Nella Last's Peace Read online

  All my life people had wanted to change me. My mother wanted a boy – or a blue-eyed, golden-curled child like the one of her first marriage, who died a gentle being of two. She could have forgiven my dark eyes and hair if I’d been a boy, but as it was I always felt her disapproval in everything I did, or how I looked. My husband was attracted to me because I was ‘always so gay and lively’ but has always disliked any gaiety himself, always pointing out that he was satisfied to be with me alone, he didn’t want outsiders, etc., always wanting me to be different. It bred and fostered in me a real horror of trying to make people alter to please me – I’d not try and alter my little cats beyond training them to be clean and agreeable.

  Cliff must live his own life. I stood it till my tired aching head could stand no more and then I said as I held out my left hand, ‘Before I would dominate Cliff’s life in any way, I’d thrust this hand into the fire, as God hears me’, and then smiled wryly to myself at the futility of my remark. Cliff would never be dominated, by people or circumstances. Anyone who tried to do so would find they only held shadows. If circumstances held his body, the real Cliff would go. Oh dear, I could have shrieked ‘Shut up’ like a fishwife!

  Will’s anxiety at this time was partly because one of his reliable workmen, Norman, had just announced that he planned to leave and set up a joinery business of his own. Her husband’s worrying got Nella thinking.

  Sunday, 3 November. To hear him talk you would think he had a fire or something. Sorry as I am, I feel my patience already wearing thin, as he talks of having to cut down expenses. I thought moodily, ‘Just keep your hands off my housekeeping money or else you will start something.’ I said, ‘Well, considering you and Frank carried on with two boys and paid your parents £4 out of the profits all through the war till Frank left, and you then managed to pay £2 10s yourself, I don’t think you are near bankruptcy as you imagine. You have one good man, a last-year apprentice, another promising one, and a shop boy who is the handiest lad you have ever had.’

  Always tomorrow, with my husband. When war restricted things he talked of how we would go off after the petrol restrictions were lifted – stay the weekend, have meals out, go on good holidays. To get him to Ireland was almost too much for me. He won’t budge out to the pictures or anywhere else. I will go to London when Cliff is packing up, whether I feel ill or well. I can see a spell of grizzling economy ahead, though I am puzzled to know how he can cut down more. He never smokes, only has Guinness for supper, and never takes a drink at any other time. If we go to the pictures, we pay alternately. He never buys a sweet or a flower for me, or thinks I need any extra housekeeping or anything for my clothes, and just won’t give me my income tax back – says he is getting too much money for any rebate. Nothing Arthur can say can convince him he should give me back the £12 to £15 every year that is stopped off my wee income. He says I’ve to ask him if I want anything. My cold made me feel cranky tonight. I felt I could have started a real row if the slightest occasion had risen.

  Monday, 4 November. Cliff’s letter came telling me he was spending Xmas at home and would be off to Australia by the end of December – dear knows how he has got his passage. I wonder if he will be better away from the London he so loves, and a lot of the silly useless people he calls his friends, and who don’t seem of any value to him. Perhaps in Australia, where he will have to stand alone, my poor laddie will get his values finally sorted out. Weak tears streamed down my cheeks, I felt so very unhappy. My husband thinks I’m a fool not to put my foot down, for Cliff says he would never go if I was very set against it. I cried till I felt all life and vitality was drained out of me, and as I bathed my face I felt I prayed in my heart that I could keep in my mind how unimportant my little troubles were, that we were all part of the Plan, that all would work out some place, some day. ‘I am the captain of my soul’ is feasible, but ‘I am the master of my fate’ is not true.

  Tuesday, 5 November. I dreamt Arthur and Edith came – wishful thinking; they will not have money to spare with Edith being ill. This time of the year so often brings change into my life – or worry. I’d two babies born in December – one died. My gran died in late November. Cliff was wounded and I got word on the 19th of November. I always felt glad when Xmas preparations could go on and I’d a little brightness to look forward to.

