Nella Last's Peace Read online

  Wednesday, 1 January, New Year’s Day. It was such a lovely bright morning. We decided to set off at eleven o’clock and have lunch at Ambleside at the White Lion again. I took Shan We and nearly lost him – if coaxing could have made me part with him, he would be lording it in the White Lion, with several cat lovers at his command! He loved it, particularly when he got scraps of turkey brought to him. It was an ‘extra’ lunch – turkey and a choice of trifle or plum pudding, but I preferred cheese and biscuits. We would have gone off to Keswick, but snow powdered fields and roads and lay on the hills, and heavy clouds threatened more, so we turned back and came home by Kendal. Ploughing, hedging and ditching and dung spreading were all going on busily. Even the heavy water-logged land was being turned by tractor ploughs. Farmers are more behind than last year, for the wet autumn was bad for planting winter seed. We were in by four o’clock, and I made up a good fire and we sat down to get warmed …

  We sat talking of the coming year. He said, ‘I wonder what it will bring?’ I said, ‘I feel changes all round somehow’, and to amuse him I began to talk of ‘If I won the Irish Sweep’, or rather the share of a ticket I have. I feel so sorry he has lost Norman, for it means he has to work harder, and he did plan to take things easier after the war. His condition rather than his health gives me concern. I notice a big change in him – an ageing far more than his actual years, and he says he feels he is growing old quickly. If only he could take things easier, and think out his work better so as to minimise effort. He should have had a son to help him, though few sons would have been content with the muddling ways of that workshop, and he would never change in any way of anything; and it’s difficult sometimes in the house, where I do insist it’s my place, and as I don’t interfere with the shop, tell him he should not interfere in the running of the house. I’ve fought my way to that stand, and anyway he cannot really prevent me giving things when I have to help his old ones. Never a day passes but a wee taste of some kind goes down to them. I never open a jar of jam, etc., bake or make anything, but they get a tiny share. I hoard my sweets or chocolate and they have little cheer-ups when they feel dim and have often eaten their share.

  My husband needn’t have been so short today when I gave some POWs all the sweets I had with me – they were mine. We had stopped to have a drink of tea out of a flask and two fair-haired lads – stupid peasant-faced children – came along. I let the window down and beckoned them and said, ‘You boys like toffee?’ I felt a little twinge of real fear at the wolfish look in their eyes when they saw the handful of sweets I held out and, knowing boys, divided them equally. There were two coloured tinsel-wrapped chocolates – they were ‘Quality Street’ mixture – and the anxious look on one boy’s face till he got his would have drawn a rebuke of ‘Now, greedy’ from me when Cliff was small. I could only feel pity for the two grown children. They spoke quite fair English, but very slowly. I said ‘A Happy New Year, boys, and good luck.’ They gave a funny little bob and one said, ‘And to you, good madam’ – I thought, till a little while after I realised it was ‘müdder’.

  Gradually a feeling of pity rather than let-them-suffer towards POWs seems to be creeping into people’s attitude. Mrs Whittam is very kind to those at a nearby camp. They made rope slippers very skilfully and asked three packets of cigarettes for them, and Mrs Whittam gave everyone a pair for Xmas so that those poor lads could feel they were capable of earning something if it was only cigs! Yet at Canteen she was really bitter against all Germans, and very angry with me for the notion that there could be any good ones. What interests me is – nobody has a good word for the Poles and I never see anyone talking to them. Yet any I’ve had speak to me are quite nice friendly boys or men, and if our eyes have met and I’ve smiled they have seemed eager to return it. They walk about like shadows, rarely conversing, and the look in their eyes, sometimes of far horizons, grieves me sorely. Someone once said to me, ‘Those Poles might have fought against us’, yet I know that same woman feels sorry for German and Italian POWs.

