Nella Last in the 1950s Read online

  The sun shone and he insisted on going out, but wasn’t pleased when I said I wanted to go and look at the Oronsay. When I said, ‘Well, don’t come – I’ll go and return on the bus’, he seemed to think I’d only meet people to talk to and ‘stay out all afternoon’, so he got out the car. All roads seemed to lead to the dockside – cars in a stream, walkers, and every bus going that way was full. It looked as if the fire ship had drawn half the water in the dock to pump into her, but the fire still smouldered below. Outside, except for a strong list, there was little to be seen, except a squad of men busy propping stays to prevent her keeling over on her side. The side of the High Level bridge was lined about six feet deep – lots of youth and young children you would have expected to create some kind of noise, but a hush was on everyone and voices were low. Barrow people love their ships, not only those people who create and build, but all of us who see a shell launched and brought round to the dockside, where day by day it is built and people can see it in passing. Two men quietly discussed the possibility of an electric fault causing the fire – the refrigeration plant had recently been installed. The thought of any kind of sabotage didn’t occur to them. We came away feeling a sadness at the waste and destruction, hoping it wasn’t as bad as at first thought. I don’t like any kind of mishap in building.*

  We went round by the Coast Road home. Sea birds flocked as if feeling a storm out at sea, and settled in the fields. The sky had a coppery glow that showed our little sunny spell might be ending. I made tea. My husband had cheese on toast. I wasn’t hungry, and had toast and a cup of tea. I settled down to stitch my felt oddments, and made two pair of large dollies’ shoes, finished the bonnets and partly made up the rabbit. The wind rose and howled mournfully over the chimneys. I didn’t feel well, and after the 9 o’clock news came to bed.

  Monday, 6 November. The Town Clerk was late for the WVS Club meeting. He had been on the selection committee for staff for the new old folks home, and he gave a most interesting talk on ‘The Ups and Downs of a Town Clerk’s Life’, suggested by Mrs Diss instead of the talk on Civil Defence originally planned for two months ago when we should have had a meeting and there was a ‘drive’ for it. Few people fascinate me as he does. I could watch him talk for hours. Everyone has two different sides to his face. I’ve seen faces ‘rearranged’ by taking two left or right sides on the print and they all looked amazingly different people, but never did I see such a perfect Jekyll and Hyde face as his. He has been in the town since long before the war, and of course is a very prominent man in the affairs of the town, but never once have I heard anyone say they liked or trusted him, and as for things said against him, ‘hypocrite’ is the mildest. He brought an idea of morals and lady friends which might have passed unnoticed in a city, but which shocked a provincial town and started off badly when public opinion practically forced him to marry a hairdresser who was expecting his baby. Rightly or wrongly, his treatment of her – cold, callous, sneering, etc. etc. – was blamed for the coming baby being an idiot. Many men could have lived it down, and not gained the contempt he did, if he hadn’t such a face. One side of it is that of an amiable actor, wide eye, mobile pleasant mouth, and cheek that curves into a likeable smile; the other is evil, much smaller eye, mean twist to mouth, and a startlingly sinister look. If you saw him on the screen it would be in a villain’s role. Yet he took his sea-going motor boat, with one man to help, and helped in the evacuation of Dunkirk. I felt a strange pity for him today. I felt I could almost see his two warring personalities as he spoke really brilliantly.

  I helped wash up and pack dishes away. We felt so awkward in a new kitchen, and as Mrs Howson, Mrs Host and Marjory Fletcher were on my Canteen squad, they seemed to think if I helped all would be done quickly!

  Saturday, 11 November. Billy Newington called in – the man who bought the business. He wanted some advice on War Damage claims my husband had dealt with nearly two years ago. I reminded him he hadn’t finished Mrs Howson’s mother’s gate, and he said he had been ‘rushed to death – could do with another man, and had heard of one’. I couldn’t but wonder why my husband said, ‘there isn’t a man to be had anywhere’ yet Billy has had no difficulty. He went on, ‘We have the Laundry work now and have worked Saturday afternoons and Sundays on some jobs, which had to be done when machinery was stopped.* By heck, I’ve struck a gold mine. I’ve averaged £30 a week clear every week since I got settled, including of course all my overtime’. I wished he hadn’t come. My husband began to brood on ‘all he had lost’. I knew sympathy would have only made him worse. I said sharply, ‘It’s no use looking back. Do you think it’s any easier for me than you? You have no one really to blame but yourself and no one but yourself can begin a cure. If you tried to think of bright things, you would feel better. Morbid grizzles breed fast as flies, and anyway, if you had £50-£500 a week what pleasure would it bring you? You are growing more and more of a hermit. Soon you could live in a cell without missing anything. All you want to do is eat and sleep and drift. Good luck to Billy in all his “wasting time” playing cricket, watching football, filling up coupons and twice a week at the pictures. At least he has other interests to take his mind off work.’

