Nella Last's Peace

by Patricia Malcolmson

  Thursday, 31 July. I worked busily in the garden from six o’clock to nearly nine o’clock. I knew my husband’s love of fault-finding too well to expect praise for all my work, but Hell’s blue light, even I was not prepared for the list of my left-undones. I left him and went to water the rockery in the front, but he followed out nattering. I raised the watering can and said, ‘If you don’t go in this instant I’ll pour this water on you, you nasty, disagreeable little pest. You came home with a black dog on your back. Next Thursday I’ll consider going to the whist drive with Mrs Atkinson and leave you to it all and then it will be right.’ When I thought of Mr Atkinson getting up lettuce and salad and finishing the garden to wash it in time for when Mrs A. strolled in complaining how stuffy it had been in the whist room, I saw red. I must have looked as if I meant it. He held his tongue and did the lawn …

  I feel better in every way for my holiday, but strangely edgy – don’t know why. When the sun shines so bright, it’s not often I lose my patience so thoroughly with my husband. I generally think something has worried him at work, or he perhaps doesn’t feel well, but tonight I felt completely out of patience, realising well Cliff’s words once, ‘You don’t know what it’s like working with Daddy. No one ever pleases him and you wouldn’t care so much if he was very capable himself.’ I stalked upstairs to have a quick bath and came down to make supper, feeling my thin woollen dressing gown irksome. I could have wandered out into the garden in my nightdress, so loath to leave its sweet earthiness.

  Saturday, 2 August. I feel a sadness when I look at my husband. He was so different on holiday. I began to feel it had done him lasting good, but now he is back his little worries have piled up into an overwhelming flood. I often wish I was clever and could help do books and bills, but know in my heart, however clever I’d been, it wouldn’t have been really practical. No one could work with him. It’s best I’m good at cooking and housekeeping perhaps. Today as we sped along in silence to Morecambe I built a little dream – that we went to Australia and made a home for Cliff. I feel often so useless, so selfish; there’s so little to do in Barrow in the way of any voluntary work and it’s pounced on by women like myself who have learned the real joy of service and working together. If we could go to Australia, I could make a home where Cliff could bring his friends and work happily, and I know well, if my husband could potter in the sun, his health, mentally and physically, would be better. Some people need a certain amount of stimulus of routine, but others, as they get older, love best to just sit. It’s always a deep-seated worry in my mind, and rarely lifts for long.

  There was a constant stream of holiday traffic, and, to me, more huge transport lorries on the road than ever, and our narrow winding roads are not really suitable. Before long this question of roads will have to be really tackled – bypass roads through narrow country towns like Kendal and Ulverston. It’s a marvel how the huge industrial loads get through. I’ve seen loads from our Yard that must have only got over some bridges, under others, and round narrow awkward bends with inches to spare.

  Monday, 4 August. As long as I’ve memory, the 4th of August 1914 will stay in my mind. The shock when war came seems to always remain. In fact, I think the years make it stand out more clearly. And mankind never learns, and women bear and rear children unthinking of what lies ahead. Life has to be lived with courage, and then we have to pass on, but it grows more complicated and puzzling. It’s been a really wretched Bank Holiday, dull and overcast, with heavy showers.

  Tuesday, 5 August. I met Mrs Thompson, who was the Canteen manager. She is one of the unlovable type of Scot, and we often had little wrangles, but I felt sorry for the way she had been ignored in the winding up of Canteen. What bitches women can be, especially if they have snobbish daughter-of-a-bank-manger, wife-of-a-Rotary-member views like Mrs Diss, the head of the WVS, and Miss Willan, a retired school teacher who comes from Ulverston, that little town of snobs and worshippers of ‘the county’. I’ve come to a very catty conclusion about Rotary, if our town is any guide – super snobs, the lot of them, with a more feudal manner, a holier than thou, that is very at variance with its brotherhood policy. Mrs Thompson says they have wound up Canteen affairs in their own way, which puzzles me, for after all there would have to be auditors and she holds all the bills and several of the books. Her husband, an Admiralty man, is in poor health – he has ‘cardiac debility’, the result of war strains. She is still teaching and they plan to go to her people in New Zealand, who went out in a family of eight, and the parents, and who have all done well. She said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go out on the same boat?’ I thought, ‘Yes, if it was a very big one.’