  I always remember Margaret Atkinson’s cousin telling of a little incident. He had been a POW for years and was taken at one of the Greek Islands and held in many places before ending up in a forestry camp in Germany. He was good at catering and dodged up Red Cross parcel oddments into square meals, and swapped things with the eager and not unkindly guards for vegetables and fruit from the surrounding district, but his greatest need was salt – the Germans seemed to lack any for themselves. He was a ‘trusty’ and the guards took him to carry the loaves of bread from the village bake house and he decided he would ‘try and find some salt for Xmas anyway’. He took a small Colman’s mustard tin and as he waited in the doorway of the bake house, managed to reach the box of salt and get it back into his pocket. A wrinkled old gran brushed against him and muttered ‘God bless – I’ve boys of my own’ and pushed a packet in his hand. When he got to the camp, he found it was about one ounce of salt, carefully wrapped. He said, ‘I never felt so mean in my life, Mrs Last – and pray I don’t ever again. It wiped all bitter feeling from my heart. I seemed to have a window in my mind opened.’

  Friday, 3 January. I had no shopping to carry so went for a ream of paper to the printing works, wondering just what weight of paper I’d covered with scribbles since the beginning of the war, and how much postage for letters, air mail and parcels! The girls in the post office used to laughingly tell me I was one of their best customers. I was in again before four o’clock, so got my ironing done before tea. I fried bacon and sausage and thick sweet apple slices, feeling my husband would need a good hot meal when he came in, and he ate a good one and the warmth brought back colour to his face. He seems to have too rapid a metabolism, for his good meals don’t do him the good they should – they never did …

  Today I was approached again by the Secretary of the Women’s Unionist Party and asked to take the Chairmanship of a Ward. I held it for two years before the war and did quite a bit of speaking, but always shied from a real political speech, feeling I was a sad ‘wobbler’ and had no hard and fast conviction or the real bigotry necessary. It was no use arguing with Mrs Finlay. She used steamroller tactics of ‘splendid organising ability rusting’, ‘having the tact and gaiety so necessary’, etc. I weakly pleaded health reasons, wishing heartily I could have gone in for politics again, but knowing it would only be a source of real worry and annoyance to me now.

  On 19 January Nella would say of her resistance to this political overture, ‘I don’t feel a good enough Tory to do it.’ Later still, on 18 February, she allowed that the Labour government ‘are trying to work to a goal, where no one will be hungry, and all will have work to do. I’ve a deep admiration for their ideals and aims. If I began to speak or work for the Conservatives, I feel I’d have just that sympathy to opponents that would make anything I said or did of little value.’ This sort of open-mindedness tended to moderate her anti-Labour inclinations. ‘I’ve a fatal gift of seeing both sides of a question,’ she confessed in a late 1948 Directive Response. Still, she was decidedly not on the left. ‘I’m a Conservative,’ Nella wrote on 18 October 1945, ‘or maybe a Liberal at heart, like Arthur says. Anyway, I’m not a Socialist.’

  Nella’s sympathies were clearly towards individualist rather than collectivist values; she wrote in her Directive Response for October 1942 that ‘I’d rather live in a hut of my own than share a palace with others’. Her empathetic qualities may, though, have steered some of her thinking to the left. On 21 December 1948 her friend, Mrs Newall, said to her, ‘You crack on about being a Tory, but you are an out and out Socialist sometimes’; however, while this remark touched on Nella’s eclectic and flexible thinking about politics, there was no doubt about her approval of prudence, restraint and personal responsibility, and her hostility to bureaucratic controls. (Revealingly, Nella disliked the novels of Anthony Trollope, and wrote on 28 December 1947 that ‘I always feel Trollope portrays a period from which sprang “socialism” in its more rampant form.’)
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  Monday, 6 January. It’s been a dreadful day – snow and driving wind. I woke cold in the night and lay awake for a while, trying to think what I could turn out for my parcel for Save Europe, and when I’d had breakfast I turned out everything I possibly could spare, feeling it wasn’t right to have two woollen jumpers, a woollen dress and stockings lying about – I’ve not worn them lately – and if I do want them, I’ve other things to wear. I packed good khaki shirts Cliff left, both drill and woollen, and my WVS raincoat, and made a really decent parcel – 1s 2d postage …

