Nella Last's Peace Page 6

  I’ve finished my book of Canada, with its short references to the state of the world in general just before and just after Napoleon’s defeat. The world seemed pretty hopeless then. I wonder if it will settle and grow stable again after all this. ‘Britain is dispersing her aircraft factories.’ ‘America is making atomic bombs still.’ I once read somewhere that ‘in the next war there is a strong possibility the British seat of Government will be moved to Canada’. That was years ago, before the last war – maybe the astrologer who wrote it had missed a war.

  I felt my wits had been shaken loose in my head. I had two aspirin and a cup of tea for my supper, reflecting that my fit of the blues started when the afternoon post brought a letter from Edith to say Arthur had been given word he had missed nomination. I did so hope he got his chance. I felt a wild terror that he was going to be like me through life – always seeming to be on the outside looking in; that however he strived and planned, he would just miss things. I don’t want Arthur to feel the gnaw and corrosion of frustration – as if it mattered one scrap what I wanted! ‘There’s an end that shapes our destiny’, etc.

  Christmas was approaching, and Nella decided to put austerity aside. ‘I’m not going to save and scratch ever again,’ she declared on 5 December. The immediate beneficiary of this resolution was her husband, for whom she bought an extravagant Christmas gift – a lovely oak-framed electric clock (costing almost £3), which she thought would go nicely with the oak trim in their dining room. The hard times had gone on long enough, she thought, and in her view the restrictive policies of the new Labour government were decidedly objectionable. ‘This government is going to rob us of all individuality,’ she wrote on 5 December. ‘I’ll not live to see the reaping of the whirlwind, but I’m not going to help them. For the rest of my life I will spend any little surplus I get.’ As if to underline this determination, later that day, when her husband asked what she would like for Christmas, she suggested a fur coat and a diamond ring.

  Monday, 10 December. It’s been a really evil day of icy fog, and maybe it was partly the cause of a really nervy day all day. I felt depressed and sad. I pictured homeless cold people, little children and old ones without fire and warmth. My snug little home and glowing fire seemed both lonesome things – and a reproach. I baked bread and some plain biscuits to put in a tin for when Cliff comes. He loves biscuits for supper and I’ve still half a tin of parkins so he will not have to worry about eating out. I had a bit of pastry in a bowl from last baking day, and I made a nice damson tart with a jar of bottled damsons. I made a very good suet pudding and there was some to send down to the old ones, with a little new cob† of bread and a few biscuits …

  As I grow older I grow more convinced in, if not reincarnation exactly, that our life here is incomplete, is only a tiny paragraph of a long book, which will have to be taken as a whole. I feel the truth of so much of my old gran’s sayings and teachings, wondering where she learned them. Her ‘do the best you can and pass on, leaving the rest to God’ might well be a teaching for today’s problems. As I sat tonight I had the feeling of frustration I had before I got into war work proper – so much to do and no one wanted my services! Europe and its terrible sufferings might be on the moon and out of reach of our help, for all the aids it gets in Barrow. Perhaps when Xmas, our first peacetime Xmas, gets over, it will be different. Mrs Diss said, ‘Trouble of it is, you know, if we do start a “make and mend” as you suggest, we might only be helping black-market crooks.’ I think the Red Cross could give us a lead, for everyone could do a little and it would help as the shilling-a-week fund helped. So many people take the view that ‘Germany has brought it all on herself.’ I said to Mrs Woods, ‘Well, there is France, and little French children.’ Her big blue eyes rolled and flashed as she said, ‘And for what are we to thank France, pray?’ I feel we should leave punishment to the clever ones. The ordinary simple folk should hold out a hand to anyone in trouble or want – we are not God – and little children feel cold and frightened whatever their country or colour. It’s a very remarkable thing that amongst the people who think Germany has brought it all on herself France is considered a traitor and should be punished for giving up – Belgium too in some people’s opinion. These are the best church people I know. I shocked Mrs Woods terribly by saying, ‘The kindly pitiful Christ you sing about would have been in the Belsen camp and in all the worst bombed places. He wouldn’t recognise his churches as holy places.’

  My husband said, ‘You look very sad. Are you worrying about anything?’ I said, ‘I’ve got a real attack of the blues. I think I’m worrying more than I know about Cliff, and Arthur and Edith having to move, and it’s opened the door to a whole battalion of worries and sad thoughts.’ I’m glad I’m going to the little reunion whist drive tomorrow and meeting all the Hospital Supply lot. Mrs Caddy the caretaker died very suddenly. She was in the best of health and spirits when we had our last drive, and disappointed because we planned to have this one in the ARP† Club. She was upset a few weeks ago when her black cat Dear Dinkes was run over. She cried to me as she said, ‘You know, I’ll miss that cat this winter when the door is shut and the evenings are so long. When you live alone you grow so attached to your cat.’ It’s as well now he went before her. He followed her like a dog and his excited rush to greet her when she had been shopping made me hope he was waiting for her. He was a very nice cat.

