Nella Last's Peace Read online

  NELLA LAST’S PEACE

  Robert Malcolmson is Professor Emeritus of history at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Patricia Malcolmson is a historian and a former executive in the Ontario public service. They live in Cobourg, Ontario.

  The Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex holds the papers of the British social research organisation Mass Observation. The papers from the original phase cover the years 1937 until the early 1950s and provide an especially rich historical resource on civilian life during the Second World War. New collections relating to everyday life in the UK in the 20th and 21st century have been added to the original collection since the Archive was established at Sussex in 1970.

  PRAISE FOR Nella Last’s Peace

  ‘Anyone who imagines there couldn’t be any drama in Nella’s diaries because the war was over would be gravely mistaken.

  I found myself captivated – whether smiling or holding my breath in anticipation. What a treat.’ Margaret Forster

  ‘A vivid, intimate account of austerity Britain. Superb.’

  David Kynaston

  ‘Compassionate, gossipy and observant ... She is brave, lovable and a born writer.’ Virginia Nicholson

  ‘Nella’s eye for detail and penetrating interest in the people around her make her diary a social document of extraordinary interest and value.’ D. J. Taylor

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  Nella Last’s War

  The Second World War diaries of Housewife, 49

  ‘I relished it … her personality is so powerful … There are so many things to admire about her’ Margaret Forster

  ‘A classic of wartime literature … highly engaging, very moving. All Home Front life is here, especially the kitchen sink’ Simon Garfield

  NELLA LAST’S PEACE

  The post-war diaries of Housewife, 49

  Edited by

  PATRICIA AND ROBERT MALCOLMSON

  Published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  Exmouth Market

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Mass Observation material © Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive

  Nella Last’s Peace, selections and editorial matter © Patricia and Robert Malcolmson, 2008

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Typeset in Garamond 3 by MacGuru Ltd

  [email protected]

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN: 978-1-84765-127-3

  This book is printed on FSC certified paper

  The editors and publishers would like to thank the following for their kind permission to reproduce the photographs: 1,2, 7, 13, courtesy of Margaret Procter and Norah Redhead; 3, 4, 5, 6, courtesy of Peter Last; 8 courtesy of Cumbria Record Office and Local Studies Library Barrow; 9, courtesy of the National Archives (INF9/193); 10, 11, 12 with permission of the North West Evening Mail.

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Introduction

  The Setting: Barrow-in-Furness

  Nella Last’s Family, Friends, Neighbours and Associates

  CHAPTER ONE Endings: August–October 1945

  CHAPTER TWO A Sort of Peace: October 1945–January 1946

  CHAPTER THREE ‘Nice to be Loved’: January–May 1946

  CHAPTER FOUR Post-war Summer: June–September 1946

  CHAPTER FIVE Stresses and Storms: October 1946–April 1947

  CHAPTER SIX ‘Sunshine is Life to Me’: April–October 1947

  CHAPTER SEVEN ‘I Can be Real Bitchy’: October–December 1947

  CHAPTER EIGHT Babies: January–June 1948

  CHAPTER NINE Close-Ups: June–December 1948

  Afterword

  Glossary and Abbreviations

  Money and Its Value

  Chronology

  Editing Nella Last’s Diary

  Mass Observation

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘Supposing I’d been clever, there could have been a few books.’

  Nella Last, 17 September, 1947

  Nella Last was a dedicated writer whom few knew to be a writer. Her immediate family knew, though they had little if any knowledge of what she wrote about, except in the letters she sent. Her next-door neighbours, the Atkinsons, were also aware that she liked to write, partly because every Friday morning, on his way to work, Mr Atkinson often dropped off at the post office a package containing the diary she wrote for Mass Observation, the social research organisation set up in 1937 to foster a ‘science of ourselves’. Mass Observation encouraged its hundreds of volunteers to write in detail about everyday life (this was then a novelty), and about how these incidents, routines and even intimacies were experienced by the Observer.

  Almost nothing Nella Last wrote was published in her lifetime. Aside from a handful of people associated with Mass Observation, no one read her diary until the 1980s. And yet it is a remarkable piece of work. Not only is it, almost certainly, one of the longest diaries in the English language – so vast that no one has read it all from start to finish – it is also a diary of quality, for Nella was sensitive, observant, imaginative and often acutely introspective, and she poured herself into her daily writing with a disciplined persistence, over close to thirty years, that few diarists have matched.