  Mrs Atkinson really annoyed me. She came hurrying in to borrow some starch – but was unlucky. She walked into the dining room to warm her hands and saw the half-packed parcel and she said, ‘You’re surely not giving those two woollen jumpers. Why our Margaret would be glad of them.’ I said, ‘But she has piles and piles. Come to think of it, she could turn some out.’ Mrs Atkinson tossed her head and said, ‘I’d watch she didn’t give anything that might be given to a German – I’d burn it first – and it’s a bit heartless of you when they did what they did to your Cliff.’ I opened my mouth to speak and closed it. All the talking in the world wouldn’t convince people like her. Then I said, ‘Cliff doesn’t bear ill will – he thinks like I do – that good is stronger than evil and only by turning to good, in however simple a form, will we find strength and a way out of all the mess we are in’, and let it go at that; but I felt glad in my heart that my careless Arab,† wounded and injured for life as he has been and is, could feel strongly the unhappiness of the POWs, and could condemn the luxury of the Army of Occupation, lavish food in NAAFI† – so much better even than we get at home – and would talk of the Germans, Jews and Italians as people and not as something alien and set apart – and I’d rather be a fool, judged by Mrs Atkinson’s standards. I thought when she had gone out, ‘You would be worse off, you know, if I wasn’t a fool. What about buying a big pan and a jam pan for your own use?’

  Three days before, Nella had written of Mrs Atkinson, ‘I like her as a neighbour and she is very kind, but she is certainly very trying.’ Nella, perhaps unfairly, thought Mrs Atkinson insufficiently careful in her household management, and she objected to her neighbour’s penchant for borrowing. ‘If she was poor or old I’d give things gladly, if it meant self-sacrifice, but it does irk me when I know she has more housekeeping money to work on than I have … She says, “You know you are welcome to anything I have”, but whenyou don’t happen to be a borrower the offer has no value.’ Nella revisited this issue in her Directive Response for September 1947 when she wrote about neighbours, and her remarks then were fairly objective. ‘We are on very good terms but at times I have to withdraw a little. She is such a chronic borrower. I’m not. I dislike having to use anything of anyone else’s and have a finicky distaste of lending personal things like blouses, scarves, etc. Luckily we are not the same size in much – I’m much smaller. Pans, dripping, garden roller, cooking tins and dishes, mincer, tapes, cutting-out shears – she regards as communal’, an attitude that was bound to conflict with Nella’s view that ‘my things are mine’. Still, Nella said of the Atkinsons, ‘I would like to be friendlier. I’d like us to exchange bi-weekly evenings and perhaps play cards. They are good company but my husband prefers his fireside unshared.’

  ‘What a day,’ Nella wrote on 7 January. ‘We woke to find all covered with snow and a cold wind that seemed to drive into the house and take all warmth away.’ The rigours of this exceptional, almost unrelenting winter persisted for weeks, with various consequences. On 18 January, en route to Spark Bridge, she noticed that ‘The flooded fields and meadows were pitiful. No dung spreading has been possible – the heaps either lay in islands or washed away. So little ploughing was possible last autumn and now, when the ground should be getting into shape, it’s under water.’ ‘Bitterly cold’ were the words she often used to describe a day’s weather. She kept only one fire going in her house, in the dining room; and she saw how her Aunt Sarah struggled to keep the cold at bay in her small cottage. ‘I shuddered to think of the squatters in the RAF huts over Walney,’ she wrote on 29 January. ‘They could not keep fires day and night as the servicemen did – and still complain of cold and discomfort.’

