Nella Last's Peace

by Patricia Malcolmson

  Thursday, 25 December, Xmas Day. Not one carol have I heard today, except on the wireless. No bands or waits – the war seems to have killed all that. I thought it would have killed more Xmas customs, but this year fir trees decked with lights and crackers could be seen in most windows of the rather poor neighbourhood we walked through on our way home [after visiting her parents-in- law]. I was rather amused to see how many children had had clothes sent from Canada and America – long pants and blouse jackets and caps to match, in gay coloured cloth or corduroy. Margaret’s auntie in Canada sent a splendid parcel – hardly worn clothes of her well-to-do sons’ wives and out of her own wardrobe, a really lovely dress and good waterproof that fits Margaret, a costume Norah claimed, a dress for Mrs Atkinson and a coat that will make a good pinafore dress, and piles of good underwear. Apart from the coupon value, they were so well cut and made. Linda came in with Margaret and we talked interestedly of a small new block of flats – the first private buildings in Barrow to have concrete stairs and all floors. I should dislike that. I could not imagine any floor covering either lasting long on concrete or being at all comfortable. I had a letter from a Scots woman in Australia who has met Cliff – such a pleasant letter of her family – and who sounds an interesting person. My post came very ‘Xmasy’, for I had four letters.

  It’s often the way, if you look forward to anything you are disappointed. I felt indifferent about Xmas – ‘detached’ would be a better word – and yet I seem to have had a very pleasant one, and my husband is so uplifted about the car,* he is being quite pleasant about my little party on Saturday night – and when I got an invite to go to a party in Mrs Diss’s big new house in the Park on the 7th of January. The other night when we were down at his brother’s, Harry said, ‘Ah, Nell, we did have some jolly times, didn’t we? And you know you and Xmas are always associated together, for we never had any kind of Xmas fun till you married our Will. I remember the first time I saw you. You had a white fur muff and cap and your hair was so black and your eyes danced with fun. You seemed so strange in our dull gloomy house. Tell me, did you never regret marrying into such a dull family?’ Harry has at times been my one ally, when whatever I did or I said was condemned. I said, ‘No-o – not for the dull part, Harry, but it was a bit hard going when I felt your dad and mother were trying always to kill all the gaiety in me, and what was worse in my eyes, make my little boys “like other boys”.’ Harry said, ‘You should have been a businessman’s or soldier-traveller’s wife, you know. You have had a “wasted” life.’ He is not often talkative and I said, ‘We don’t really matter much individually, Harry. It’s the pattern on the carpet that matters, and I am beginning the home stretch, I think. I feel as if I see clearer the real values – of doing the things at hand, of liking the things we have rather than having the things we like.’ He smiled and said, ‘In other ways, polishing up the dark side.’

  When we came home my husband looked thoughtful and he said suddenly, ‘I’ve always tried to give you everything you wanted. You have a nice home, a car and all your own way in things.’ I half opened my mouth, but shut it firmly again. It’s Xmas, and we have been over the ground so often. I could have pointed out that it had been my own money that bought the car and the house! – that only sheer fright had made him buy the car in the first place, when I had heart trouble after an operation, and the house was bought after a serious talk by the doctor, who wanted to order me ‘a trip on a slow boat to Australia’, an odd but favourite prescription of his, which, he maintained, had ‘saved life and reason’ on several occasions! I felt Harry’s remarks had helped me about my little party, and I need not worry in any way. Tonight, too, when Linda and Margaret were in, he joined in talking and sat all the time they were in, never once looking at the clock or fidgeting. I feel girls like Margaret have such an advantage of those of my generation. We were ‘tweenties’ – between Victorian submission and today’s career girls, and if you were at all weak minded and passionately loved peace and a pleasant atmosphere, you tended to have individuality squashed somewhat.