  Nella Last started to write for Mass Observation in late August 1939. Her wartime diary, Nella Last’s War, edited by Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming, was published first in 1981 and republished in 2006, and the book has been the inspiration for an acclaimed television drama, Housewife, 49 (the ‘49’ referring to her age when the diary began). But the war did not see the end of her writing for Mass Observation – commonly known as MO. She continued to write for the organisation, and during the three and a half years between the middle of 1945 and the end of 1948 she wrote perhaps a million and a quarter words. Her post-war writing as presented in this book is a little less than a tenth of her original handwritten diary, which is held in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex and is open to the public. So, like Nella Last’s War, this post-war volume is highly selective. Nella also responded to most of MO’s questionnaires, known as Directives, which were sent out monthly to its volunteer Observers from 1939 to 1945 and less regularly thereafter.

  We have chosen to highlight, broadly, four features of Nella’s diary: passages where she revealed something of her private outlooks, opinions and emotions; where she wrote about personal relations, notably those with her husband, who had his own joinery business, and with her two adult sons; where she ruminated on her own life and family history; and occasions when she described matters of public life – action in the streets, conversations overheard and participated in, commercial transactions, transportation and travel, rumours and gossip and scandal. It is our desire to allow a life story to unfold – a story played out in those unheroic post-war years of soul-searching and privation, but of hope and satisfaction as well. ‘If the historians could see clearly enough,’ Nella wrote on 30 July 1947, ‘this could well be called the age of frustration. People seem to have such unnecessary worries and setbacks, and after all, for o
rdinary people, it’s the little things that count, whether for good or ill.’

  THE SETING:

  BARROW-IN-FURNES

  Barrow-in-Furness was, as Nella and others remarked, ‘a young town’. From virtual non-existence (only a few dozen families lived there before the 1840s), it grew dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its population peaked at almost 75,000 in the early 1920s; in the later 1940s Barrovians numbered around 67,000. It was very much a centre of heavy industry – ‘Barrow is a working class town, with no “society” really,’ Nella observed in late 1948.

  Barrow had sprung to life in the mid nineteenth century with the construction of the railways. Iron and steel led the way; later shipbuilding predominated – this was very much the town’s leading industry in the 1940s. Barrow ‘is late enough to be well planned,’ observed one writer in 1940, ‘and its cleanliness shows a high degree of civic pride on the part of the inhabitants’. The town offered little in the way of antiquities or scenery, and ‘most of the town’s visitors must come for the sake of the famous shipyards’.* When Nella wrote of the ‘Yard’, this is what she was referring to. Geographically Barrow was decidedly isolated and detached from the rest of the county – it was then in Lancashire rather than in Cumbria – and surrounded by sea except to the north, where the Lake District was close and reasonably accessible, especially for those who had a car, as the Lasts did.

  Nella’s modern semi-detached house, built in 1936, was on an estate towards the then northern outskirts of Barrow, much of which had been constructed in the 1930s. Ilkley Road, where she lived, runs north-west off Abbey Road, the main artery that led and still leads from the north in Barrow southward to the centre of town. When Nella spoke of going down town, a little over a mile from her home, she meant she had travelled or planned to travel, usually by bus, south-west on Abbey Road to the town’s centre, where most of the main shops and services were located. The houses on Ilkley Road and nearby are mainly two-storeyed and semi-detached, with a sitting room at the front and dining room and kitchen at the back, three bedrooms above and usually an ample garden. ‘This is an exceptionally nice neighbourhood to live in,’ Nella wrote in response to MO’s September 1947 Directive. ‘I’ve been here eleven years and it was a few years old and our four houses the last to be built. We came in September and I was surprised to have strangers coming with flowers and roots and rockery plants they had split and which they thought would help establish my garden.’ The Lasts’ house was exceptional in having an attached garage, which could be entered from the house as well as from outside; and theirs was one of the few homes on Ilkley Road with a telephone.

  * Doreen Wallace, English Lakeland (London: Batsford, 1940), p. 47.

  NELA LAST’S FAMILY,

  FRIENDS,

  NEIGHBO URS AND

  ASSOC IATES

  CHAPTER ONE

  ENDINGS

  August–October 1945

  With war winding down in the spring and summer of 1945, Nella Last often reflected on the changes, many of them dramatic and troubling, that the world was undergoing – the devastation on the Continent, the plight of refugees, the dislocations of so many lives, the dropping of two atomic bombs – and the changes that she and others might expect with the arrival of peace. She was anxious about the challenges of adapting to a post-war existence. She worried about her sons, Arthur and Cliff, the latter still in the Army, the former employed as a civil servant and living with his wife, Edith, in Belfast. She wondered what roles and purposes she would find for herself when those that the war had provided (notably the Women’s Voluntary Services and other volunteer commitments) were terminated. Nella had felt ‘useful’; but would she be able to find ways to continue to feel useful – beyond affording household services to her husband? How would she, now in her mid fifties, consume her time?

  Nella had doubts, too, about her diary, which had absorbed so much of her time and energy since 1939. ‘The thought struck me as I began my diary,’ she wrote on 4 May, ‘how much longer will they want them?’ ‘They’ were the people at Mass Observation to whom she regularly dispatched her writings – ‘miles’ of them, as she remarked on 30 August.