  Sunday, 10 August. We were out before two o’clock and went to Arnside. It was scorching hot and a lot of people were there, mainly visitors. Scores of German POWs sauntered about, looking so happy and well kept now they can buy hair oil and blacking, light shirts – and ice cream. I looked at them, many such pleasant healthy lads, and thought if I’d to choose between them and 99 out of 100 Poles, I’d choose the German every time. I’m really getting a prejudice against the loutish, unmannered Poles who lounge in the buses, while women and old people stand, and walk three and four abreast on the pavement. Why don’t they either send them home or let them work? They slouch so aimlessly about as if with no hope – they are dying slowly. If there is a risk of what the Russians will do to them! – well, all life is a risk. They are men, and we have no right to spoon-feed anyone. What was once ‘Britain’s sheltering arm’ and so forth tends to be interference to a degree nowadays. I often wonder in a ‘maze’ why on earth we don’t get out of Palestine and leave Jew and Arab to batter each other instead of using our poor soldiers as ‘in between’.

  The tide slipped silently in, as it generally does in Morecambe Bay. Soon happy bathers were playing and swimming round. We had our tea, and left for home just before seven o’clock to travel slowly to be sure to be home for 8.30 to hear To Let. Somehow I felt as if I was part of Galsworthy’s ‘golden age’ tonight. I felt sun soaked, and the westerning sun still warmed the dining room and made for that feeling of well being when all is glowing and warm. The very music is a triumph, a mental magic carpet to carry me back, and the tempo of their lovely voices is perfection. I got my husband to carry a bucket of water for each of the little fruit trees and I watered my leeks and broccoli and the little rockery walls and rose trees at the top of the garden. All seems very dry and it looks set fair for a day or two.

  Wednesday, 13 August. Mrs Salisbury didn’t come. She said she might be having a day at Lancaster with her sister-in-law, so I began to do the bedroom. There was a ring and Mrs Whittam’s agitated voice begged me to come over early and give her a hand. She didn’t know where to turn. The harvesters had come two days before expected and Ena had been up all night with a cow that had developed mastitis and there were sandwiches to cut for eight of them working in the fields …

  What a mix-up and mess they were in, and Olga does get cranky. I persuaded her to take her little girl and Ena’s three children off to bathe. I simply couldn’t have done anything today with them all squabbling round me. Mrs Whittam and I make a grand pair – I love to plan and ‘boss’ someone round, she loves to be told exactly what to do – and then she works like two. She said I could do what I liked and there seemed lots to go at, so I said, ‘We will bake for two days and then it will help Ena tomorrow.’ Mrs Whittam looked after the coal oven. I got all ready. Two big tins full of date cookies, three of cheese scones, three of plain to have cheese between – Ena cut into a 12 lb cheese she had saved for harvest. I beat up a batch of dough for little crisp rolls, using new milk, made a four-pound gingerbread, two big tins of jam pasty and two of apple, and then the rolls were ready for the oven. A pleasant Jewish-looking POW came from the field to carry the big enamelled bucket of tea, and he took one side of the big basket of food with Mrs Whittam. We had washed crisp lettuce hearts and there was a bag of dead-ripe tomatoes and we didn’t forget to
put in a little box of salt.

  I took Ena some tea into the cowshed. She was so upset over the cow and the vet didn’t come. He had left pills yesterday and it seemed a bit better, but as I told Ena, she shouldn’t have let her drink. The POW came and I asked him to go gather an armful of marshmallow and we boiled it and laid big poultices on the cow’s swollen udder and we all helped to bathe her all over and put cold compresses on her poor hot head. They call the POW ‘Youbie’ or something like it. He had real kindness and patience with that cow. I said, ‘You should have been a vet’ and he said quietly, ‘I would have been by now if the war hadn’t come.’ He spoke very good English. I looked at his intent face as he bent over the cow and at his long sensitive hands, and felt I’d have liked to know all about him. Oddly enough he knew Gran’s way with mastitis in a cow. He prepared the marshmallow as I’d have done myself, and I could see he thought the cow had been neglected. Ena is slapdash. Kindheartedness is not enough with animals. As much common sense is required as with children. My husband called for me, and we sat on the seashore for a while, but I was tired out and I’d my potted meat to make.

