Nella Last in the 1950s Page 10
Three and a half years later Nella again pondered her confused feelings about race after visiting this black ophthalmologist at his office in his home, whom she portrayed as ‘clever, patient and well liked’, and who was married to a French woman. ‘I felt what wonderful people the Africans – and coloured people – were. In one or two – three at the most – generations, they have bridged such a gap between primitive and civilised ways. I’m not consistent. I’ve no colour feeling, no shrinking from black hands touching me as head was turned and lenses fitted, no feeling of revulsion at all; yet when those really charming half caste children leaned against me – the little girl of three climbed on my knee – I felt something in me shrank away’ (1 August 1952). It was the ‘mixing of blood and race’ that unsettled her, and which she found hard to digest (5 January 1950). In the same passage she had written of ‘the shock I got the other day to read how many half caste children were the result of the American negro soldiers’ short stay in England’.
Saturday, 29 July. We set off [for Coniston Water] at 1.30 to avoid the congested roads of 2 o’clock onward, for it was the Agricultural Show at Ulverston, and the rush times from the surrounding countryside are early morning and early afternoon. I’d have liked to go, but it’s a strenuous affair with so much walking and standing. I felt I couldn’t have stood much, and for my husband it was unthinkable. It was one of those crystal days of loveliness that [Hugh] Walpole loved, and only he could find words to describe. A sweet peace on every shadowed fell and hillside, muted slap, slap of water on the edge of the Lake, the gentle breeze hardly stirring the leaves, woody smell of earth and trees perfumed with meadowsweet, soft carillon of wood pigeons, which must be a pest to the farmers this year, their numbers are so increased. We parked at our usual spot on the East side of the Lake. Few cars and no bathers about today – perhaps the regulars have gone on holiday …
I never saw nuts so plentiful. If they only ripen there will be a bumper crop, and blackberries promise to be more plentiful than last year even. I picked handfuls of sweet wild raspberries and ate them as we walked. I looked at the green tender shoots and leaves and thought of the bags full we picked as children for Granny to dry. Those days every expectant mother drank raspberry leaf tea. Mother and Aunt Eliza, both London-trained nurses for midwifery, scoffed at such absurd ideas. Now it’s one of the clinic’s instructions. I often wish I’d collected Granny’s simple recipes. Not even Aunt Sarah thought the faded crabbed written ‘cures’ and recipes worth keeping. I let my mind wander to ‘turnip syrup’, thin slices of freshly dug swede turnip, sprinkled with demerara sugar and stood in a warm place and the syrup given to ‘chesty’ children. I chuckled as I remembered the gasp of astonishment I gave when once as I was hurrying to get ready to go to Hospital Supply I heard it given out in Housewife ‘hints’ after the 8 o’clock news! I recalled the flavouring that gave to Granny’s cakes at Xmas, something rare – hawthorn blossom gathered when the sun was bringing out its heady sweetness, and after the green stalks had been slipped off, it was packed in a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid and covered with brandy. As the flowers wilted more flowers were packed in, more brandy added, and long as the ‘May blossom’ lasted. Kept in a dark place, well sealed, the flower went to the bottom and the syrupy brandy decanted into small bottles about November. The residue was pressed through muslin and went into a different bottle for ‘heavy’ cakes – Xmas and Simnel†. I thought of all the sachets – elderflower, sage, marshmallow† – small ‘eye bright’ ones for styes on the eye. I rambled on and on, till I said, ‘Sorry dear, this won’t interest you’, but my husband had been both interested and entertained. He is like the two boys in his interest in Gran and her way of life and living and tales of a day that seems as far away as the ‘golden age’ of Elizabethan days, yet measured in years, isn’t so very far away.
I spread a rug, and we had tea, watched eagerly by several impatient sparrows, who hopped about waiting for crumbs. Wild birds do seem to like ‘artificial’ food, as if they too come under the restless urge of change of today. I sewed lazily at my wool work – this cushion is getting finished quicker than Cliff’s other two – and we came back slowly, and were home before 9 o’clock. We felt we wanted to linger in the perfect evening, knowing well the rain storms that would follow.