  The North Lonsdale Hospital is on the verge of bankruptcy and stern economy is the order of the day in every possible way. No one leaves money in their will to endow a cot, etc. There seems a general idea that the Government will ‘see to all now’ [the NHS was set up in 1948]. While I deplore mass nationalisation, I do agree about the state being responsible for hospitals. I’ve had so much illness and so often couldn’t afford treatment I should have had, pulling through more by will power than care, always my little children to make me struggle to be well enough to rear them. I rejoice to think a time will come when women like me, too well off for charity and not well off enough for nursing home treatment, will be looked after in illness and operations.

  I got notice today I was liable to be called up as a juror. Seems odd. I’ve never had word of such before.

  Everywhere bangs and happy shouts of children. It’s the first big Bonfire Night since war started, bringing back faint echoes of our jolly parties, and the last one, so wild and gay, when Arthur had got word he had won his Inspectorate exam – the second place in Great Britain. When he went for his Viva, he got more marks than the top one. It was a cheap party, sausage and mash, but so many rolled up with the 6d of fireworks they had agreed, and of course Jack Gorst’s contribution was nearer to £6 than 6d! Of all that happy ‘ignorant’ crowd, eight didn’t come back, one has queer nerve lapses and two of the girls were left widows. It seems so very long ago, so much has happened.

  I’ll have to bottle most of the apples Edith’s friend sent from Ireland. They have got rather knocked and will not keep. They might do till Xmas, and by then I’ll have a few jars empty again.

  On 13 November Nella took the train to London, where she spent almost a week with Cliff. She looked around the shops in Kensington the following day. ‘I coveted a fur coat I tried on – I couldn’t resist seeing how I looked in it, £148!’ She saw a play and two variety shows, went to the ‘Britain Can Make It’ Exhibition, visited Mass Observation’s offices at Bloomsbury House, wandered about Portobello Market and travelled by bus to Camden Town and Putney – ‘I felt shocked,’ she wrote on the 17th, ‘to see so many flats still unfit to be lived in and wondered wherever all the people were living.’ Her stay in London got her thinking on the 20th about ‘my father’s people’, who ‘lived and were buried for generations round Woolwich. They were all seafarers, far back, working always for the Indian tea trade, any money in the family being an echo of “good investments” which enabled them to “die in their beds” and leave a little behind.’

  With peace came little in the way of plenty in 1946–7. The lights had indeed come back on – to reveal a worn and shabby people inhabiting a nearly bankrupt nation. There was an impressive litany of woes, many of which got Nella’s attention: a colossal national debt; housing shortages; thin or even virtually non-existent supplies of consumer goods; and austerity policies from Westminster that continued or even increased wartime rationing and added new regulations that constricted daily life. The burdens of existence fell heavily on housewives, for it was they who did most of the mending and making do and queuing, and it was they who dealt directly with new restrictions and unpredictable shortages. Bread had never been rationed during the war; now it was. In 1947 about half of consumer expenditure on food was rationed, and non-rationed perishables such as fish, fruit and vegetables were often in short supply or to be had only at alarming prices. Rations of some coveted items, including bacon, ham and fat, fell below wartime levels. The widespread shortages of consumer durables were exacerbated by the government’s drive to revive Britain’s exports of manufactured goods, at the expense of the domestic market.

  Tuesday
, 26 November. When I went down town I thought I’d never seen so many angry, baffled women – all except Co-op members! – who lately have been so well served. Tinned fruit was the bone of contention. ‘Strachey [Minister of Food] said there was 2 lb per head for everyone and it was in the Daily Mail and the Sunday Dispatch’ – yet my grocer, with hundreds of customers, had four small cases and we were told we would have to queue in the morning if we wanted one. If Cliff had been home for Xmas, I might have considered going down town at 6.30, though at that time I’d have had to walk, but I’ll not bother. Someone with kiddies might get the tins I’d have got.