  I think the knowledge we were due out at 2 o’clock helped him throw off his mood, and after a short rest for him we set off. I insisted firmly on going by bus. Knowing how upset he can get, I wouldn’t risk him driving after hypnotic treatment, not being very sure of the results. When I saw the annexe door locked and no nurse in attendance, I began to think there was a hitch. After a reasonable wait I began to make enquiries – not easy, for there’s no connection between Moor Hospital at Lancaster and the North Lonsdale; the former only come and go for appointments. The only thing a Sister and I could think of was that Dr Wadsworth had not made a note of the interview and it had quite slipped his mind. We could do nothing but come home. It was after 3 o’clock, and any programmes at cinemas half over or I’d have dragged him in, but we just came home, and the look on his face appalled me. He might as well have had his death sentence instead of only a broken appointment. Nothing lifted his gloom.

  Thursday, 16 November. I got a small half shoulder of Canterbury lamb, and some good steak bones for my stock pot, and we went to the Martinmas fair at Ulverston. The town was thronged with smart but serviceably clad and shod young fellows, keen and intelligent as well as healthy looking, and so widely different from the brutish country bumpkins of a few years ago. I felt that there was a few things in this swiftly changing world that were brave and splendid. I never saw such a number of really marvellously furnished and equipped trailer caravans – coal stoves, expensive carpets and furnishings with beautifully polished silver on the tiny sideboards. Nor did I ever see so many fortune tellers and palmists. Six of the best equipped and largest of the caravans had placards with ‘testimonials’. Lea’s, Boscombe’s and Smith’s, and a tawny eyed beauty of little more than twenty eagerly offered from her caravan step to ‘tell your fortune, lady’. The age-old surrounding houses of the Gill [the site of hiring fairs], the dark-eyed unchanged gypsies – except for better clothes – the merry-eyed happy children tumbling round, the tawdry splendour of old-fashioned shooting galleries, roundabouts and sideshows, swung me back more years than I could count. If Mrs Higham hadn’t been coming, I’d have loved to linger in the crowded little town, where, it seemed, everyone from the surrounding countryside had flocked today. I felt I’d have liked to be able to ‘dream back’ to when the fair first started – a church near by goes back over 1,000 years. I wondered if the fair did. I get fish from a very nice fishmonger at Ulverston – a Tynesider who went all through the war in the Navy but has a hint of small town ways, likes to chat about Ulverston, cats, the weather, etc. He surprised me today by asking, ‘Isn’t there any old history books of this place?’ I couldn’t tell him. Any I know are contemporary, except those Norman Birkett wrote, and they tend to leave out so much you feel you would like to know. I told him of Collingwood’s Thorstein
of the Lake – from Greenodd up the Crake River to Coniston, in the time of the Norsemen.*

  Saturday, 18 November. We had to be at the Hospital for 10.30. I hurriedly dusted and shook the rug, washed up and made beds, and we set out by 10 o’clock. I felt far from happy. My husband rose looking ill and was in one of his silent brooding moods, and I knew he dreaded going. After he went into the smaller room of the annexe with the doctor, the nurse-receptionist and I settled silently, she with her knitting, I with a rather tatty magazine off the table. Our silence contrasted with the noise of all kinds of traffic noises, cars being reversed or started in the Hospital quadrangle, shouts of children. After what seemed a long wait, Dr Wadsworth came out and spoke to the nurse, who hurried off and returned with a pillow. She mouthed at me ‘Can’t get him off’. Then followed another long wait till the door opened again, and looking across at me the doctor said quietly, ‘Will you come in please, Mrs Last’. I had that awful feeling when the blood all seems to drain into the feet and makes them heavy as lead, and the rest of the body feather light and giddy, and for a split second I felt incapable of moving. It was only a few steps to the door of the inner room, and I saw my husband in one of the worst nervous shaking attacks he has had. I crossed over and took his very cold hands and rubbed them. The doctor got some kind of tablet and dissolved it in a glass of water, and I soothed and ‘petted’ my husband until the dreadful tremors passed, knowing so surely there was wild terror and some kind of memory behind them. I’d seen my poor old Cliff like that often, when he was first home, and the horrors of war hadn’t faded out of his mind.