  Wednesday, 31 December. I’ll remember this Hogmanay all right – it’s been a day. I felt conscious of my bones when I woke. I knew it was a cold raw morning before I got out of bed. I planned to tidy up thoroughly with vac and duster, and settle down to sew in the afternoon. I’d just finished breakfast – before washing up – and kneaded a batch of bread, when Mrs Atkinson came in, looking so drawn and tired, and as if she’s been crying. She said, ‘Be a pal and come and help me get Mamie ready for the ambulance. The doctor insists she goes into the hospital without delay.’ She had her breast off in Christie’s Hospital in Manchester, and when she was in, someone told her that her husband had to have a bladder operation, and she insisted on coming out, against every advice from doctors and nurses. At first she seemed all right, though she had ghastly wounds that would not heal. The last time I saw her was three weeks ago, when she brought Norah’s baby a little knitted coatee and bonnet, and she looked ill, and her husband looked as if he could hardly crawl round, for he had only come out of hospital. She said that she couldn’t sleep for the pain in her arm, shoulder and neck. Last night they sent for Mrs Atkinson and the doctor, who said firmly, ‘Hospital – I’ll be round at ten o’clock, when the ambulance will be there.’ Mrs Atkinson was tired and upset. I helped wash and change Mrs McLachan, get her few toilet things ready, shuddering to my soul case at the pitiful sight – her arm had swelled to a large alabaster-like limb and her neck was level with her shoulder, and she couldn’t speak plainly. Mrs Atkinson said the conditions had worsened while she watched in the night. The doctor gave her an injection before she was lifted on to the stretcher, but it didn’t seem to take well. He said, ‘One of you had better go in the ambulance’, and Mrs Atkinson looked pleadingly at me, so I went. I was asked to wait a few minutes and then went in to see her, in a side ward, put her toilet requirements handy and asked if there was anything needed, or any message to deliver. The sister shook her head and I saw her take screens and arrange them round the bed. I realised I’d no hat with me.

  Mrs Atkinson was so upset as she talked of her cousin and her troubled life – infant paralysis of their only child in America, where they had gone after the 1920 slump, an accident which resulted in a tumour in her husband’s head and all the illness and operations, the bitter struggle to get her son walking and to educate him and train him for a chiropodist. She cried so bitterly as she told me, and spoke of death as if it was a punishment and an end. I’ve noticed so often the same attitude to death and the hereafter in Christians, but do realise that any real orthodox Christian has little held out to make him otherwise – green pastures, ‘no more sea’ of St Paul, streets paved with gold, harps, angels forever singing, etc., so far removed from every human idea of bliss they could well be a punishment.

  I’d not washed my dishes, and left them while I hurriedly dusted, heated soup and fried sausage pats with a sliced potato and two sliced sweet apples, and I’d pudding enough. I felt all jumped up and only had pudding and later a cup of tea. I’d washed the crocks and was beginning the pans when Mrs Atkinson dashed in, shaking and white, and squealed, ‘What shall I do? The chimney is on fire.’ I said, ‘Well, what’ – and glanced through the kitchenette window and felt she had cause for upset – her tall chimney was the ‘stalk’ for a huge bunch of flames like flower petals. I said, ‘Did you shut the dining room door after you?’ and we ran in, and not a minute too soon as huge lumps of red hot charcoal, which the sweep tells us is the result of burning so much wood, plus the bad soft coal, rolled down the chimney, burned on the tiled hearth and would have been scattered all over the rug. We turned the rug over and fielded the red hot lumps as they fell. Our hands were scorched. We grew blacker and blacker. But gradually the loud roar lessened. A passer-by rang to say she had heard the chimney pot crack, and when we went outside we could see it plainly, as the red-hot lining of charred soot glowed through. It’s a very smoky chimney and this tall pot ha
d little ventilating louvres, and it helped keep the soot alight. We felt terrified that as the pot cooled it would snap and crash through the roof, and it would have been through the next-door roof where Jessie lives and who expects her baby early in January. I phoned my husband, asking him to get in touch with a builder, which he thought unlikely at three o’clock on Hogmanay, many of whom had already packed up if they lived out of town and planned to spend New Year at home. He promised to send a man and boy by to take the pot off anyway, so we felt we could leave it at that.

  We were black as two sweeps. I said, ‘I’ll put my immersion heater on and you can have a bath at our house’, and I suddenly said, ‘What caused such a blaze? You had hardly any fire in the grate.’ She said off-handedly, ‘Oh, I threw the fat out of my roasting tin on the fire.’ Words failed me. I thought of her everlasting dripping scrounge – she has had two whole tins of Australian dripping lately. I felt it greedy to keep it when I’d two or three on the shelf. I said, ‘You burned FAT’, and she nodded and said, ‘I had such a lot about with the goose and the beef.’

