Nella Last's Peace Read online

  Such a mix-up. I’ve had a suspicion sometimes he was getting me mixed up with Aunt Mary, whose husband was killed in an accident in Abbey Road in the blackout in the war. I can remember telling him I was going to Ireland on my own, and how he teased me about always being independent. It was such an embarrassment to us both, and he apologised so sincerely for his mistake. I could see how lonely he has been these few months, for I’ve often seen him round town and always alone. I was so upset I got a bad attack of hiccoughs when I got in. I wish I knew some lonely friendly soul who could marry him. He’s a dear.

  Wednesday, 20 August. I’ve been nattering about the lavatory seat and lid ever since war ended. I hate shabby things and try and dodge some way to make them better, if I can. My husband never had that pride in his home to make the best of things and says, ‘Ah, don’t bother – it’s right enough’ as long as it holds together. I wanted him to have the seat and lid French polished, but today I got on my top note and decided I’d do the darn thing myself. I unscrewed it off and partly stripped off the polish with a piece of woollen material, wrung out of warm water and ammonia sprinkled on, and I’ll sandpaper every scrap off. It’s mahogany. I think I’ll just oil dress it, giving it repeated stains of linseed oil, and then Mansion polish will finish it off. I love a Chippendale polish on wood, or beeswaxed oak, far before a hand gloss …

  I was washed and changed before lunch, and off to Walney before 1.30 to Ena Whittam’s. The cow is better and out in the field again and today they were not so busy, for it was a little spell off in their harvest, for the two north fields are not ready till Friday or Saturday for cutting. There’s a lot of chinks in any scheme, rationing especially. Olga and Billy, two of Mrs Whittam’s family, have bought a pig between them to fatten and kill about Xmas, to ensure they have plenty to eat all winter. Olga has one little girl, Billy as yet no family. The pig weighs twenty-two score pounds, and they paid £25 and will feed it till killing, and there is all the waste weight. Ena says she estimates their bacon will work out at at least 3s a pound before they get it, and they will only have to give up their bacon ration!! I helped pick pears and beans for two orders besides my own, and then we stacked up a pile of untidy raspberry prunings and potato tops, which, to Ena’s mirth, annoyed me as they lay around. She said, ‘You’d never make a farmer. You are too nasty particular about dirt and untidiness.’ I smiled, but thought of Gran’s farm, tidy to a degree and as sweet and fair, in its own way, as a well-kept house.

  Monday, 25 August. Another lovely day. A pleasure to get up and face the day’s work. I decided to take all my curtains down, wash them, and left them in water to soak while I went down town shopping. I met Mr Jefferson and quite simply got to know how he had got me mixed up with Aunt Mary. On the boat coming over, Amy was talking about people and families she knew in Barrow and the district, and Mr J. and she found they had many mutual acquaintances. He asked if she knew anyone called Lord – Mary Lord, who had been a young friend of his wife and her sister. Amy said, ‘Ah yes, very well – wasn’t it dreadful about her husband, but it’s a happy release’ and told of Uncle Jim’s death, and how very lonely Aunt Mary would be now her family were either married or, in the case of Molly, working away from Barrow. Then he said, ‘I was walking down Abbey Road and saw you laughing and talking to someone and your whole appearance in your summer frock brought back a memory of before the war, when we were over. You looked so like Mary, and when I met you the first time and said “I’m sure you were a Miss Lord.” I never thought of any other Miss Lord, or of the years between my visits.’ I told him about gentle, sweet Aunt Mary, who, through all her bitter troubles, married to a brilliant clever man who was a dipsomaniac, loved and shielded him and only fifteen months after just stopped living and laid back in her chair without a word and died.

  Sunday, 1 September. Mother’s birthday today. She would have been eighty-five. Odd she should die so young, only fifty-two, and her three sisters and brother live above the allotted span. Even the senile invalid sister who lives out of the district, and whom we have not seen since before the war, is over seventy. Mother wearied her life away. She was never a happy woman. Her life really ended when her first husband died when she was only twenty-one.

  In September came a two-week visit by Arthur and Edith, who arrived separately, he on the 2nd, she on the 5th (after a holiday in Scotland). In the midst of recording details of daily life, Nella was, from time to time, introspective. ‘I hope I don’t live to be over eighty,’ she wrote on 10 September, ‘but then I like reading and cats, and being alone has no terrors for me – there’s so much to think about.’ On the 16th she was contemplating her ‘uncongenial in-laws’. ‘I remembered my own “let me alone” streak and my frenzy at people always poking sharp fingers into my soul case and leaving little scars, as they accused me, silently or vocally, of “being different”.’

  Wednesday, 17 September. Such a nice letter from MO. Arthur can see a value in my endless scribbles. He told me long ago they were of more use than ‘clever’ writings, as they wanted an ordinary woman’s viewpoint and routine. There’s so little help I can give now. It gave me a grand feeling I could help someone. An idle thought struck me – the weight and volume of over eight years’ scribbling must be surprising. Supposing I’d been clever, there could have been a few books! Always I longed to write, but there was something missing. Only in my letter writing and MO have I found fulfilment of my girlhood yearning to write. Anyway, they might have been good books. At least my letters have cheered and comforted – the boys always like them.

