Nella Last's Peace

by Patricia Malcolmson

  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 down town for one 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 kerb 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 had 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 her husband 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.’

  Sunday, 30 March. Mrs Higham called in to tell me her mother-in- law was dead. I felt very glad – she has known no one for nearly a fortnight, and she was eighty-two or eighty-three, and Mrs Higham could not have kept on for much longer. She looks worn out. She will go to Liverpool tomorrow to make all arrangements for the funeral there on Monday. Gert, the sister-in-law, will be a problem. She is a very plain but conceited and touchy woman of over forty, always telling someone off. If she is wise, both for herself and her brother, she will keep on the house and get someone to live with her for company, but there again, no one could or would stand Gert for long!

  When Mrs Higham went I sat by the fire – my husband was reckoning up bills in the next room so I didn’t put on the wireless. I reflected how, looking back, I could see people have changed as much as fashion. Everyone asks more of life and that they should be let to work out things for themselves. When I was a girl, for a woman to live alone, even if she had money to do it, which was rare, it would have been quite unthinkable. When Aunt Sarah’s husband died and left her alone, both Aunt Eliza and my mother offered her a home, confidently thinking it was their duty to ‘poor Sarah’. When she calmly refused, there was shocked amazement, and questions how she possibly could. The situation was saved, after wrangling, by a bachelor cousin, whose sister died, going to live with her. People offered homes to old people and children left without parents, as a matter of course, never stopping to ask if it would upset their arrangements – and ‘fit in’ – and old people seemed to settle and make no fuss.

  Tuesday, 1 April. I feel sorry for Margaret, and these two last times she has been in have given me an insight into her wanting to get away from home. I thought it was merely restlessness, but she is unhappy at home. Her father hasn’t spoken to her for weeks – just ignores her. I said, ‘What did you do or say in the first place?’, but Margaret said she was really unable to say … She said, ‘It’s daft to say it, but I believe Dad was vexed with me when I peeled an orange and ate it in bits. He and Norah were sucking theirs and he said I was “la di ah”, and’ – she paused and blushed deeply – ‘he said I was trying to be a lady but I’d not catch Cliff that way.’ My nebulous dislike of Mr Atkinson crystallised. I felt at a loss for words, poor dear, for her own father to be so mean. I began to talk of Cliff, of his roving ways. Half seriously, half jokingly, I began to tell of the escapades – some of them – of Cliff’s great-uncle, who, I often reflect, he looks like resembling more and more, and sighed as I thought how match making had its good points. Margaret’s ‘hero worship’ would have been a greater happiness maker between them than any forthright qualities. I looked at Margaret, wishing more than ever she was my girl to love and make
happy. I won’t lose patience with her again, now I know the root of her unhappiness. It’s so easy to misjudge people, however we try to understand them.

  Wednesday, 2 April. Sometimes I feel there is a real jinx on us lately. Nothing goes right with my husband’s business, poor dear. He now is losing another apprentice, a lad of eighteen–nineteen, whose friend is going into the Army. He seems to think they can always be together if they both go into the Army together. My husband was going to get him exempted till he was twenty-one, but if he wants to go he cannot stop him. That makes three in a very short time – first Norman, then the Manx boy who went back to Douglas and now this one. It’s impossible to get a man, and big work beginning again, like shop alterations. I sighed as I looked at his poor worried face and wished I’d won the Irish Sweep!

  Thursday, 3 April. I had a very restless night. I turned things over and over in my mind, unable to forget how worried my husband was about Alec leaving. I decided I’d go and have a talk with his mother, so rose early, put potatoes in the pan with the stewed mutton and vegetables and left it on a low heat on the stove, feeling I just didn’t care about fuel restrictions. I’d bigger worries. Alec’s mother turned out to be a very nice woman and we knew each other by sight. I tactfully pointed out what a disadvantage it was to boys returning from the Services who had not finished serving their apprenticeship and how lucky Alec was to have the chance to finish his, and I told her my mistake with Cliff, when I let him over-rule me – leave school before he took his matric. I don’t think she had thought much about it. I could see my ideas were new. I told her what a promising boy he was and how my husband regretted his decision, and let it go at that, and went shopping …