  Dr Wadsworth said, ‘We will leave Mr Last to rest quietly till his tablet takes effect’, and he took my arm and gently propelled me from the room to a chair by the radiator in the anteroom and began to talk. He said, ‘Does your husband get so easily upset at home? He was only being asked a few routine questions, and he reacted so badly it was impossible to hypnotise him.’ He seemed to be able to put leading questions so simply. I recalled afterwards he must have been able to build up a very clear cut picture of my husband’s habits, moods, and approach to life in general, not only now but for years. He said, ‘Would you agree to bring your husband to the Moor Hospital at Lancaster some evening?’ I said, ‘Doctor, I’m beginning to feel so desperate I’d take him to China if I thought it would help him’. He said, ‘Something will have to be done. I can see he is worse than when I saw him first. His life cannot be worth living – yours either if I may say so.’ I said, ‘Tell me please, doctor, am I right to give way to his moods to avoid such attacks of nerves, or should I, as his doctor suggests, “rouse and stimulate him, and quarrel with him if it’s the only way to jerk him out of himself”’? Dr Wadsworth pursed his lips and slowly shook his head as he said, ‘Any course at present that helps to avoid such distressing attacks is your best policy, but rest assured, everything in my powers will be done to help him’. Once an attack is over, my husband seems himself, often better, seemingly, than I feel after one!

  Thursday, 30 November. Mrs Higham spoke of vague unrest in the WVS office. As I get little chance of going in the office I hear little – and feel I care less. When a prim old maid school teacher, fast getting a little ‘woolly’, grabs the news, I feel anything could happen. I feel sorry and understanding for Mrs Diss and her somewhat weary attitude. She wanted to give up long ago, and it’s a mistake to persuade people beyond their feelings or wishes. People got so tired after the war years. New ones were needed and should have been sought. I’d expected a power cut for tea, and prepared candles in my brass as well as glass candlesticks, but the cut must have missed our part of town. Mrs Higham went early, and we settled to listen to the good Thursday evening programmes, but Mrs Howson came in and stayed till 9 o’clock. I felt I’d rather it had been Mrs Higham, for you can discuss any subject with her. Mrs Howson utterly refuses to talk of any war worries, the effects of rearmaments, anything she considers deep or worrying.

  Sunday, 3 December. Everything was thick with snow this morning, and soon after breakfast it began again. I never remember such an odd effect. Big feathery flakes the size of pigeons’ eggs stuck to the windows till the heat from inside melted them off. Poor Shan We sat on the window sill chattering like a monkey, and looking so distressed. I’m always puzzled with the gulls and rooks on really bad mornings, and cannot but think they have a ‘memory’ and also a way of telling other birds they know a place where some kind of a bite will be given them. Always they sit round on the trellis and fence waiting, while none can be seen in the surrounding garden … I felt so bewildered and depressed by the news from Korea. What can we do against such hordes – and such cruel ruthless ‘savages’. I shuddered to think of poor wives’ and mothers’ feelings in America who read of GIs wounded being burnt. My deep fear that another atom bomb will be dropped grows daily as I can see no other weapon against such odds.

  Nella had read John Hershey’s Hiroshima (1946), a gripping account of the ruinous impact of one atomic bomb. On 4 December she heard another opinion about the crisis in Korea. ‘My hairdresser is a young married woman whose husband works in the Yard. She was full of the conviction of the men in the Yard that the atom bomb – or bombs – would be certain to be dropped, that unless they were used American and British troops would be pushed back into the sea, and there would be no Dunkirk rescue.’ The following day, with her sister-in-law, Flo, ‘We talked of the black shadow of war looming’. ‘It’s a queer and mad world when prices rise and rise,’ she wrote on 22 December, ‘and the only things we do seem to be able to afford as nations are armaments and atom bombs to further destroy and kill, not only peoples, but the gracious lovely things of life.’ As a result of the war in Korea, there was to be a major increase in military expenditures, to the detriment of the domestic economy; Britain was under heavy pressure from Washington to rearm.

