT look. I would soon be having a nervous breakdown if I did not concentrate on something else, even if dollies or wax blossoms or collecting old clothes and newspapers or anything that I can think of that will either bring in money for wool or prevent waste. I feel such a hypocrite at times, though, when I realise what a pretence my “gaiety” really is, especially when Mrs Waite says “Little Last is a tonic”. I think it was St Paul who said “Only the heart knoweth its own bitterness” and perhaps everyone we see and mix with are different inside.’
Nella Last’s diary is testimony to the differences between life lived for and with others and life experienced only by the inner self. Up to the start of the war she had devoted herself to her sons and her husband and had not put herself centre-stage. She had paid a price for Will’s and his family’s lack of imagination and conventionality and their distaste for her ‘oddness’ – ‘I’ve always had people poking sharp fingers into my dreams and hopes’, she wrote on 2 May 1942. Still, she invariably took pains to be the model housewife, especially when it came to managing the household budget and preparing meals; and she worked hard not to fuel Will’s anxieties and to do what she could to accommodate and reassure him, which often meant concealing her own fears. The war, as we have seen, enlarged her world. Its work gave her a chance to be upbeat and buoyant on a larger stage and, in a sense, to drown her worries in busyness. She also found new outlets for her creativity – previously these outlets had been severely constrained – and thus enjoyed the satisfaction of being productive and doing good things for others, whether the POWs who benefited from the money brought in at the Red Cross Shop or the youngsters who (she hoped) would be pleased with her dollies. Her efforts, too, she knew, were part of a larger national purpose. After 1945 she had to cast about for other worthwhile things to do.
As for her diary, she seemed to have mixed feelings. On one occasion, 16 February 1941, she wrote that ‘It’s impossible for me to grasp that diaries and what people – people like me, for instance – think about things are much use.’ Still, she stuck to this daily writing with a degree of commitment – writing hundreds of hours every year, including her many letters – that is astounding. Despite frequently feeling worn out at bedtime, she could still toss off, as a rule, before turning off the lights, at least a thousand words of diary-writing. It is not clear exactly what this relentless composing meant to her. We might, perhaps, infer that she was fulfilling that ‘craving’ she had had in her youth to write books, an ideal that she always felt she was not clever enough to realise. Through this writing she did connect with others – she seemed to treat her diary as a sort of extended letter, with readers at MO as the recipients. She confessed in her diary to feelings that she could not reveal to the people in her life, and which were at times radically at odds with the self she showed to society. Thanks to Mass Observation’s archiving of this private writing, later generations are able to enter into her world and become engaged with the mind of a woman whose life was both ordinary and extraordinary, both commonplace and uncommon, and certainly creative well beyond her own modest ambitions.
GLOSSARY
A-A
anti-aircraft
AFS
Auxiliary Fire Service
Arab
someone wandering, unsettled (meaning Cliff)
ARP
Air Raid Precautions
ATS
Auxiliary Territorial Service
bad hat
a mischief-maker, an incorrigible scamp (often used playfully)
bags
loosely fitting trousers
bank (verb)
to build up a fire with a tightly packed fuel so that it burns slowly
bass bag
flat plaited bag
Bemax
vitamin supplement
Brannigan
a brawler
brindled
a tawny or brownish colour, especially in streaks
C3 man
An Army medical category indicating that a man was only suitable for non-combatant work at home
Cassandra
prophet of gloom
char
cleaning woman
chara
charabanc – a large open bus, often used for sightseeing
clippies
women bus conductors
conchies
conscientious objectors
coolth
coolness
crock up
break down
Darby and Joan club
social club for old people
Disprin
painkiller, sedative
doll-eyed
foolish, tasteless
dollies
stuffed dolls made from scraps of fabric
DR
Directive Response to a questionnaire from Mass-Observation
ENSA
Entertainments’ National Service Association
festa
festival, celebra
tion
flapdoodle
nonsense, absurd person
Glastonburys
boots
gormless
slow-witted, lacking sense
haysel
haymaking season, hay
Herries
family in Hugh Walpole’s historical fiction, set in the Lakes
hip-blouse
shirt designed to hang out
houris
beautiful virgins of the Muslim paradise
inaffectedly
without artifice
ITMA
It’s That Man Again, radio comedy programme, with Tommy Handley
jankers
punished with confinement/imprisonment
job lot
miscellaneous group of items bought together
keen
to lament
lumber sale
rummage sale
machined
worked on a sewing machine
maffick
to rejoice extravagantly
Mail
North-Western Daily Mail
Marshall Aid (Plan)
American financial assistance to Europe announced in 1947, implemented from 1948
matric
qualified for admission to university, college or polytechnic
The Diaries of Nella Last Page 49
