Nella Last's Peace Read online

  We were back early. I made up the fire and soon had tea ready. Toasted fruit bread – I put raisins and a little honey in one of my little loaves when I baked – bottled pears and unsweetened milk, lemon cheese and wholemeal bread and butter and fruit cake. The table looked so gay and inviting, and still I did not feel I cared whether I had any food or not, and what I ate soon satisfied me. I could have giggled wildly at my husband’s attitude, barely speaking when spoken to, glancing at the changed walls pitifully like a ham actor. Odd how little his reactions affect me nowadays. I cannot believe at one time I worried and worried and let his monkey-shines drive me into a nervous breakdown. Now any breakdown would not be mine. I feel often I look at a rather tiresome stranger, wonder at my own weakness of attitude, which led me to be shut up like a dog, only taken out on a chain, called to heel, petted and patted but never let out of sight or off the chain. I must have been a fool. I feel it has fostered something in me that would have been better not. I was never dull or bored that I can ever remember. If I could not do one thing, I turned to another, while longing for friends who would not notice if they were snubbed or let see they were not welcome. My war work bridged that gap. I loved working with people, feeling ‘I’ll never be shut up again’, and when I’m well enough I hope I can find something outside my home.

  I sat and embroidered my cushion cover, feeling tonight I’d be well to start my blouses this week and then I’d have a bit of useful sewing on the go. I’ll have to take my curtains down too and let the hem down. They have shrunk one and a half inches, and it fidgets me if a thing is not right and I have to keep looking at it.

  I keep thinking of Cliff. He is always at the back of my mind. I wonder if he will get a start soon, feeling the real calamity it would be if he had to come back to work with his father, knowing how impossible it would be, feeling I could never stand the strain nowadays as I once did, when they were so totally different in every possible way, in every line of thought and action.

  Monday, 18 March. The heavy rain and hailstones seem to have broken the back of winter. I woke to birds twittering and chirping, and the garden looked as if spring might be soon here. I felt tired when I rose, and my back was bad to start the day, but I thought fresh air would do me good and I went down town to get my rations. There was a real Monday look about the shops – no fish or meat, sausage or cakes. I met several women I knew well. All complained of the poverty of Barrow shops compared to Ulverston and the Lake towns. All but two were worried about returning sons and their jobs. One who has been so high hat about her son being a captain – she has been shunned a little – today was especially worried. I’d not known the son or his job before he joined up, but was surprised to learn he had only worked for a newsagent who had asthma badly and could not meet the early train for his newspapers or deliver on cold wet days. Somehow I had the idea her son had been in a bank. She is desperately wondering how he and his wife and baby will fit into life on their return. She seems in awe of her daughter-in-law, who seems a ‘captain’s lady’.

  Cliff, who had just been demobilised, arrived on 20 March in Barrow for a brief visit. She found him in good spirits, though she admitted the next day that ‘I sighed as I noticed how slow he was with his right hand – but checked myself when I thought it was only a finger gone after all.’

  Friday, 22 March. I had to rise earlier to cook breakfast and pack sandwiches for Cliff. I made him a nice breakfast: half a grapefruit prepared overnight, a little rasher of bacon, two sausages and an egg. The potted meat I’d made from the sheep’s head made nice sandwiches with chutney and cress, and I kept two slices for my husband’s tea. I packed a slice of cake, two buttered slices of malt bread, an orange and a flask of tea in the Thermos I bought him at Xmas. The taxi came at 8.30 but I didn’t go to the station. I felt a bit shaky with rushing about and laid on the settee for half an hour. I had to take Cliff’s watch back to the watchmaker’s. The repair I’d had done a few weeks back had gone wrong again.