Friday, 4 August. We went down the Coast Road again. It was a lot cooler, and looks set for a change. The fields were being prepared for the reaper and binder to begin harvest. Down the edges, two sides, men cut and tied a swathe – it does look a poor thin crop, and I can hear it’s much worse over the Duddon estuary in Cumberland. The incoming tide was dotted with bathers. Happy family groups round little tents everywhere on the grass verge looked as if they had been down all morning. Cars with numbers from every part of Scotland and England passed or paused a while. The number of Scottish cars increases each summer. The other day when my husband was getting petrol at the garage where he generally deals I said, ‘The news and situation in Korea makes us wonder how much longer petrol will be off ration’. The proprietor said, ‘I think it’s found its level. The trade say only 10% more was sold, and that includes part of the holiday traffic, you know. My son says our sales haven’t gone up a lot, but people will be buying petrol further afield, as they take longer journeys.’ We walked along the sands before the tide was full. The air was sweet and fresh. We met several people we knew and had a chat, and had tea in the car …
The news of retreat and yet still further retreat in Korea is bad. It seems to play right into Stalin’s hands and give him such cause to crow ‘America – pooh – why Koreans can send them packing. They would never have a chance if they struck at ME’, and it’s not good Westerners should lose face. I had a fearsome little remembrance of ‘The last war of all will start in the East’ and vague oddments of revelations that were ‘being proved every day for those with eyes to see’ and such like – hangovers from a nosy childhood when there was nothing for curious children to interest their minds as now, and a street orator was a treat. I can see plainly as I write a figure I’d forgotten long ago, only coming back now as his wild prophecies of the ‘end of all things’ was shouted at indifferent adults and enthralled children. Not one corner of this lovely world is safe or secure. I wonder what this dreadful H-bomb is like in its effects. It will be a fearful ‘adventure’ to set off a trial one. I wonder if America will set off the atom bomb in Korea. To do so could set the whole Eastern world against us. As Stalin would be able to say, ‘This is what the West means to you, death and mutilation on a wholesale massacre’.
The war in Korea had attracted Nella’s attention on several occasions recently. On 26 July, ‘When I heard the 6 o’clock news I felt faint shock – that we were sending troops to Korea’. Hundreds of thousands of British families were bound to be alarmed, as their boys of military age faced the prospect of being sent, once again, into battle. ‘Fear and concern is coming to mothers of boys who will be due for National Service’, Nella wrote on 28 July, ‘for now it sounds as if they will be soldiers from the start, liable for overseas, and all it can mean, by the time they are 19.’ Moreover, the current crisis raised for the first time since 1945 the potential use of atomic weapons, and Nella was gloomy about Britain’s post-war weakness in a world dominated by the two superpowers. ‘America has the A-bomb – and is young’, she remarked on July 27. ‘We would have little or no say whether one had to be dropped in Korea, and if such a dreadful thing did happen – and Russia has them – all hell could be easily let loose. A terrifying outlook.’
Wednesday, 16 August. I called in the library to get my husband a book and then took the bus up to Croslands Park. Miss Butler [recently returned to Barrow] still must have a lot of money. She is not the type to live on capital, but to buy and keep up a house rated at nearly £40 a year, have a car and telephone, a day girl – she would like a resident help – travel, dress and spend as she does, her income must be good. She still has the lovely furniture – or scraps of it – h
er parents collected. Some a collector would like. Her father was a local solicitor, her mother a wealthy Bradford merchant’s daughter, her two darling brothers of 19 and 20 killed in the First World War. Now beyond cousins scattered, she has no one but a little Corgi dog. She is rather a ‘difficult’ person, to have begun life for herself at over 50 when her mother died, and the mother belonged to that real Victorian-early Edwardian type who demanded a ‘prop for my declining years’, ‘someone to close my eyes’, etc. Miss Butler was so joyously happy to help in Canteen. I thought at the time it was pressure from her mother that made her leave. She was unwilling HER daughter should mix and work in such company, although she was goodness itself in giving to charity.
