Nella Last's Peace Read online

  Margaret brought some magazines back. There is a decided coolness now between us. I think my remarks about the Australian pilot have offended her out of all proportion – several times she has got in a dig about such a girl ‘seeming to be good enough for so and so’. Useless to say anything. The cap has been crammed down over her ears and not just fitted. I wonder in my heart if I started a train of thought that night, if Margaret suddenly sees how many ‘friends’ she has had, how many heartbreaks. Her friend Linda is married and very sedate, rather snobbishly and slavishly so! She pauses to think how her husband – now left town – would like every little action. Margaret asked her to go to a show the other night and Linda said, ‘Oh NO, Margaret. Eddie would not like it, for I know you would be sure to meet some of your boy friends and they would string along.’ I looked at Margaret’s gay vital face tonight, suddenly seeing why Cliff and she didn’t draw any nearer as I’d hoped. They have both that lack of stability, that snatching at life, always wanting the next thing. They are too much alike. I hope Margaret doesn’t keep up her offence with me. She is a sweet girl and never takes notice of my husband’s moods and silences. I came to bed early, glad my mind is settled enough to read and enjoy a book. It’s a great blessing when one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book.

  Friday, 21 September. I rose feeling tired but had a strong cup of tea and a bit of toast. The butter does go off nowadays. I thought as I tasted it this morning, ‘It’s just as well we don’t get more than we do – that there is marg.’ I baked a little ginger and date cake to share with my mother-in-law, who sent up sugar and her lard ration; made a little hot pot from my scrag of mutton, baked apples and dried egg custard. I had some bits of fat to render and thought I’d clarify my fat in the chip pan. When I took off the lid I felt so annoyed. Mrs Atkinson has borrowed it three times since last Saturday; it was so burnt I feared it would not be any more use – in fact, at one time I’d just have thrown it away. There were bits of blackened fish as well as potatoes and she knows very well that if I do fish in it I always clean it by pouring the fat when boiling into a large dish half filled with water, and letting the fat set before scraping off any scraps from the bottom. I had to boil up and set twice and will do it tomorrow – and keep my chip pan in a different place and not in the garage where she can pop in and get it when she wants without asking.

  Tuesday, 25 September. I feel I’ve never had such a sour attitude on life in general. I thought of the fun and laughter there used to be at Centre, even in the darkest days of war. Sometimes they say in the office, ‘You are quiet’ – say it in wonder – and I just smile, but think, ‘I feel quiet, I’m tired out’, and wonder if that is why others feel dim. There was such an eager looking forward to the end of the war. When I used to talk of still lean times till all got reorganised, I was looked on as a real dismal Jimmy. Now it’s over. We look forward to a winter which promises to be short of coal and food. Women who thought their husbands would be released if their job was waiting are feeling disappointed. Husbands are coming home so changed and with such altered outlooks they seem strangers. Women are leaving their wartime jobs and finding it’s not as easy to pick up threads as lay them down. Clothes coupons are beginning to seem inadequate lately when big things are needed. Meat is scarcer and nothing to replace it in the menus of harried landladies and mothers of families. Milk is down to two pints a head per week. There is so little brightness in life, and people’s heads are so tired. Speaking for myself, I feel as if anyone said, ‘Tell me what you would really like to do’, I could not tell them. I could say I’d like to go somewhere where there were no bitter winds and damp to make me dread winter, somewhere where I could lie in the sun and feel warm, but I feel too indifferent to think of anything I’d really like to buy, or do, and what I do seems only like another job – all except when I come to bed and lie reading. It’s my chief joy today. I think of this tiredness magnified to the highest degree amongst the homeless ones. Sometimes I wonder if we get wavelengths of their despair and depression. I wonder what would happen if anything like the Spanish influenza swept over the world like it did after the last war – people would die in greater numbers than even in the war.

  Thursday, 4 October. My 55th birthday – and Centre finally finished except for a little whist drive next Tuesday and our trip to Blackpool on Wednesday. I feel a bit dim tonight. We were down early and worked like niggers. Mrs Woods came down soon after Mrs Higham and I did and helped us sort out six years’ accumulation of junk in the way of old cardboard boxes, old letters – Mrs Waite has a Chinaman’s aversion to destroying any written or printed matter! Carters trailed in and out for various lent things. The place got emptier. We were glad of our hot lunches – really hot with junk we had burnt and got the oven hot. Mrs Waite came in, and Mrs Lord and Mrs Ledgerwood would not have anything at all to do with her and kept out of the Committee room. I got into trouble with the organisers of the trip to Blackpool for having asked Mrs Woods to go with us. I said impatiently, ‘Oh, don’t be daft – you invited Mrs Higham and I, and Mrs Woods is on the Committee’, and got the answer ‘Well, we like you’! They knew it was my birthday and teased me to tell them how old I was, one woman saying, ‘Well, I know you are nearer fifty than forty’, and made those who knew my age laugh …