  Tuesday, 11 December. It’s been a day of surprises, not the least being that I’ve slipped up somewhere and am fifty-six and not fifty-five! My husband is fifty-seven today. I went down town for my groceries and got some lovely sweet oranges, and when I said how glad I was to have them as I expected three of my family home for Xmas, my greengrocer let me have a pound each for them as well – he said they would not keep but I don’t see why, they are not too ripe. I went into Canteen for the bills to pay and Mrs Goode the cleaner said what a poor Xmas it was for kiddies. She spoke of past Xmases when there had been apples, and a few tins of fruit. I said, ‘Well, you would have to give points for fruit.’ She said she never spent all her points – did I want any? I offered to swap bottled fruit for enough points to get a pound of chocolate biscuits, so I’ll give her a 2 lb jar of unsweetened blackberries and a 1 lb jar of apples and 1 lb jar of damsons in syrup. She was delighted, and so was I …

  I sat and planned my decorations. I’ll get them out tomorrow. I’ve not much scope for anything different with my carefully saved streamers of red and green crinkled paper, but suddenly remembered they would be new to the boys and Edith. I keep prowling around trying to see anything which needs seeing to, renewing every little thing like my stock of condiments, soap flakes in the jar in the bathroom and ammonia in the bottle there, longing for the days of bath salts I loved – lovely eau de cologne or pine or verbena.

  Wednesday, 12 December. When Mrs Cooper went I finished off the shirt I had tacked and then hunted out all my Xmas bits and bobs, carefully packed in boxes. Cliff’s little tree carries its age very well – twenty-five! Perhaps the great love he had for it and the fact it would not be Xmas without it has helped preserve it! I put all the little glass ornaments on and the big star and two strands of tinsel I bought out of Mrs Waite’s little hoard she gave us to sell at the Hospital Supply last Xmas. I bought a box of tiny crackers only thumb length for our last party, seven years ago. I caught my breath at the thought that only my own two and three of the girls were left. One girl died of TB – that was the outcome of going in the WAAFs and sleeping in a damp bed. One died when her baby was born – poor dear, she was the wife of one of the Boots’ crowd. And one was killed in our raids. The other two we lost sight of completely when their family moved to Australia. I’d forgotten Jack Gorst, though – he was there, for it was the crackers he brought in, made like little dinner rolls, that made me forget to pull the wee ones off the tree. I had said, ‘Never mind. I’ll save them for the next party’ – and 1939 brought something else but parties and I said to myself, ‘I’ll keep them till
the next party as I said.’ They look a bit tired and dusty, but then, aren’t we all? I think they have little whistles or jewellery in – something hard. Mrs Atkinson said with a little sniff, ‘Trust you to have something that no one else has, or can buy.’ I was glad really that no one came in as I unpacked my little oddments, of paper rolled up from, I think, three other Xmases – two anyway.

  I trimmed the little tree with the feeling that every little tawdry chipped bauble was alive and was glad to be on the tree again, for when I’d finished I felt myself musing and gently laughing over a remembered incident, and the tree twinkled and winked in the firelight as if to say, ‘Go on remembering. Memory is the one thing that no one can break or tarnish, soil or destroy. It’s your very own.’

  Under my well-thought preparations and my plans I’ve a sadness which takes keeping down. Perhaps it’s because of Cliff and his future. Perhaps thinking of Arthur and Edith flat-hunting. They talk of young folks having families. I see no chance as yet of Arthur starting a family in any reasonable comfort, and he is thirty-two and life passes so swiftly. Just as a clock often begins to go fast as it nears the end of its spring, and needs complete winding or it will stop, I feel we all are going faster.

  I’d like to talk over, or rather listen to clever competent people talking about, this loan from America. I feel America has not acted like a good neighbour at all. My husband says that when travellers come round so much is written off their catalogues and they tell him all is for export. The New Year is going to be a shock for people. Things will be very tight and on the whole more difficult than in the war years, for there will be so many more civilians and so many less things to buy. I feel America is laying the foundations of resentment which will recoil on her, whereas she could have laid those of real comradeship, and in life there are no rewards and no revenge – only consequences. I feel it’s the fact we have a Labour Government, that if Churchill had still led, things would have been a lot different. Rightly or wrongly, the USA Government fear Attlee and despise Harold Laski [Chairman of the Labour Party]. It would have been better if he had been in the hotel in Barrow when a bomb demolished it. He is that most unfortunate of men – one who does not know when to speak and when to hold his tongue, and in a public figure it’s the unforgivable sin. The fact too that he is a Jew is unfortunate. I’ve often been astonished at the mistrust and real hatred of Jews in quite ordinary men in the street.