  These were grim weeks. Coal was in short supply – some women were routinely going to movie matinees in order to save on fuel – and from the second half of the month there were intermittent power cuts, which meant, among other things, that these cinemas closed. On 24 January, ‘When the laundry man brought my fortnightly parcel, he said, “Go as slow as you can with laundry – if we don’t get more coal this week we will have to close down.”’ Nella found on 29 January that ‘water spilled outside glazes into ice almost at once, and when Mrs Salisbury was doing the step, her cloth kept freezing to it!’ It was all rather dispiriting. ‘It seems as if Nature herself is part of the out-of-joint tenure of our lives,’ she wrote on 6 February. ‘When blinding snow was swirling down yesterday afternoon,’ observed the North-Western Evening Mail on 10 February, ‘Barrow Park resembled a scene in Switzerland’ and ‘tobogganing was in full swing’.

  Friday, 31 January. We had our first 100% cut in electricity, but it didn’t affect me as I have gone back to my wartime ways of cooking on the hob of the dining-room fire wherever possible, and I never use the bedroom or bathroom radiators unless for a very short time, and my husband always writes in the dining room, to save electricity for people who haven’t a fire. I wonder what folk will do in those lovely all-electric blocks of flats, and on some housing estates. I’ve my one coal fire for warmth and water heating, and, with the little stool in front, do the bulk of my cooking, when it’s mostly stews and soups.

  Wednesday, 5 February. Mrs Salisbury came and we worked busily together. Snow fell all day, but the wet kind and kept melting. I stared in amazement at Mrs Salisbury. She has always seemed sensible in the way she tried to make the money go round her family of four children, for her husband is only a labourer in the Yard. I’ve often told her she would be better to stay at home now she has the children’s state allowance, cook meals and bake, etc. I can tell beyond potatoes, bread and jam and corned beef they don’t get much of a midday meal. Today she said, ‘I’m trying to get a vac – pay 5s a week for it’, and she only has the very old carpet I gave her off our dining-room floor and with no pile at all except round the edges where there was no tread. I said tactfully, ‘Don’t you worry about the house. You get a really nice rig-out for yourself this year and pay in to the “club”, and get Phyllis something nice. Don’t forget what I say, that in a few years the two oldest boys will be bringing home wages to help you.’ But I saw her mouth set. If she can get a vac, she will.

  Friday, 7 February. The cold has been arctic – glassy roads and a bitter south-east wind that swept through unexpected crevices and doors. The screaming gulls fought over my boiled vegetable scraps and wheeled and swept overhead all day, and the starlings, tits, thrushes, blackbirds and robins fought over the sheep’s head bones I threw on to the lawn. I felt I’d no clothes on under my cotton overall. My wretched bones felt they creaked, and my hands swelled with the pain when they got chilled. I was thankful I could stay indoors …

  The news of the cuts in electricity was a shock. I thought of the poor people who were in all-electric houses or flats. As it is it will mean cinemas, hairdressers and many confectioners at a standstill in the day, and be a problem to housewives with only an electric stove for cooking. I began to plan. I’ll bake a batch of bread tomorrow and a good gingerbread, for I’ve plenty of dripping and some brown sugar. My butcher brought a piece of brisket beef and I’ll cut off any bits of lean I can and stew it with vegetables and pot roast the fat end with potatoes. I can always do a casserole on my dining-room fire stool.

  The next day her husband joked about her fondness for plans, saying, ‘You should have been married to Shinwell [Minister of Fuel and Power]. You would have seen he never landed us in this mess. Your love of planning would have been of s
ome use there.’

  Saturday, 8 February. My husband has a queer dislike of seeing me asleep. He woke me anxious as I slept on the settee and said, ‘Are you sure you feel all right?’ I blinked and said, ‘No. I’m cross you woke me. I like to wake up myself.’ He said, ‘You looked so far away from me I was frightened’, and he really looked upset. I said, ‘Well, someone once said sleep was a “little death”’, and was sorry I’d been so flippant when he whitened and said, ‘Don’t say such dreadful things!’

  Almost every day this month was a struggle – a struggle to keep warm (often not possible), to prepare food, to keep the pipes from freezing, to get out and about (Nella was housebound most of the time). People’s spirits were low, their energy was sapped and physical complaints were commonplace.