  I was home at 4.15 and before I changed or washed I relaxed on the settee and read Cliff’s letter – quite an ordinary and newsy one. I need not have worried so with visions of him being ill. He is so happy just now in his work, he says. He would make the Army his career if he had a small private income! I’ve been astonished to hear many remarks which show the same trend – married men too who speak of living in occupied countries with their families later on …

  Aunt Eliza came in with some pears and a wee buttonhole of two flat clover-coloured daisies, which will be the making of my clover flannel frock. She has such an eye for colour as form – surprisingly so for an old country woman. We sat and talked. She will be eighty this December but her mind is as keen and clear as Aunt Sarah’s and her memory like a book whose pages can be turned back for reference. Surprisingly enough, tonight she talked of Mother, who died at fifty-two – poor Mother whose heart broke at twenty-one and for the rest of her life had little to give her second husband or her three children; who, looking back, seemed to live in a world entirely her own and preferred shadows and might-have-beens to real people. My husband said, ‘If Nell doesn’t stop losing weight she is going to grow very like her mother in figure and general looks.’ Aunt Eliza was shocked. She said, ‘Oh no, Will – why, Nell’s mother was a beauty. I’m sure Nell takes after Grandma Lord’, which, considering I’ve heard Aunt Eliza discuss the short stature and the all-round worthlessness of a family who had lived for generations in Woolwich – ‘which they tell me is London’ – I thought it a bit comic. She looks well for her change of air and speaks of trying to get a cottage in the country next summer. I thought of the way Mother and her sisters had squandered money, just lately letting it drain away. I thought in that respect I was like the Lord’s family, and of course I never had any to squander. My shillings have always had to go as far as eighteen pence.

  I made some little felt shoes and got them on seven dollies. They are coming on very nicely. I’ve a pile of odd bits of material from Centre, too, I can piece up for very wee ones’ nighties and I’ll make some little dressing gowns of crazy patchwork from my good scraps of pastel-coloured crêpe de Chine and silk. I’ll find plenty to do all right, but I would like to find something where we could work in company. It’s no use worrying. I had a job to break into the war but I did it.

  Bed seems pretty good to my aching back and wretched bones and I’ll read when I’ve written two letters.

  Saturday, 6 October. It was such a queer foggy morning and when I went to the hairdresser’s for nine o’clock the cars and buses all had lights on full. I cannot be in a good mood with myself. For the first time, getting my hair permed irked and fid
geted me, but it’s a very good one and will last. It was my husband’s birthday gift so cost me nothing either. When I came home at twelve o’clock, the sun was shining brightly and people thronged the streets. The sun, the heaps of celery, pears and apples, tomatoes and boiled peeled beetroots, and meeting so many children and young people happily munching apples or pears as they walked in the sun, seemed to give such an air of happy prosperity, quite like the pre-war days.

  It always seems odd to me to see queues for shoes, but an incident I heard the other day made me wonder if it was people’s greed that was partly to blame for the shortage. Favoured customers get a ring when Joyce or good branded shoes come in, and one woman who, before the war, would never have had more than three pair of shoes was heard to boast she had fifteen pairs of shoes that had never yet been mended and were as good as new. My husband, who never in his life owned more than one fountain pen, now has three. He had one from Arthur as a present and passed on the one I bought to Clifford and was heard to say he could have done with a spare one and was offered two at different times and took them. I said, ‘You cannot use more than one pen at once’ but he seems to like to see them! I’ve noticed many little incidents like it at different times and feel it’s one of the chief sources of everyday things being scarce. I had enough soup to heat and we had potted meat, celery and tomatoes, wholemeal bread and butter.

  We decided to go to Kendal for our last little outing before the clocks were put back, and have our tea out. It was a glorious day for motoring, bright and clear and golden brown leaves softly falling like snow and drifting along the roads into heaps. I dearly love Kendal, its old hotels and buildings and its general air of peacefulness, only marred by the heavy North Road traffic thundering through. I think it should be by-passed from the narrow streets. I could have bought fat hares and rabbits, trout or mackerel, and the shops were so well stocked. I saw china and crockery I never thought to see again, and the antique shops had things of beauty and usefulness, not ugly museum pieces. I looked at chairs and presses, gay china and lovely glass, thinking ‘Judith Paris† may have owned things like that’, and laughed at my whimsy when I realised they would have come from every corner of England. I saw my first television set but was not very thrilled. The screen was so tiny any performers would have looked like dolls …

  Mrs Howson came in for a chat. She got home last night and looks a bit down. She has had a nice time in Portsmouth. She says she doesn’t know what she will do when the clothing job finishes at the WVS. She is a very lonely and somewhat aloof woman, and at times gets notions that everyone and everything is against her. I feel concern at times when she is in that mood, recalling how her father with no real cares felt the same – and one day was found hanging from a beam in his paint shop.

  * The symbol † indicates that a word or words, or an acronym, are explained in the Glossary.