  Sunday, 21 September. We came back to Thirlmere to eat our picnic tea, and sat in the sun, then came slowly back, pausing a while by Ambleside lake. A car pulled in beside us and I heard a parrot screech, which I knew could only belong to one person, and sure enough it was Isa Hunter and her husband, and Amy and her husband in the back. We passed a few remarks. She had the audacity to ask why I’d ‘not brought Arthur and Edith up to see me’. I bet the little toad thinks I’ve forgotten her monkey-shines enough to be friendly again. By Gad, I’d like to meet her on her own and then if she ‘Dearied’ me I’d let her hear something she’d not forget.

  Nella’s hostility to this woman was exceptional, and re-emerged a few weeks later. ‘Whenever I think of Isa Hunter,’ she wrote on 11 November, ‘I feel again that cold rage she always arouses in me. I feel she has less right to her twisted, thwarted life than one of my little cats. I shall always blame her for making mischief at a time when a happy friendship was developing between Cliff and Margaret.’

  Wednesday, 1 October. My husband came rushing in excitedly and said, ‘How would you like a fridge for your birthday?’ and said a shop had four in and the proprietor, an electrician who often works on big jobs my husband has, had promised him one for a long time. In fact, he first did nearly five years ago, but any that have come in have been either ‘shop’ ones or priority. I feel a bit dazed and a bit indifferent, as I think if I’d been let have one and paid for it myself by instalments when the boys were home, it would not have cost so much – £29 10s – and I would have had it when most needed. I’ve done so long without it, I could have gone on doing so. I didn’t voice my thoughts. If we have another hot summer it will be grand for we both like ice cream, as well as the advantage of well-kept food, hard butter and marg, and crisp salads. It’s my birthday and Xmas present, so I’ll buy my shoes, and if I decide on a costume, out of my year’s income – this year only £19 odd.

  Poor Dad. I’m always glad he died before he saw his investments dwindle and crash after the 1914 war. They had begun to weaken in 1919, when he died suddenly. In a queer expansive mood on the cold wild March day before he died, when I sat on a low stool with my sleeping baby on my lap – Cliff was fifteen months old – he said he knew he would never realise his dream, to retire to Cornwall, and live retired, but he said he realised it was ‘much better to journey than arrive’. He had had a queer unhappy marriage. Mother should never have remarried. Her
thoughts and heart were for ever in the never-never land of her idyllic short marriage. She thought married life would always be like those few months. Dad puffed at his pipe as he rather shyly said, ‘You were always a blessing and interest to me. You know I’ve only really had two women to mean anything in my life, you and my mother, and it makes me very happy to know I’m leaving you comfortable. I can see Will will never get far, and I know you want to help the two little boys.’ If he had lived to see how money and investments went down so rapidly, it would have grieved him.

  * Tom Harrisson, one of MO’s founders and leading lights, who returned from service in Borneo after the war, had recently observed of postwar Britain, ‘I noticed how much less people laughed than when I had gone away, and how very much less than we laughed in Central Borneo’ (from a broadcast on the BBC Home Service, reprinted in the Listener, 23 January 1947, p. 136).

  * Nella was actually eleven when Victoria died in January 1901.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I CAN BE REAL BITCHY’

  October–December 1947

  Thursday, 2 October. Mrs Higham came in to see my fridge. Like Mrs Atkinson, she has that feeling I have – that we could have bought it years ago ourselves out of housekeeping money by instalments. ‘When things pass, both good and bad go’ – by the wee man.† I’d not go back, wars, atom-bomb threats or anything else. I’d like the more leisurely days, the plenty of simple amenities, of quantities of plain food like butter, milk, coal, etc., cheap. I’d like the ignorance that really was bliss, when war was something in the history books for ordinary people. The South African Boer War only touched a few deeply. To the rest and especially to we children it was a confusion of flags waving and ‘Soldier of the Queen’ and happy cheering, cakes in bags and mugs of tea sent to outlying fields in beer barrels, which made the tea taste very odd.

  But under all the freedom, women could only speak and write, and all men were tyrants, however loving. I see red when a silly song out of, I think, Annie Get Your Gun is sung, ‘The girl I will marry’, is drooled over the wireless. It sums up the Victorian Edwardian attitude so thoroughly, and I was one of the unfortunates who ‘looked like a doll’. I’ve always looked incapable, or something, for added to my weak streak, I’ve been over-ruled by first my father and then husband, ‘taken care of’, ‘far too attractive to give much education – she will only marry and it will be wasted’. Men folk of my day had a very ‘Man of Property’ outlook, ‘I earn the money, I must know where it all goes’ attitude. No housekeeping savings could possibly be spent on anything not liked or approved by the lord and master of the house, father or husband. A woman’s place, unless sickness or loss drove her out to work, was, except in districts where women worked in mills, decidedly in the home. When my husband had such a lot of rheumatism and was off work six months at a stretch, he would never let me have boarders to help out – there were only men boarders in any quantity in Barrow at any time, with there being no work to bring women into the town. I was not let take advantage of my father’s offer to put me into a little shop of whatever line I chose. Every idea that didn’t coincide with his was condemned utterly. If the boys had not backed me up more or less by their outlook on life and their ambitions, I couldn’t have gone on – and I saw to it they had no false ideas of lordly superiority towards women!