  Saturday, 16 August. We didn’t have the news on last night, so it was seven o’clock when we heard the pitiful account of the trapped miners at Whitehaven. I felt sick at heart as I thought of those waiting wives and mothers. I was once in Whitehaven when there was a pit disaster. I’d gone with my father on business, and was only a little girl, but I can remember the hush over the little town and the waiting crowd of women. They rarely spoke. Many had shawls over their heads and their faces looked as if carved in ivory, and they strained towards the pit head …

  We had all windows, the windscreen and the top open, yet it was only when we were moving we felt it bearable. Harvesters, road menders, bikers and hikers and drivers of heavy lorries looked very un-English with only singlets and shorts – many only the latter. Their golden brown bodies gleamed with perspiration, but they looked as happy as I felt in the lovely sunshine. I never saw so many tramps. They shuffled along, the only overdressed people about, for most wore tattered overcoats and had heavy packs that could have been a makeshift tent on their backs.

  We went to Arnside, thinking to find it cool by the estuary, but it was very airless. We had tea. The ice cream made our simple meal very festive. Scores of POWs from the big camp nearby sauntered about or sat on the wall. I felt really happy for them, to see how getting a little money nowadays had turned them from sad sullen prisoners into ordinary citizens. Granted, this life-giving sun would lift up anyone’s spirits, but the gleaming oiled hair and polished shoes, light, open-necked shirts, and some odd looking white linen caps they had bought from some queer source, made them look usual in spite of coarse POW pants. Some had sunglasses, many ate ice cream – but it came to me suddenly that I rarely saw them smoking. A wide-mouthed lad with gleaming teeth and long sensitive hands sat near, so like my Cliff when he went overseas – even his burnt orange shirt made the likeness more plain. Cliff loved to feel different …

  My husband said suddenly, ‘This weather agrees with you – you look ten years younger.’ I laughed and said, ‘Only ten years – I feel as gay and light headed as a girl, and feel like buying a bathing suit and going swimming again!’ I feel my body is soaking up sunshine like blotting paper. Work is a pleasure, simple, well-cooked food a banquet. I feel it will build us up for winter and help us face any crisis.

  We wouldn’t have come home as early, but wanted to hear Churchill’s voice again. I’d a queer little sadness when I heard him. I felt he was worried and heart sick, and baffled when he had no authority to sound the clarion call as formerly. Bless him for his faith and courage that we will pull through. I share his concern about so many who want to go abroad, but what can we do? Youth is so fleeting. This generation has lost so much, and dear God they ask so little – just that chance to work and see something for their labours, a share in those simple good things in life in the way of food that the colonies offer. I’ve never yet heard anyone speak of making a fortune or of big wages, only the chance to get on.

  Nella was one of those who, in post-war grimness, often remembered Churchill fondly. ‘If only we had a leader like Churchill now, whoever he was,’ she wrote on 14 January 1947. ‘When I think of a tired, ageing woman, driving herself with a whip, always, as I had to, I remember that husky, rather stuttering voice acclaiming we would “fight on the beaches, on the streets”. I felt strong, my little hands with fingers that ached so badly, curved as if round a weapon. I felt my head rise as if galvanised and a feeling that “I’ll be there – count on me; I’ll not fail you.” That, looking back, was a bit comic, for I couldn’t have done much fighting.’ On 6 November 1946 she had recalled his ‘stirring, rousing speeches in the war’ and ‘feeling a surge of strength coming over the air, flooding not only the quiet room, but my tired body’. Later, on 5 August 1947, she thought of ‘the electrical feeling of expectancy when Churchill was announced as being on the air in wartime’. Her declaration on 23 October 1946 would have been widely shared: ‘What a grand leader he was in our darkest days – long may he be spared.’

  Sunday, 17 August. We met Jack Hunter’s sister and a friend by Derwent Water and, somewhat to my embarrassment, she insisted on telling me all about her divorce. At the time she was married I told her straight she was a fool. It was doomed from the start. She was a very nice but not very attractive girl, and it’s no use denying, but there’s a lack in the Hunter family and a downright taint in the kindly gentle German family of his mother which seem to make for idiot children and peculiar old maids. Jack is undeveloped somehow. He would never have married Isa if he had been ‘all there’, and the sisters seemed to have the same curious lack of judgement, and this one at thirty married a peevish-looking, sickly mother’s darling of nineteen! They met on a cruise. The Hunters have more money than they can spend, and I could just imagine how lavish they were. The lad was studying for an architect and was not fond of work – mentally he would no doubt be the elder. Her money and connections, plus her mothering for fifteen years, have made him a prosperous man, and they had a lovely home in Weston-super-Mare.