  On 15 August, the day that the Japanese Emperor announced the surrender of his country, Nella Last wrote twice for Mass Observation, first around 1 a.m. (parts of which are reproduced at the very end of her published wartime diary), and later, in the evening, when she and her husband were talking.

  Monday, 15 August. We talked of things when we were small, and our early married days. He only sees the good bits. He has a calm mind which accepts. He has never known rebellion of heart and mind – or any struggle to keep his head above water. I’ve never let him know the rough side of ‘managing’ for he had poor health and it made him worse to be worried. He talks of the ‘good days’ only and makes me feel a bit sick. I see the struggles, the worries about the two boys, the frustration of spirit when I could not do all I would have liked for them …

  I wonder what work there will be for me. It always worried me because in a clever family I seemed ‘the odd one out’ – my lameness when a child coming at the time when I needed most for learning, and in those days little notice was taken of girls and their education. I’ve learned my little gifts of cooking and managing. My love of peace and fun, and seeing folks happy, are real gifts, more useful at times than clever things, like knowing figures and book-keeping. I’ve learned to keep people together by a laugh, when to take notice of tempers could have meant a split. I’ve learned the beauty and worth of sustained service with and for others. I’ll never go back into the cage of household duties alone, much as my home means and will always mean to me.

  Tuesday, 21 August. I wonder how long before it looks like peace in Japan – and is it really peace or will it all break out again, or linger like a festering corroding sore for years, like the war in China? Vast countries like that are not like we are in Europe. Little things grow dearer and dearer to me. Sometimes I feel I run the danger of clinging too closely to things and by experience I know how foolish that can be. The little wood fire I made for my husband to have his supper by (for I know he always feels chilly after perspiring and working outdoors), the gleaming bits of brass I’d found time to polish tonight, even my bread and gingerbread, seemed ‘real’ in a world of shadows and doubts. I feel the everyday jobs and my little household gods are more real and convincing than ‘big news’, which my tired head doesn’t seem to grasp. I said once at the WVS*† Centre, ‘I feel like a piece of elastic that has been stretched and stretched and now has no more stretch – and cannot spring back.’ They laughed, but several said it was a pretty good description of their own post-war feelings and I can tell Arthur has somewhat the same reaction. More and more do I feel I must take each day as it comes, do the best I can and lay my day aside, taking up the next. Sometimes I feel so dead tired, like a burnt-out shell, craving only to relax and rest. Then my mind rises and rebukes my tired body – says, ‘So much to be done, so little time.’ The stars shine brightly tonight. I love stars. They make me feel trivial and unimportant – and are so stable. I don’t wonder the old ones thought Heaven was above the bright blue sky.

  Wednesday, 22 August. The dusk fell quickly tonight and there were no stars in the overcast sky. It’s grand to think that this winter will have no blackout, that bright lights will be in streets and from lightly curtained windows. How remote the last six years are becoming. It’s odd to realise how Cliff has lost such a slice from his life, turned from a charming if headstrong boy to a man who shows his apprehension of life and having as yet no stability of a settled place in the community, by moods, and a general look of strain. He has all his limbs. I think of the poor ones who came back handicapped so badly. I pray so deeply for real peace – for ordinary people who ask so little of life beyond simple needs, food and shelter for their families and a little for small enjoyments. I search for details of factories ‘turning over’ or opening, contra
cts received, but it’s not very often I feel satisfied when I’ve read the papers. I read today an article written by an American armaments man, who urged America to ‘go underground’. I recalled an article of Naylor the astrologist written when big underground shelters were being made in the beginning of the war. He said a time was coming when we would put all works and factories – and people would live in huge blocks of buildings – built deep down and air-conditioned. It made me feel terrified at the time. I so love the freedom of fresh winds and air.

  Tonight I thought of the dreadful new bomb – we will always live in the shadow of fear now. With the dawn of new and comparatively easily made and handled weapons, no country will ever be safe, however big their armies and navies. Only by change of thought and heart can civilisation be saved. Old sayings are real truths – ‘Put not your trust in Princes, or any sons of man’ – more vitally real then ever. And what change of heart can be expected today? Bitter hatred, chaos, broken faith, lost ideals are poor foundations. I feel again this world of ours has blundered into a beam of wickedness and unrest. Call it Uranus the ‘dark Planet’ or what you will, it’s some evil force that affects all. I’ve a deep sadness over my mind and heart like a shadow, instead of joy the war is ended. I tell myself impatiently that I’m tired out, that I’m run down, and I rest as much as I can, coming to bed early, but it does not lessen the shadow. I go and work in the garden and leave a little of it there and when the bright sun shines I feel I lift up my hands to it in delight, but cannot stir the heavy dead-weight shadow off my heart for long.