  I felt words failed me, but from now on I’ll hide my tins of dripping, or give them to someone with more sense. I let her have the first bath and I made up my fire and finished washing up. Mrs Howson came across and burst out laughing when I opened the door. She said, ‘I never saw you look as dirty and cross. I saw you in and out of Mrs Atkinson’s. Whatever caused the blaze? It’s a wonder the fire brigade wasn’t around, never mind the policeman.’Mrs Atkinson was coming downstairs and heard my reply. ‘Oh, Mrs Atkinson threw some fat on the fire.’ ‘FAT,’ squealed Mrs Howson, ‘on the FIRE.’ And I felt it let Mrs Atkinson see how her crime was looked on by another woman. Mrs Howson said, ‘If I’d known you had enough to spare to grease my baking tins I’d have been across.’ She said, ‘Go and have your bath and I’ll make you a cup of tea’, and Mrs Atkinson stayed.

  Hot baths are not for me. They either make me feel dizzy and faint, or else sick, but I was so very dirty and had to rub and scrub myself and perhaps stayed too long in the water, or it was my upsetting day. I felt ill as I dried myself and put on my dressing gown. Half dressed, I’d my cup of tea and then began a bad gastric attack. Mrs Howson got the table ready and I laid down with my blessed electric pad on my clay-cold tummy. Mrs Atkinson brought me some hot brandy and water. They both were scared. They hadn’t seen me ill before. By 5.30 I could crawl down, feeling like chewed string, shaking so I daren’t lift the kettle to brew tea, so my husband did, and cut the bread and butter when he came in. He had to have cheese and salad again, but he enjoyed it, and all the bits and bobs of cake, shortbread, jam, lemon cheese and Xmas cake Mrs Howson had put on the table. She came across later and was surprised to see me sewing – a bit less quickly, I felt I couldn’t care less. She said, ‘Are you sure you are all right? What are your lips like under that lipstick? You frightened me when you went so blue.’ By the nine o’clock news I felt I’d better get off to my bed, Hogmanay or no. I sent my little prayer winging into the Infinite Rhythm, with Big Ben strokes, no New Year resolutions in my heart. Each day begins a new year, each day we must begin again.

  * Two days before, Will had phoned Nella from work, for he ‘had just had word the ten-horse Morris he had ordered two years ago had come in!! We thought all hopes of it fled when the export drive was intensified.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BABIES

  January–June 1948

  Friday, 2 January. I looked with amazement at the slashing reductions in coats, dresses and suits – up to a third of the price – but, contrasting them with the ‘new look’ ones, they did look dated. I knew if I’d been buying I’d have not been tempted to buy out-of-date clothes and give up coupons. I am so lucky. I’ve no middle-aged spread and a dart each side of my corsets gives me a waist. I’ve a good hem on my costume and with dropping the skirt from the top to the bottom of my waist belt and putting on a velvet ribbon belt from a belt I have, I can lengthen my skirt to London length, and with my new dusty pink and altered best dress I feel quite up to date.

  Nella’s Spirella corsets were, she claimed on 11 December, 1947, ‘museum pieces’. She had only two and was frequently repairing them, so that by now they looked, she said on 11 January, 1948, ‘like a patchwork quilt’. Late in the following year she revisited this matter of scarcity – rubber was in short supply and was needed during the 1940s for ‘essential’ manufacturers, or those related to exports. ‘I met my Spirella corsetiere the other day,’ she wrote on 23 November 1949, ‘and she told me no doctors’ permits were to be given before an order of Spirellas. I bought two pair in January 1940, and none since. I thought I was a good advert for Spirellas, for I’ve worn them constantly, except for the hottest part of last summer when I turned out an older, thinner pair.’ Nella was advised that ‘it takes two to three months for delivery and they have been told a drastic cut may come again in spring. I need the under belt carefully measured and adjusted. Dr Miller advised it rather than another operation for “dropped” stomach.’(She probably suffered a prolapsed uterus after Cliff’s birth.)