  When my husband came in his face was radiant. He said, ‘Alec has been thinking it over, and has realised it would be better to finish his time when I can get exemption for him till then’, and he went on to say he had sent in the form for applicants for exemption for him straight away. I recognised in Alec’s mother an artfulness I always possessed dealing with my lads. I bet that Alec thinks it’s entirely his own idea, and unless it comes out any time that she and I had a little talk, it’s best forgotten. Men don’t like ‘managing’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘SUNSHINE IS LIFE TO ME’

  April–October 1947

  On 5 March, after weeks of the plodding grind of daily life, Nella had written glumly about her feelings, and perhaps her changing outlook:

  ‘Perhaps if this bitter cold would go, we would all recapture a little sense of humour. Tom Harrisson is right – no one laughs much now.* I feel as if I’ve hadlittle unnoticed grains of sand drop on my head – unnoticed till it’s a burden that is not easily shaken off. All my life, illness or trouble, shortage of money, moods and queerness, have never got me down. Doctors have remarked on my “amazing vitality”. I’ve always been welcome in company because I always had something to say. My company has been sought because I was always cheery. My “gift of laughter” was an asset, and my sense of humour at times deplorable. I calmly look back on what I feel was quite a gallant person, and realise what a contrast to the tired, resigned old aching bag of bones I am today. I always liked my quiet moments and circumstances tended to drive me in on myself, for my husband never takes much interest in things, and when the boys went, there was no one to argue with or talk things over. How at times I feel I’ve the makings of a real recluse growing in me. I never strive to get into company, and have settled down to the fact a social life for me is impossible, but the screamingly comic side of it all is that now I walk alone and never strive to alter things, my husband is less suited than when I was always fighting. Sometimes I feel I’d like a tiny cottage in the country amongst the hills I love, and quietly dream my life away. So little seems to matter really. Things break and grow old. However people plan, there’s something to turn plans away. I feel a deep abiding when I look at the quiet of hills and lakes, a quiet peace. Perhaps I’m low in health – I know I am. The lowered vitality makes me like this. I think of others who feel like me, and long again for something nice to happen.’

  Her spirits did in fact improve – and the summer of 1947 would prove to be as sunny and warm as the winter had been bitterly cold.

  Saturday, 12 April. I told Aunt Eliza I was thinking of going to Ireland for a week in June, and she was delighted to be asked to look after my husband’s lunch each day – and the cats. She told me neither of her daughters would let her have the run of everything – they have a curious way of locking everything away. Knowing they had little of value, I laughed, but Aunt Eliza reminded me of her husband’s odd secretive ways and said both girls took after him, making secrets when they had none ready made!

  No letter from Cliff. I wondered if the strikes at Melbourne could have anything to do with any delay. I’ll be glad when I get a letter. I sensed a feeling of Cliff being out of tune in his last letter.

  I packed a little tin of salmon, bread and butter, fruit bread and cake, and two flasks of tea, and we went to Kendal. We had the top off the car, and even then too warm, in our winter coats. The sunshine and the smell of newly turned earth with the sun on it and the happy faces of people who sauntered along or sat about was different from last weekend, and it seemed as if a golden breath had been on every hedgerow, field and wood. I never remember such a show of daffodils, celandines and coltsfoot, sprung as if by magic, for on Monday when we passed there was no sign of them. The ploughs were everywhere, and grain has been sown and harrowed, and lime and fertiliser being spread from little tippy carts. Kendal was full of country folk, come to market. I’m always fascinated by the types of faces, from patrician to serf, only the dress making them different from bygone ancestors. There is an old-world air of kindliness and leisure everywhere. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard a raucous voice, or one raised in anger, in either Kendal or Ulverston. I’d like a holiday in Kendal, and time to explore all its old courts and alleyways …