  She said today, ‘You said he would realise some day I was so much older and he did and then began mental cruelty that nearly drove me insane. He was always trying to get even with me for marrying him, shutting his eyes to the fact that it was my help and money that had made him.’ She let him keep it all and didn’t sue for alimony. Her kind stupid eyes, so like Jack’s in their puzzled bewilderment, blinked back the tears. She said, ‘I’ve only kept the name “Mrs Round”, and the few oddments of jewellery he bought me.’ I recalled that old Mrs Hunter had paid for the engagement ring. Luckily she has a good home, the grocery business of Jack’s to potter round in and draw a salary – it’s the dirtiest, most badly managed and run and most prosperous one in town or the outlying districts – and there will be more money when her mother dies. Now at forty-five, she can relax – not too much, I hope – she has put on two stones since she came last October. They all tend to put on fat, because of self-indulgence, but Jack has made a determined effort to reduce since they went to live in Ulverston.

  Isa has got her way at last – she has persuaded Jack to let her go back into business and has opened a little gown shop in Ulverston. I’m glad. It will keep her out of mischief anyway, and she always had a flair for clothes and made a success of the shop she had before she married. A thought struck me though. She will perhaps fall between two stools. The ‘county’ folk are inclined to stick to their own modishes and the country folk buy at old established shops, so that only leaves visitors and people who come to work – not a large source of custom. But I bet because she has no need to make a success of it that she does. It’s often like that.

  I’ve always said there is very small litter left about the Lakes. Today I saw that if you are litter minded you can ride in a Rolls or motor coach or tramp the roads. Few little streams are running into Thirlmere, and only one where
there was any coolness from its wetness or enough to bathe sticky hands. A very big car with four well-fed adults and a chauffeur were just pulling out, and I suggested we park a while. Thrown carelessly out, presumably from the car just left, were paper drinking cups, a small cardboard box which had had sandwiches in, two empty chocolate carton-boxes and crumpled paper napkins. A passing tramp paused shyly as if hoping there would be something he could pick up. I smiled and picked up the sandwich box, which had two in it, and said, ‘This box might be useful for you.’ He came across and we looked down at the litter and he shook his head and then picked all up, and said something about ‘being kept busy’, as if he held himself to be the salvage collector of that piece of road, but when I looked at his grubby, shabby appearance, I thought he had a finer ‘inside’ than the untidy ones.

  Monday, 18 August. Another lovely day. I seem to have packed in two days’ work! I decided to go down town shopping before it got too hot and put some clothes to soak, dusted round, and was down town by ten o’clock. I bought 4 lb tomatoes and 2 lb pears to bottle, left my grocery order and got fish bits, etc. The town seems full of strangers, and scantily dressed women and children in bright colours made such a happy note.

  I stood waiting for the bus and met an old Barrovian whose family and my father were connected with the railway when it was local and called the Furness Railway. He is staying at a nearby hotel and I’ve often chatted to him going down town or waiting for the bus. He seemed lonely, for he has spent his life abroad on tea plantations. He is older than I am. He married a friend of my father’s youngest sister, who was not ten years older than I am, and she died years ago and they never had a family. He has always asked after various relatives and friends – if my husband had been more sociable I’d have made him welcome and invited him round, but it’s no use denying the fact I’m giving up the struggle as regards visitors. The bridge was evidently up and buses delayed. Mr Jefferson suggested strolling on to the next stop. I remarked how I loved the sun, and how happy and well I felt in sunshine, spoke of when I lived down south and of envying Cliff in Australia – just talked idly as we strolled. He said something about me going back south to live, perhaps Devon, but I said if I made a change, I thought it might be Australia. I recall something about going for a long visit to Australia and coming back – ‘After all, you have your own life, and interests in England’ –and then I couldn’t believe my ears – he asked if I thought I could consider marrying him!!!