We sat and talked of loneliness, and what a searing thing it could be. She said, ‘People like you cannot know what it means’. I said, ‘Well, I’ve had two sons, but see little of them, and my husband has always been so quiet and reserved. I’ve felt lonely in spirit often.’ She said, ‘Yes dear, but never in an empty house, looking out at passers-by, go to bed lonely, rise the same – you could never plumb such depths. You look too serene to have known what I mean. You speak to people – the way Foxy took to you shows you are friendly – I’m not you know.’ I said, ‘You might be a lot friendlier than I am really. I know I’ve always been “individual” more than “communal”.’ She knew what I meant, and said, ‘Do you know that I think I would have been “communal”, as you call it. Being alone has no appeal to me. I’ve never known what it was like till these last few years.’ I recalled she was right. They had four or five indoor servants. She was driven into town with someone to carry her parcels, etc. She isn’t the ‘malleable’ type that you could pop in to see, take a book, ring up for a chat, suggest coming down to Civil Defence or any WVS activities. She kept showing me little ‘treasures’, opening boxes and drawers. I saw nothing of handiwork or sewing, knitting or embroidery about, no books or papers, and she complained of the poor wireless programmes in summer.
Saturday, 19 August. I tidied round quickly after breakfast and we sat waiting about 15 minutes for the taxi. Being such a big wedding [of her cousin’s son] and so many to bring from a wide district, even with a fleet of taxis it was a rush to get everyone to church in time. The bride lived at Rampside, a small village on Morecambe Bay, five miles from town. The church was beautifully decorated with pink roses and tall pink spikes gladioli, and I don’t remember seeing a lovelier bride and attendants. Nancy had a medieval plain cut dress with long tight sleeves, flowing train in stiff corded silk, and wore a family veil. The bridesmaids had stiff striped brocade of blending pastel shades with a silver thread between each delicate hue. They were simply made but cunningly cut and so different from the usual bridesmaids’ dresses. We knew nearly everyone. Miss Ledgerwood, who worked with us at Hospital Supply, is an aunt of the bride, and there was the usual big turn up of relations rarely seen between weddings and funerals. Mary Rawlinson was there, beautifully dressed, serene and aloof, parrying enquiries about the break between her and Cliff Crump, after a long drawn out courtship of nearly ten years, when she had kept putting off her marriage, saying ‘There’s plenty of time’, and now he has tired of waiting. Perhaps because I asked no questions, she told me, ‘We grew to have less and less in common, and anyway Nell, I think I’m like your Cliff – too content on my own’. I said, ‘Well Mary, you are so like my own mother in looks and ways. I think it’s as well for either a husband or any children you might have had that you don’t marry. I know Mother would have been happier if she hadn’t married my father, but put it down to the fact that the “real” life of her died when her first husband did. Now I wonder if she was like you – a kind of Rhine maiden.’ She wasn’t at all pleased, but she knows well I’ve known several of her half finished romances in all their details. It’s as if she seeks a perfection in human relationship almost impossible to find, and the comic part is that she is more full of whims and whamseys† and more difficult to understand than most.
We didn’t go to the station to see the bridal couple off, first to London to spend the night, and then to Newquay on the Cornish express. It was too late to make the journey in one day from Barrow.* Instead we went to Spark Bridge to tell Aunt Sarah all about the wedding. Other days, others ways – she was so disappointed her share of the ‘wedding feast’ and a glass of wine hadn’t been sent. Useless to try and explain the difference of hotel catering and that of the old-time personal attention to everything. I recall country weddings when I was small when any old or sick who couldn’t go had their share of goodies put aside – someone took it and told of every detail. Ruth is staying in the cottage next door. She came in to hear all about all that occurred. I felt shocked to see how suddenly she had begun to look her age. Her lecture tour in America was so strenuous and she did so hate New York, saying ‘Never go there if you can help it. It has the least soul of any place I’ve known.’ I can tell she feels gloomy about the way things are going in Korea. She seems to have got atom bomb and total destruction of civilisation pretty bad. I said, ‘I’ve got past it, Ruth. I’ve a growing Sayonara – “if it must be so” – a feeling we are all in some great and intricate “Place”, that “it’s not life that matters, but the courage we bring to it”’.