  Just as I picked up the local paper, Mrs Atkinson came in, asking me if I’d read the deaths. I was shocked to see that of a neighbour in a nearby road who had put her head in the gas oven. She is only forty-eight, and since the war, when her husband got a very good job – permanent – at a wine and spirits merchant’s, her daughter, a friend of Margaret’s, a good job too, and she went back to an office where she previously worked, the poor woman seemed really well off. She scorned women who like myself ‘worked for nothing’, and when her job finished when an ex-soldier came back she was unhappy, for she missed the company. Just before Easter I met her and she said how bored she was, and asked me how I filled in my time now WVS had packed up. I told her how I’d not felt too well and things took me longer to do, and confessed how I too missed the fun of working together, but she didn’t seem unduly despondent. Margaret went to a big twenty-first party of her daughter’s last week, and said Mrs Senior was jolly and gay. Perhaps a sudden brain storm came over the poor woman.

  Friday, 16 May. I got my permit to fly from Liverpool to Belfast today, so now I can really make plans. I feel so excited about going, especially when I’m going by air. It will cost about £7, I think, and then there will be little expenses. I took £10 out of the bank, after all. I’m not going to buy a new costume so my extra holiday is my own affair. When I felt the surge of joy run through my veins, I thought surprisedly that I’m not as old as I thought, that it’s rather the monotony of my life that tires and ages me.

  By Gad, if I won the Sweep my poor husband would get a shake up. I’d try anything once! I always drilled it into the boys it was all the things I hadn’t done and nothing I’d done that grieved me as I got older. Ill health, little nervy and giving way too easily about any little change all combined to make me walk sedately, but if I had the chance I know I still love travel and change as much as ever, and that dullness breeds dullness in me.

  Wednesday, 28 May. I’ve everything packed and ready except a few sandwiches and a flask of tea, for I will not be able to eat much breakfast an
d will be ready for a snack about ten o’clock. I’d had my bath before tea while Aunt Eliza boiled the kettle and set the table, and I rinsed my Celanese undies through and they dried in the warm air and will go in my case. Mrs Howson called in to tell me I had an invite to Manchester to some WVS meeting next Tuesday. I was sorry I’ll be away. I love a day out with them but it would be hot and tiring if it’s as warm as this. Shan We knows well there is something in the wind – he has never left me all day and been tiresome when he would take a running jump on my shoulder when he was not getting enough attention. I’m very glad Aunt Eliza will look in – he loves her. This time tomorrow I’ll be with Arthur and Edith, after all the looking forward for so long. My husband was quite nice tonight, but it doesn’t look as if he is going to give me anything towards my holiday. Never mind. What you don’t have you can do without, and if he is awkward, I can be too when we go to Scarborough. I’ll insist on having my housekeeping and buy something I need, to wear, and not let it go in the kitty. I felt annoyed when Mrs Atkinson said she wanted my pan to bottle rhubarb for herself and Norah. It looks as if she doesn’t intend to ever get one – and she could do it in her gas boiler quite well and do more at a time.

  Thursday, 29 May. I’m a lucky traveller and always meet nice people, and my whole journey to Liverpool Exchange was pleasant. A very nice RAF fellow, like myself a stranger to Liverpool, shared a taxi, I to Lime Street station and he to a medical school where he hoped to continue his studies, if passed by a Board. A bus picked up passengers to Speke airfield and I felt caught up in really pre-war courtesy and efficiency as everyone spoke so kindly and wanted to be of every assistance. I was one of four passengers going to Belfast, the other three being men. One young man about Arthur’s age was really a dear. He seemed to think I’d be nervous and showed me how to buckle my belt and sat beside me. I’d imagined a ‘whoop’ into the air, but we took off so quietly we were in the air before I realised, seemingly flying slowly, over cotton-wool clouds, with only a brief glimpse of the sea. Refreshments were served – coffee and sandwiches and cakes, which looked very nice – but I’d had tea and sandwiches while waiting at Lime Street. The air hostess came round to make sure we had our belts fastened as we were soon to land. I’d begun to read the paper and had a feeling ‘Now the unpleasant feeling would start’, but I saw the edge of the wings open as if in some kind of brake and we went down easier than going downhill in the car. Mr Graham, the nice young man, said, ‘Well, how did you feel?’ and I said, ‘Cheated – never got the least thrill.’