  * In reply to a question from Mass Observation about names, Nella reported that her parents had wanted to call her Deirdre but a clergyman objected to its Irish roots, so she was named Nellie, which she always hated (this is the name on her birth certificate). However, her mother called her Deirdre, ‘which got shortened to Dearie and which the boys as well have always called me’. The name ‘Nella’was once used in a school concert; she was delighted, and it stuck. (Directive Response, May 1946)

  * Hugh Walpole’s regional fiction, the ‘Herries Chronicle’ (1930–33), which comprised four historical novels, featuring narratives of violence and romance, was set in the Lake District in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nella was a great admirer of these novels. Her mother’s family were Rawlinsons.†

  * Field Marshal Earl Roberts (1832–1914) had advocated a robust British rearmament to defend against (as he saw it) an understandably expansionist Germany. A street in Barrow is named after him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A SORT OF PEACE

  October 1945–January 1946

  Tuesday, 16 October. Sometimes I’ve a cold fear on me when I look at my husband. He never had a very firm hold on realities. Now he has an interest in nothing. At one time I grew frettish if I was not ‘bright and amusing’. Often now he never speaks for the whole evening unless it’s a grunt or ‘Yes’ or ‘Oh’. I think of his parents and shudder. Beyond breathing and eating, they have not been alive for years, say quite frankly they ‘don’t want bothering’ when their sons or daughters call. No memory, no interest in themselves or the outside world. I’m heart thankful the boys are not like that. I’d rather never have their company than they should grow so afraid and indifferent to life. All my wild rebellion seems over. Strong people don’t dominate like weak ones. In a strong person there is something to fight, a chink in their armour somewhere. Everyone has something. I count my blessings and find I’ve a good many, and most of us walk alone. I often envy women with a big family. I look at Margaret often and wish she was my girl, though lately we seem very apart. I think my words about the Australian were a cap that fitted and for the first time she began to think.

  Saturday, 20 October. I’ve a great sadness on me. Perhaps the grey day and the thought of winter contributed to my mood, but somehow the dockers’ strike, the worldwide unrest, the widespread misery made me wonder how long it will be before we can say, ‘Peace in our time, oh Lord.’ The only peace is that there are no active hostilities, but the corrosion of the war years is eating deeper into civilisation. People have time to think, and their thoughts make them afraid. In the chaos that follows war there seems so little to grip. Things alter and move so quickly. Sometimes I feel I’m on a slide – and a greased one at that. In the simple code in which my generation were reared there was right and wrong, good and bad, things which were just not done, examples we strove to follow. All gone. Freud pointed out that behaviourism could be excused on the count of inhibitions and repressions. In a world where mass murder by bombing was looked on as necessary, where life was as little valued in the Western as the Eastern world, when young men went off on suicide expeditions by air and glider, where clergy had ceased to hold people by doctrine or natural dignity, where no hero lasted for long and where home ties were broken, and ‘Mother’ or ‘Dad’, as always handy to turn to, impossible, there seems none of the stability so necessary for each and all, if we have to have peace of mind at all.

  I often feel as if the whole world had been a heap of compact bundles of sticks, and all the strings binding them were going and sticks lying round or floating downstream, blown in high winds, breaking each other or pressing the ones underneath into the ground to rot. I wish I could find some work which had to be done – a job to do outside my home, working with and for others. As I sat tonight I visualised all the piles of mending, my hospital dollies and garments, books I’d planned to read – and found them wanting. I don’t want leisure to feel creeping tides of worry and unrest come nearer. I want to feel I am helping, in however small a way. I want the laughter and fellowship of the war years.

  Tuesday, 23 October. My husband rang up and suggested going to the pictures tonight as he could not get home early tomorrow night. I scrambled an egg for him and I had cheese and tomato and there was loganberry jam and wholemeal bread and butter, and plain cake and gingerbread. I enjoyed the picture, Roughly Speaking, though it bordered somewhat on fantasy to English people, in its opportunities and ups and downs, but I thought it would be grand to be married to a man who hit back at life without whining and complaining.

  I had a letter from Cliff today. It looks as if he has made up his mind to go with the Glider Pilot Regiment if he has a chance when they go to Palestine, although he says they may have one of their own flyers as adjutant. Things may work out for the best if he does. I’ve always said he needed discipline, and up to now he has kicked against everything, seeing authority as only to be flouted. Another year in the Army may make him more sure of his own capabilities. He is not lazy and if he can concentrate on a job where he will be happy it will be all for the good. I do miss Arthur sometimes, and long to ta
lk things over and over. I sit and turn things over in my mind as my fingers fly over my sewing. The humour I’ve been in lately recalls six years ago, when I honestly think my rag dollies helped me to hold on. There’s a great satisfaction in seeing a thing take shape and form under one’s hands, especially if they are made from oddments into something worthwhile. I often have a sneaking wish I was strong minded like Mrs Atkinson and could say I was going to a whist drive a few nights a week. She tells her husband quite frankly, if he’s too dull to talk or play cards, she will go where she can be amused. Yet cards never interest me for very long. It would be more of a penance than amusement if I went to play so often. In spite of my busy day I got two more dollies finished, little black girl dollies in gay dresses and a big bow in their mop of hair.