  Why do newspapers print things before they are official? Every knot of women I passed seemed to be talking of the marg and soap cut – then tonight on the wireless there was ‘nothing sure’, as if women haven’t enough worries. There were no queues for fish, and plenty of variety, but I never can have fish for Fridays what with going to Canteen. The bus conductors are quickly replacing the clippies† and it’s a real pleasure to be spoken to politely. So many of the girls gave one the feeling they were completely indifferent, whether you rode on the bus or fell off it …

  I had half an hour’s rest after lunch, for we were going down in Mrs Higham’s car so had no waiting or walking to the bus stop. I’ve felt so out of joint with Canteen since I had flu. Somehow the gaunt, nearly empty place, short supplies of food, cutlery and crocks, and the type of soldiers who come in, seemed to repel me. Gone are the friendly nice lads, and rather curt and sometimes insolent fellows come in now, as if instead of friendliness they work off annoyance on us. Today two of them did upset Mrs Fletcher. Poor Marjorie. She is so big and strong looking, but her thyroid makes her very nervy and frightened. We had such short supplies of cakes and could only eke them out with cheese sandwiches, buttered teacakes and hot dogs. I like to be fair to all the boys and said to the helper, ‘We will only let each lad have one cake.’ These two piled up four on one plate, six on the other, and gave Marjorie cheek. I’d been sitting down resting and she served for me. I went to the counter and one of them snarled at me and told me he would darn well please himself – they were for sale, weren’t they? I tipped the cakes back on the dish and I said – he was over six feet and soared over me – ‘Little man, what a shock you are going to get in civvy street after your life of luxury in the Army.’ If I’d been as nasty as I felt it would have done little good. I felt the roars of laughter of his friends were better than any sharp remarks. Mrs Whittam said, ‘You can get under anyone’s skin. That lout said “please” when he came for his cup refilled’ …

  Mrs Whittam is an oddity. She has always a huge roll of notes in her bag from selling something – horse, cow, etc. – or looking for something worth buying, and we thought nothing could surprise us but she certainly did today when she fished out of her sleazy leather bag 100 clothing coupons for which she had paid £10! It was more of a bombshell than once when she had over £300 in her bag and I revolted and trotted her off to the bank with it, fearing at that time, when we were always so crowded, someone could hear her – she has a loud voice – and rob her as she went home. I saw Mrs Higham’s mouth open and shut like a fish’s and felt mine did the same! I said, ‘Now what on earth are you possibly going to do with those? You naughty old thing. You know you have stacks of good clothes you say are too smart for you.’ She beamed all over her very weather-beaten face and said, ‘Well, I badly want a new hat’, and joined in the burst of laughter. She has a very good velour hat that wind and weather has altered and which she puts on her head with the delicacy of a cow stamping in the mud and which we always call her ‘creations’. I said, ‘Silly, you don’t need coupons for hats, and I know you have some nice ones. Pass that one for keeps to your cat. I know she must have had kittens in it several times.’ Crude remarks like that are priceless wit to Mrs Whittam. She shook and rolled with mirth till she nearly fell off the chair. Dear knows what she will do with all those coupons if, as I pointed out, ‘she kept out of jail’.

  Saturday, 23 March. I’ve had a maddeningly tiresome day. I don’t remember worse. I had a hair appointment for nine o’clock but missed two buses which were crowded and when I got down it was 9.10. I needn’t have worried. I had to sit waiting till 9.30 and then the water was not as hot as it should have been, for something had gone wrong with the thermostat in the tank. I got fish for lunch – nice haddock fillets – and a nice piece of smoked cod for Aunt Sarah. It’s such a problem nowadays to get a little tasty bit for them.

  When I got back there were two real tinkers mending jute doormats and I said they could mend mine. I could have done it mysel
f with a packing needle and coarse string, but they looked so lost and hungry, and they talked in such sing-song Welsh they were bad to understand. I made the mistake of not asking how much it would be, and I’m sure I look soft, for when they brought it back they demanded fifteen shillings. It’s a very good ‘has been’, for I always believed in buying the best, or else I’d have said, ‘You can have the mat.’ They came in the garage and were half in the kitchenette before I realised they were there, and both neighbours were out. I don’t remember being so frightened of anyone, but I stood firm. They would not let me have the mat, but on the pretext of examining the work – very badly and sloppily done – I seized my potato knife off the stove where I had laid it and said, ‘NO – I’m going to give you your valuable jute back’, and made to unpick it. They agreed to take five shillings – for about ten minutes’ badly done work and six pence of jute string just caught round and not oversewn as usual, and I told them I was ringing up the police and laying a charge of trying to extort money. They believed me, for they gathered up their bass bag† and left the road hurriedly.