  People seem to take their jobs so casually nowadays. Employers complain on every side, saying better pay, shorter hours, paid holidays and less and less interest taken – and more impudence given. I often hear little remarks about rude assistants. I’m lucky, for at all the shops I deal, there are such nice assistants. It’s a real pleasure to be served at my grocer’s and to hear the kindly patience they have with old ones, and men folk, having to do unaccustomed shopping and at a loss about coupons and points. As I sit quiet, the day’s events often flit through my mind. Little incidents and remarks come back. A woman I know was in the grocer’s. I asked after her son, away at sea, and as I left I said, ‘A Happy New Year, Mrs Jones.’ She said, ‘And to you, Mrs Last. It’s the first time this year I’ve heard anyone say that.’ And it suddenly came to me that I’d been the first to say Happy Xmas or New Year, and I thought of the greetings of other years, even war years, at Hospital Supply. We set our faces against drabness and clinging to old customs of happier days was one little gesture, even in the darkest days. I sighed as I thought the so-called peace was robbing us of things that war never did. I often look back on the war years personally and think of the exhilaration that filled my veins like potent wine, carrying me over rough places, helping me to laugh and joke however dim I felt inside, giving me courage to do whatever came along. Perhaps the curious loss of that exaltation of spirit makes me feel emptier and more dead than I otherwise would, feeling as if I’m beaten and tired out, that my bones master me when they ache so badly.

  My husband said tonight, ‘Get the garage floor cleared early in the morning for I’ll bring the new car home’, and I felt I couldn’t care less. I was ashamed of my lack of interest and excitement. I felt complete indifference whether we had a car at all! Anyway, I’ve very common tastes – I love buses. There’s such fun watching people and overhearing remarks and trying to picture what is behind them.

  ‘My husband brought the car home, looking as excited as a schoolboy,’ Nella wrote the next day. ‘I do hope his car worries are at an end. I pointed out he cannot blame a previous owner for faults and failings now, and that with care, this car should last as long as we need one.’ On Sunday the 4th they had tea at the Atkinsons. ‘Jessie Holme, Mrs Atkinson’s adjoining neighbour, and her husband were there, a very nice pleasant couple, who expect their first baby this month. I hope it’s the boy they both want, though she said when she looked at wee Ann’ – Norah’s baby – ‘“No one could help loving a baby, boy or girl.”’

  Monday, 5 January. Mrs Whittam wasn’t her bright self. She said Ena and Olga were getting her down. They spoke, but as acquaintances only, none of the old love and friendliness. I felt there was so little I could say, that saying about blood being thicker than water is a queer, misleading saying – who wants water to be thick anyway? And if people related turn, they can be bigger enemies and more bitter than any stranger. Ag
ain, Mrs Whittam, perhaps unconsciously, likes her sons better than her daughters, listening to their advice, etc., and that doesn’t make for peace. I tried to talk of old times in Canteen and Hospital Supply, but found I’d started another annoyance going – one of our members died suddenly two years ago this Xmas, and her husband married in less than a year and brought his wife to livenear Mrs Whittam. I felt really amused at her intolerance. I said, ‘It’s better so. If I died I’d like to pick a woman to look after my husband and care for him as I’d done. It would be dreadful for me to think he could be lost and lonely. You cannot live by the dead – they have gone beyond worry.’

  Tuesday, 6 January. We were at Mrs Diss’s party by soon after seven o’clock. The lovely big house was ablaze with lights, big fires in every grate, huge expensive gas fires in bedrooms and at the ends of the long rooms. Since I’d been in the house – when Cliff was small and for a while it was used as a massage electrical sun-ray place, and where my husband used to attend frequently – the Head of the Yard lived in it, and as always under those circumstances, money hadn’t been any object in any décor, electric or gas fitting, or improvement, and the carpets, at today’s prices, worth a king’s ransom. Mrs Diss bought all fittings and quite nine-tenths of the carpets, for the occupants were moving to a much smaller house. All heavy brocade curtains, door curtains, two huge folding Indian screens and several big fitments had been left – and not been priced at an exorbitant sum, for the Callenders and Disses were friends. Added to all the priceless cut glass, antique furniture, china, etc. of Mrs Diss and her mother, who has recently died, few houses today look so pre-war. I’d have loved a few of the Indian and Chinese carpets, and several pieces of cut glass, which I like better than silver or plate, but when I heard some of the women’s envy I realised there’s lots of gaps in make-up or perhaps my tastes are so simple – the only thing I really coveted was a Spanish bitch about eight months old. I half wished I’d accepted the proffered one at Xmas when Penny was such a nice dignified little lady, puzzled at the crowd, accepting it, and conquering her puppy shyness by an effort.