  Wednesday, 6 December. It’s been an evil day of sleet and rain and North wind and all turning to slush. Mrs Salisbury came round by the bus, which cost me 6d extra, but I felt so glad she came I didn’t grudge it. She has never complained of being so hard up – says, too, that she years ago, when she had two small children and her husband only had the dole, had more in her purse that wasn’t ‘condemned’ and could be ‘spent’ instead of just for weekly bills. A lot of her troubles even now are of her own making. As I often tell her, if she made soup and porridge and baked more instead of tinned soups – for six of them – and didn’t rely on cornflakes always and silly little bought cakes that were stale the next day, she could economise on her Co-op bill. Where she lives there’s only one other shop on the estate and it’s easiest to get all ‘on the bill’ and pay each Friday.* I washed a few oddments so as not to have a real wash day with a lot of wet woollens etc. drying in the house, for my cough still keeps bad…

  I’d remembered in the evening that Mr Attlee would speak and Mrs Howson asked if I ‘would bother to listen’. When I said, ‘certainly’, she went with something about ‘No time for that’. I listened with real respect for the dignity and restraint of Attlee’s speech. He couldn’t have said less – or more. I felt that never before in the world’s history was so difficult a situation facing men, or countries. Whether to leave all our gallant soldiers with no hope either of more troops to help, or a Dunkirk, or withdraw and lose face but ‘live to fight another day’, always with the sick fear that whatever we did would be wrong, but with the certainty of Stalin’s deep laid plans to engulf Europe, and, if Europe, the whole of the world. Beside Stalin, Hitler seems a boy scout. He is the Anti Christ and not Hitler.**

  Thursday, 7 December. It’s been such a nice sunny day. I rose feeling out of joint generally, but the sun was like a tonic. I got what bit of tidying round needed doing and was ready when my husband came back from the hospital. I’d sent Matron the Xmas dollies – only 1½ dozen this year, and not up to the usual standard. Bits and pieces get more scarce every year, and scraps for stuffing too, for each dollie takes quite a lot of scraps cut fin
ely. Gone are the days when Matron used to say, ‘Ask for whatever you want. As long as it is coming back to the hospital, it is quite alright.’ …

  Mrs Howson had said, ‘Come early – don’t forget it’s a little party’ – she had had her 25th wedding anniversary at the weekend. She had invited two other friends. Before they came, we sorted out some oddments of fur cloth and felt. She is making a monkey at evening class with a bought ‘mark’, and I’ve always wanted to make a monkey, so I’m copying it, hoping Edith won’t get vexed with the clutter of soft toys I seem to make for little Peter.

  I knew the couple invited very well. We spent a pleasant if a bit grim afternoon discussing Korea and our fears. Jack Hammond is certain the atom bomb will have to be dropped – ‘the only way to stem the onrush of Chinese, drunk with power, who otherwise will wipe out our troops mercilessly; and remember, those self same troops may soon be needed in Europe’. I see every argument for dropping the bomb, or bombs, yet I grow sick and cold with horror when I think of the results on the innocent as well as guilty – and ‘guilty’ in that soldiers are pawns in a game, hardly considered as human by the ones who wage wars. We took the Hammonds to the Ribble bus stop – they live near Ulverston – and we came home. I felt somehow lonelier than usual, not bodily as much as mentally lonely. Talking doesn’t solve world problems, but to talk out things always eases worry. My husband never liked to talk or argue. In fact, most things have always passed over his head and his argument has always been ‘Don’t worry so much. It does no good and you cannot help things.’

  Mrs Howson came in and I felt so impatient at her concerns and worry because she cannot get grey shoes anywhere. She has 19 pairs of shoes already, all colours, mostly Joyce or sling backs, or ‘peep toe’ sandals. A more expensive doll-eyed collection I couldn’t imagine, and not a good pair of walking shoes or bootees, not even Wellingtons for snow and wet. I didn’t like the idea of grey accessories to the deep ruby red coat she has anyway, and the expensive grey hat looks definitely wrong. She got up hurriedly when I turned on the 9 o’clock news and grabbed her coat, saying, ‘I’m not going to listen to any old war news. They make too much of it anyway. There’s never anything else nowadays.’