  It upset me badly and I shook from head to foot and felt glad when I heard a ring – till I went to the door. A queer-eyed untidy woman who might have belonged to them stepped up on to the top step and began begging, for food, coppers and clothes. I felt it the last straw. I said, ‘There is a telephone at my hand. If you don’t go away I’ll call the police.’ She looked very surprised and stopped cursing me and began to whine. I said, ‘The police of this town are very severe with beggars’, and off she went. I’m sure they were all together. I cannot recall beggars at the door for years.

  During the next several weeks Nella travelled much more than she had in the previous year – a day trip to Lancaster, Easter weekend in Morecambe, and a weekend in London to visit Cliff. In London she went shopping, and on 27 April ‘went to Derry and Tom’s lovely roof garden’ and later to the theatre, and did lots of sightseeing, though not as much as she had hoped to do (her 27-year-old son didn’t approve of his 56-year-old mother going out on her own). Cliff, she felt, put on some big-city airs. ‘I tried not to act country cousins and only slipped up a few times,’ she wrote on the 29th, ‘and was only reproved once, and anyway the little waitress did look tired and the aspirins I gave her and the sniff of my smelling salts did her good, for her head ached. She was a really nice little girl but annoyed Cliff when she stood talking and told me she had a baby of three and twins a year old and worked every Sunday in the Richmond café to help out while her husband minded the babies. Cliff said, “Londoners don’t talk to people. You would be looked on as eccentric if you lived here, you know.”’

  On Saturday, 4 May Nella accompanied her husband on a business trip, as she sometimes did, this time to Kendal. ‘Country people stood in groups waiting for their own particular bus, all so smart and neat,’ she wrote, ‘only their country dialect making them unlike townsfolk. Gone are the tasteless, clumsy ways of dressing, of heavy clod-hopping shoes, except for work.’ She remembered ‘the cotton bonnets and big white aprons of the cottage women when I was a child, the heavy corduroys and blue shirts and red kerchiefs round the necks of the men’, and reflected on ‘the real revolution of thought and behaviour started before the last war’.

  That this spring was an unsettling time for Nella was clear from how often she remarked on the imminent closing of the canteen. On 1 April she was with Mrs Howson. ‘We used to feel such eagerness to help fellows who might be going overseas and not come back, such happiness in making a meal for sailors off to join their ships,’ she recalled. ‘Now all that seems to have gone. They are just men folk with no desire for friendship unless it’s to confide their demob grievances.’ The canteen no longer seemed to merit the investment of time and effort. On 11 April she wrote that ‘So many women take the line “Service people get such better rations and are only hanging round. I don’t see why we should give up time now to let them have cheap food. If they want refreshments, let them go to an ordinary café.”’

  On 24 April she and Mrs Howson were again talking of the canteen, which was then expected to close by the end of May. ‘We both feel sorry, but more for the past than the present. We always tried to be friends to the boys, and we laughed as we talked over little incidents, now so far off it might be much longer.’ She felt a sense of loss. ‘I feel as if doors were slowly closing me in … A dimness of “not being wanted to help” is hardening into a film of not bothering.’ (The canteen did indeed close at the end of May. ‘Our happy life of service together was over,’ she wrote on the evening it happened. ‘Today saw something pretty nice come to an end.’)

  Tuesday, 14 May. I cleared tea, did a bit of mending, had a little chat with Mrs Waite and Mrs Higham on the phone and then relaxed on the settee with a book. My husband was a bit lost. He was tired and would have liked to go out in the car. He says driving rests him. I thought of Mrs Waite’s voice complaining that no one went to see her, and in the next sentence admitting callers were not let in if Mr Waite felt that way, or was rude to them if he did let them in. I looked across at my husband and wondered what he would be like at eighty – perhaps like his father, who has never been interested in much since I’ve remembered and who is content if he has fire and food and doesn’t notice anything else.