  I stood amongst the women waiting to be served. Well dressed or otherwise, they all had one thing in common – a kind of look in their eyes and compressed-looking mouths, as if they had closed them tightly at times to keep back sharp words of irritation. I was covertly watching their faces through a little strip of mirror, rather badly lit, and one mouth looked particularly set. I looked again at the bit of chin that showed above a row of tinned pears, feeling pity as I thought, ‘You do look repressed and irritable’, till a corner of the hand-woven scarf under the chin caught my eye, and I recognised it for my own mouth, and wondered, ‘Do I often look like that? Where, oh where is “Lasty’s gamin grin” that seemed to amuse in those far-off Hospital Supply days, the “sugary smile” which at Canteen was said to spread over my face when Naval or Merchant Navy boys came in tired and hungry?’ My face so fascinated me, I went into a chemist’s shop next. I felt I must really see myself as others see me. I walked to the cosmetic counter and under pretence of selecting rouge under the daylight lamp, I looked closer at myself than I remember doing and was rather shocked to find how unlit my face was, so tired and shabby, so resigned, as if gaiety and laughter had fled – a November face. I bought a little box of rouge, feeling I needed it inside rather than outside, realising with a little shock how dead and heart a-cold I really felt, knowing suddenly what makes a man get quietly and steadily dead drunk!

  Both Cliff and Arthur visited their parents in early December – Cliff was about to leave for Australia. ‘I feel we four will never stand together again,’ Nella wrote on 6 December. ‘I’ve such a sadness on me,’ she noted three days later, ‘ such a hopeless feeling, at the thought of Cliff going so very far away – worse than when he went East in the war.’ The rest of the month was much less sociable and festive than the previous December had been, and Nella’s main companion was her reclusive husband. On 2 December she had had ‘thoughts of living on and on with someone who has lost interest in everyone and everything, except his food and warm fire, with not the slightest interest in other people or their opinions or ways’, and his sad appearance on the 12th got her thinking about their lives together.

  My husband looked so cold and tired. I often feel a sharp pang as I realise how he has missed his way. Other businessmen have arranged things that they don’t work so hard as they grow older. He has that queer mistrust of people, and plods on like a labourer, though in many instances a younger and stronger man could do things in less time. I thought of the muddle and disorder of his parents’ house and lives. He was never taught discipline of either thought or action, and never left home or his parents’ business, to learn life’s lessons for himself, except for those two blessed life-line years of the 1914–1918 war when Arthur and I lived in Southampton and the New Forest, to be nearer to him when he was in ‘Harry Tate’s Navy’ in the submarine chasm. I would have been better if I’d been stronger minded and not, as he once said, ‘so comfortable to live with’.

  ‘I try in every possible way to keep him going,’ she remarked on 18December, ‘feeling at times I’m fighting a losing battle.’ However, Christmas was ‘a very pleasant day, if rather quiet, after last year’, and since Nella had persuaded her husband to close his workshop for the better part of a week, they (or at least he) had time to relax, and to take day trips.

  Friday, 27 December. It was actually a fine day, and after a slaphappy tidy round with vac and duster, we set off at 10.30 to go to Ambleside to pay the bill for towing the car when the crown wheel went. They were very off-hand – said they would have sent it sometime but were very behind with all book-keeping and bills! It was a lovely day. We lunched at Ambleside at the White Lion, quite the best place we have been for years, and on to Kendal. The hills towards Scotland were covered with snow, but the sun shone like a blessing. Everywhere men worked at tidying hedges and ditches and road borders and carted huge drifts of leaves away.