  Mrs Higham and I talked idly of our girlhood, of men’s really harem outlook. She said, ‘I often wish I’d stayed in Liverpool, you know. I could have felt in things as I grow older.’ We talked of Hospital Supply, Canteen and Red Cross shop days, when we felt worthwhile. Now there only seems the daily round, and to take each day as it comes and do the best with it. Neither of us are the ‘Housewives’ League’ type who could fight for causes.

  Wednesday, 15 October. Mrs Whittam and I sat and talked. She has had a wonderful lot of things sent from America lately – it cost her nearly £6 for duty! Her daughter has sent shoes and a dress, stockings and rubber overshoes, and stacks of food – dried fruits and chocolates, meat, milk and jam. She is wisely putting some on the shelf. We had a real good grizzle as we conjectured about the austerity ahead, wondering how long it would last. She had backed Firemaster and it came in second – she never seems to back a loser in a big race …

  It’s a fearful and wonderful thing the way the Russians have emerged from serfdom in so short a time, but virgin minds like virgin soil, and can nourish quicker than old. The Russians are unique in this swift moving modern world. With that clear-cut opportunity to go from night to day, they are not cluttered up with the perplexities and complications of mind the rest of the world have accumulated in the last 200 years. I always have a feeling that Russia is a potency of good or ill, and can swing civilisation as never before, I’ve a feeling for right or wrong. Communism is THE force in the world, and the worst of it is that it is one of the few creeds (?) or beliefs (?) – perhaps force is the right word – that in this world of inertia of mind and muddled thinking is a living urge. Just as Christianity took a deep hold on people by the sincerity and belief of people who would go to their deaths in Rome, making them feel ‘it must be right’, I’ve a feeling that the very fanaticism of Communism is like a torch on a dark journey for a lot of people. Sometimes I feel as if life baffles me. I sit and think and think, trying to fit things together, feeling I look through a kaleidoscope that changes before I’ve seen the last pattern and making little sense or cohesion at that. Ordinary people can do so little.

  Wednesday, 22 October. Lately I’ve been amazed at finding so many people with old relatives of eighty and over. At one time it was seldom, especially when, as now, they are active. The other day Aunt Eliza was grumbling about her thatch of brown hair, with only a few grey ones sprinkled through, saying it grew too quickly and a perm lasted no time and that by Xmas she would be ready to have it done again. Aunt Sarah is failing, it’s true. In her note the other day she complained of the mists off the river and how frost gripped her bones, yet she bakes and washes, reads a lot and loves visitors, and her cottage is kept trim and clean. There’s something in life today that suits old people. I often think it’s because they are compelled to lead a regular life. They cannot choose the somewhat indigestible dainties the very young and very old prefer. They cannot sit in the chimney corner, and if they did give up and stay in bed, as old ones did up to the last generation, the modern hardness and the undoubted lack of endurance their daughters were expected to have wouldn’t encourage semi-invalidism. So unusual was it to have an active gran of over seventy, when most girls at school had grans sitting round in shawls or in bed till lunch, if not all day. I swung between pride and a queer kind of shame. My little gran was so active and busy. I felt it was not quite right she should be the first one thought of or sent for in illness.

  Things were different then. About fifty-two years ago, she came to visit Mother at Rampside, just outside Barrow, and to go and see an old friend who had changed farms from Greenodd to near Rampside. I can remember plainly how upset and worried my mother was when Gran stayed overnight to look after a sick child and when next day two more were ill and it was scarlet fever. We used to go and talk with Gran over the garden wall and she was there nearly six months as one after another went down – milk and butter, by the way, were sold as usual and no one seemed to think it odd! No breakdown for Gran. Mother went and brought her cat that had been going to have kittens, and kindly neighbours who had been going to stay the fortnight Gran had planned to be away shut up their cottage and stayed the full time till Gran got back – and no one saw anything odd in any of the arrangements.

  Nowadays, unless it was in the backwoods, no such state of affairs could exist. We cannot hold more than a given quantity in our hands. If we pick up one thing or choose another, we have to put something away to do so. We are getting pensions, medical care, school meals, do this and do that, and you cannot have this and only a wee bit of that – all very nice and easy in some people’s minds, but it lessens personal responsibility and kills
that kindliness to each other, even in the country villages. I heard Aunt Sarah say once, ‘No one watches for smoke from a cottage chimney, knowing if a fire is lit all is well, and if no smoke from the chimney of a person living alone, it’s your duty to go and see what is to do and if help is needed in any way.’ People carried buckets of water from the well for each other, hung clothes out if anyone had bad colds, kneaded and baked bread for old people or expectant mothers, cut up an old warm coat and remade it for a shivering child. Time brings changes. No doubt all will work out.