CHAPTER FOUR
FRAGILITIES AND FAMILIARITIES
September–December 1950
Saturday, 2 September. I got ready hurriedly to go and see a wedding – my grocer’s only child, whom I’ve known all her life. Mrs Howson and I had planned to go, but when it was a fine morning she and Steve had taken the chance to go off by an early train for a day out. I looked round the church wondering how much money was represented, even amongst those I knew. The bridegroom, an accountant, comes from Glasgow and only a small group of his relatives and friends were there. The church was beautifully decorated with tall white lilies and white gladioli, but it looked colder than the soft pink roses and gladioli of a fortnight ago when my cousin’s son was married, and I much preferred Nancy’s plain well-cut gown in thick heavy silk, although her slim slight figure could have worn anything. The bride today is plump and rather thick set, and her billowing and flowing gown made her look a bit pudgy, and the diamanté† trimming twitching in the sunshine looked too Hollywood for my taste. Her mother looked sad. Newcastle, where the married couple will live, ‘seems a long way off’, though the other day I pointed out it was much nearer than Northern Ireland or Australia! …
As we ate lunch I asked my husband, ‘What would you like to do, short of putting your head in the gas oven?’ He looked aggrieved at my flippancy, but wouldn’t give any kind of answer. But when we got out, he perked up and said suddenly, ‘Let’s go to Kendal’. I felt surprised. He has never suggested going since Robert was here just after Xmas. I said, ‘I’ll be delighted if you feel up to it’. We went slowly. It’s not much more than an hour’s run from Barrow. Everywhere in the high wind and fitful sunshine farmers were busy. I saw many ricks being covered with tarpaulin as if some grain on higher ground had dried sufficiently. Hay too was being cut, and quite a good crop if it only dries. Two hikers hailed us for a lift. They had huge packs on their backs but my husband wouldn’t stop. He had read an article or letter by a motorist in the Express the other week saying, ‘Why should motorists, who are taxed and have to pay so dear for petrol, pander to some people’s desire and determination to get a cheap holiday by hitch-hiking?’ My husband pointed out that there was a very good bus service, and just before we came along a service bus half empty had paused to pick up passengers, and the two hikers had not bothered though it would only have been a few coppers to go as far as Kendal.
There was the usual life and bustle of a county town. Kendal has been as unfortunate for weather as the rest of Lakeland. In two shops where I went – one for a lettuce and celery, one for elastic – they spoke of the ‘terrible weather for August’. We came round by Bowness and parked by the Lake to eat tea, from where I could see into cars round about. Most of them
were having a picnic meal – and some really large expensive cars. Perhaps the price of petrol hits more people than one realised! Fewer cars and only a very short line of motor coaches in the big car park. Perhaps Morecambe illuminations will take most coach trips now. We were home by 7.30, already foam over the Irish Sea. Banks of rain were rolling in. It’s only been a ‘borrowed’ day.
Thursday, 7 September. There was wild confusion of piled furniture and carpets in some side streets of Ulverston, brought hurriedly from houses never been flooded in living memory, and a great deal of damage to two bridges and roads had been caused. A ‘river’ surged through Ulverston station, washing all before it. Passengers from Whitehaven to Euston were taken off the trains at Dalton and travelled by road round the Bay to Carnforth, and we didn’t get papers till noon as all had to be brought by lorry or bus. Low-lying fields were lakes. Others I never remember seeing flooded were under water, any stooks of corn that didn’t float submerged altogether – a pitiful sight. I’d not dared to look at the poor garden before I left, and hardly knew where to start when I got home. I had a promising crop of pears and James Grieve apples – half were on the ground – herbaceous plants flat, rose branches torn off completely, the lawn was covered with branches and pieces of Michaelmas daisy, chrysanth plants, etc. With the dry spring and too wet autumn, stems and stalks were too spindly and thin to stand up to much. I looked at apple blossom, spring rock plants, aubretia and polyanthus in bloom, and could not remember so freakish a year. I felt spent and exhausted long before I’d made much tidy, so left it to heat cream of chicken soup and fry fillets of hake to make a handy meal.