  To me it’s really terrible to see German and Italian POWs, as well as Poles. Why oh why are they not sent home to work at repairing their own land, building up family relationships and doing a man’s job? Whose idea is it, I wonder, to keep men in semi-idleness, destroying initiative, making them soft with regimentation and pampering? They cannot all be Nazis, and two wrongs never yet made one right. I look at their brooding sad faces with a great sadness. Human beings have no right to treat their fellows so. Hope deferred doesn’t only make the heart sick, it withers and kills. My husband says I’ve always some bee in my bonnet, but nothing would make me feel it a right thing to do. I’m not sloppy about POWs, but you cannot punish a nation. What’s the use of scraps of rations and old clothes in helping folks? Give them their men folk. Help in things like material to repair, seeds, livestock. Make all Germany on the same footing, not zoned so that one fares better than another. Help decent Germans and back them to accept authority – and start afresh ourselves. My husband says they must be kept for harvesting our food. Then how can we pray for good crops and fair weather if we use slave labour, and anyway how expect them to work ‘worth their keep’? There may be Italians and Germans who, like many Poles, want nothing more than to settle in England. That’s different, and surely work could be found on the land or in the mines, though from what I hear they are not wanted in the mines by the men who don’t want their own sons to be trained for mines.

  Whenever I’ve my WVS uniform on, it’s almost certain at least one Polish soldier will speak to me. Last week I solved a mystery of quite a few weeks’ standing as to whatever the Poles could buy to pack into parcels they are always sending home – it’s secondhand clothes. They haunt the cheaper wardrobe shops in a rather poorer shopping street, and I feel sure the Pole was telling me of his family and their footwear trouble. His companion seemed to be telling me of his desire for work in a woodwork factory and insisted on showing papers – I could have read them if I’d had my glasses, the ones in English – and he drew a tangle of carved wood from his pocket and it was a chain cut out of a solid piece of wood, like Norwegians and Danes make. It’s a very great problem no doubt, but it must be tackled. It’s not good for anyone to have numbers of men herded together, growing bitter.

  Kendal shops were an amazement as usual. Even shops like Woolworths and Marks & Spencer had things we never see in Barrow branches, and in one electrical shop there were electric blankets and bed pads with ‘thermostat’ control and three heats, yet both in Barrow and Manchester they told Mrs Howson none were made with them now. I always look covetously at the good antique shops: they always have such beautiful bits of furniture.

  Today it was four Chippendale dining chairs and a little low long stool I’d have liked. Modern furniture, unless copies, has to me no grace or beauty, and steel tube furniture has real repulsion, and as for twisted imitation wrought iron and plastic, a real horror.

  Saturday, 28 December. It was so fair a morning – we set off for Morecambe for a little day out. We meant to go about ten o’clock, but Aunt Eliza came round and was a bit down in the dumps. I’d had more fish than we needed, left on the window sill yesterday, so I gave her a nice fillet of plaice and a bit of dripping, a mince pie and a sweet apple. Poor old pet; she likes eating, as she admits, and it cheered her up and off she went. I took my little Shan We – he refused to be left behind. Such an odd cat. He either loves motoring, or my company, enough to conquer any fear of the traffic noises, and when we had lunch at the
Royal at Bolton-le-Sands, he was tied to the table leg, but showed no signs of wanting to stray. He had his lunch and bottle of water in the car, but so strong is habit, I have to take a scrap of ashes in a newspaper – he must have at least one forepaw on familiar ground.

  The shops at Morecambe were very attractive and, like Kendal, still had tinned fruit like apricots and golden plums. Either people had no points or there had been plenty. We walked round the shops and along the Prom. There was a surprising amount of visitors sitting in the windows having late lunch and a lot of huge new cars about. South Lancashire people like Xmas Holiday always. As I looked at them I thought, as often, how silly and futile to lump people together and say, ‘I don’t like Lancashire people’ or Germans or Poles or any country. There were two South Lancashire men staying in the hotel where we had lunch, and no one could have been favourably impressed, and I thought, ‘I’d hate to be classed among those men and typed as from Lancashire.’ They looked as if material things were their god; too well fed and too fat, too loud mouthed, far too expensive clothes and car, for the feeling of black market not to come into my mind, and I’d have liked to slap one of their faces as he leered at me and kept touching my hand as he petted and played with Shan We. A really horrible man. We were back home for four o’clock, both feeling better for our little trip.