  Saturday, 18 May. We gave a lift to a young fellow who had missed the bus. He interested me, poor dear. He was eager to talk and told me he was a porter at the Lakeside Hotel, but had no home nor people – that he had been a Barnardo boy. I could tell he had a deep sadness about having no background. He was essentially a family unit. I said, ‘You must try and find a nice home-loving girl in the country and have a family of your own. You will value and appreciate a family lots more and there will be a great deal of happiness in it for you.’ He had big wistful blue eyes. He would have been an adorable baby, and his ears and mouth and hands showed breeding. He was not a slum child. I wondered at his history. Such a topsy-turvy time. Some don’t want homes and the tie of hometown life. Some wistfully long for them.

  Monday, 20 May. My husband came in in great distress. He had a crate of lead lights taken up to some houses they were repairing and somehow it had overbalanced, due, as he admitted, to destroying the balance when he took small ones out of one side, and the larger ones tipped and over it went. Besides about £24 worth going, there is the delay of weeks. It worried me so as he talked about ‘not having any head these days’ and his ‘wishing we won the Irish Sweep so that he needn’t work any more’. One thing I was thankful for – he ate a good lunch …

  When I got in and thankfully put my feet up on the settee to rest them I felt worried, with that dread of not being able to get out and about feeling, that comes to arthritic people. I listened to Justice, the Saturday night play, and in the strung-up humour I was in I felt I could have put my head down and wept bitterly, thinking how much injustice there was. I felt as if I could feel it in the dark thunder clouds overhead. I thought of all the good earth, warm sunshine, enough folks to dig and delve, and yet people are suffering from fear of death by starvation. I felt wildly that if I was God I’d spin the world wildly to shake off all the foolish people on this lovely earth and start all over again …

  My husband looked so nervy and worried. He ate his tea in silence. I left him quiet till he had half finished, and then talked on little subjects I thought might take his mind off that wretched glass. He sat back in his chair and said, ‘Thank God for home.’ I felt I could have burst into tears! He rarely pays any compliments and when he does they are so devastatingly sincere.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  POST-WAR SUMMER

  June–September 1946

  Saturday, 1 June. I looked round at the shoppers. A casual glance would have said ‘so well fed’, but the too-fat young and early middle-aged women, to a keen observer, would have confirmed too big a starch diet. If bread and potatoes are cut, women will be the hardest hit – those who just buy a pie or cake and who make do on that for themselves,
especially. I’m always so thankful we like soup, odd savouries and vegetables. One confectioner had a great idea – little trifles set in paper cases, the prices ranging from 3d to 1s. Mrs Higham brought in four for tea at Canteen, saying they were quite good. Granted I’ve a picky, finicky appetite and prefer a very small portion of anything nice than double the quantity if it doesn’t appeal to me, but I thought I’d never tasted such trash. It had synthetic jelly at the bottom, tasting and looking like red ink, and then a tasteless layer of yellow custard sweetened with saccharin and topped with a flavourless dab of something like soap suds. Politeness alone made me swallow the nauseous concoction and I managed to palm most of the jelly in the bottom and put the paper container in the pig bin. I felt more grateful than ever I could look after Cliff’s food for him. I believe in good wholesome food well served as one of the chief essentials of life, from both a physical and mental standpoint.

  I reflected how things work themselves out. I come of a clever family, whose girls dance, sing, roller skate or go in for sports effortlessly, and of whom many are really beautiful. I was lame when a child. Only somewhat crude methods of sleeping with a heavy weight on my right foot while lying on a hard mattress stretched my right leg out after a hip and pelvis fracture. I was never very active. My father scorned a good education for women as unnecessary. I always felt a sneaking envy for my clever cousins. Now I’ve no envy of any cleverness, not even for people who can add up well. I’ve a superiority complex instead!! I’m never at a loss for a meal. My husband says he has ‘never known there has been a war’ because he has always had tasty meals, has never been without some little tastie of bottled or preserves for a little treat, and my thrifty country ways of always a bit on the shelf rather than a feast and then a famine has been after all a gift that is better than a cleverness.