  Friday, 14 December. I got a letter, or rather a note, to say Cliff would be coming Saturday or perhaps Friday. He was in London and doing a little shopping. I had to hurry and bake, for in any case I would not do so on Saturday morning as I had to go to the hairdresser’s …

  I was talking to such a nice lad in Canteen today, well spoken and with that indefinable air of ‘background’. We spoke of demobilisation. He hopes to be out by next June. He’s twenty-four. He joined up at seventeen and a half because he was out of joint with the jarring course he had embarked upon, and the Army offered a grand escape. His uncle has since died – his father died when he was small – and he has absolutely no idea what he will do. He thought he might go in the building trade for he will have to help his mother. A boy in a nearby street was a ticket collector on the railway. Now he is demobbed a major – acting colonel when he came out – with a dainty, expensive-looking wife he married when a captain, and they have a little girl of two and another expected any time. I thought of housing problems as well as work and adjustments. I felt the Saturnalian ‘Lord of misrule’ was in charge of this lovely earth and its misused treasures. The dire feeling that lies like a bank of heavy snow clouds in my mind seemed to deepen. When Big Ben tolls I feel my heartfelt prayer urging, ‘Please God, bless the young ones’ more sincere than that for hopeless frightened ones or the cold and hungry. We older ones have had our day, have made or marred our lives, but we did have chances. Any courage we possess was rooted in security of some kind – home, Church, or faith in the clever ones who seemed omnipotent.

  Till I die I’ll remember the morning after our worst raid, when roofs and windows all went aground – tiled roofs. I felt I walked about in a daze. With a curious lack of any noise or talking or movement, except a persistent tinkling sound, like the little temple wind bells we once would buy, it was falling shovelfuls of glass as everyone swept it up and put it in heaps. Sometimes in my mind I feel and hear that tinkling noise, when I think of the shattered lives of so many, of the senselessness and the utter folly of war, when no one wins. America has won this war, but in a short time she will have a bigger depression than ever before. She has no soul and is too young a country to understand the problems of the old world. And there’s a thing people tend to forget. One of the strongest cornerstones in American society as a whole is bitter resentment, either to their own country or another, which compelled them to seek a fuller life overseas. There is a deep hidden fear in Americans. That is why so many of them bluster and brag. They are not used to things. Prosperity hurts them as much as the poverty and hardship which sent their fathers wandering, but shows in their love of being top dog.

  I rave. It’s after 12.30 and time I slept!

  Cliff was now at home.

  Saturday, 15 December. I had to hurry out for nine o’clock and I cooked enough bacon and sausage for two mornings for Cliff and put half in the pantry so that I can rest in the morning. I rose tired and have had a busy day, and I want to be well and gay for Xmas. Although it was still early, people were coming home with holly, holly wreaths, lovely chrysanths and mistletoe, which they had bought from the carts and lorries as soon as they came to market. A few lucky ones had little fir trees, and I hear they are very scarce this year in these days of deforestation. They will not want to cut trees that have survived a few years and begun to grow apace. No fish shops had even the shutters down, so supplies could not have been expected till the midday train at the earliest. There were piles of lovely big branches of mistletoe, but all the berries had come off most. Oranges were still about but still on ration books, and there was not a nut of any kind. I pictured the stacks and stacks of nuts – we must have been a nut-eating town, for every possible nut, including salted or puffed nuts, always had a ready sale. I wonder why at least some are not about. They are good food value.

  I felt really annoyed in the hairdresser’s and spoke my mind, telling them I would not come in the New Year if circumstances did not alter. They have two driers, one a very old type, but the proprietor was in the National Fire Service and was moved to Totnes, where he decided to open a shop when he was freed. He bought new gear to take and stripped this shop of anything he fancied, put in his sister-in-law as manager over two girls, sacked the better-paid hand, and generally rack-rented† the business, which is a very good little one. Today there was a perm in the next cubicle and it needed the dryer, before they could begin, after shampooing. The old one just refused to go on and the old one they were using for me had to be borrowed. I felt the wetness of my thick hair strike a chill, and as I pointed out, arthritic people could not afford to take risks. The manageress said, ‘Such a deplorable accident’, but as I pointed out, it was not an accident, it was carelessness and inefficiency on the owner’s part. He wants his money but will not lay any out.

  I went into the WVS office for a drink of hot tea and Mrs Diss said, ‘Don’t be surprised if a detective looks you up. There has been a hold-up at Gleaston and the postmistress could give a very good description of the soldier who did it.’ I felt I didn’t want to be bothered with a detective calling so I trotted round to the police station, but could give no help. The description could have fitted so many, though at the back of my mind I’d a vague feeling it fitted one soldier rather well, one who ate at the counter and talked of ‘never bothering about tomorrow till it came’ …

  I’ve been very lucky all round this Xmas. People seem to think the Red Cross shop was pretty good work, and with me being in most I seem to have got the credit for it! When I got the bottle of gin – and the port – I was diffide
nt about asking for them, and the bottle of rum was offered and the manager said, ‘If you don’t deserve it, who does?’ (!!) Again, Mr Truss, the manager at Diss’s jewellery shop who was amazingly kind to me in valuing things when we had the shop, really likes me and said he was ‘glad to be of service’ when I was so grateful for getting Cliff’s darling wee alarm clock – only the size of a man’s watch but a good timekeeper and reliable Swiss make – and just what Cliff wanted for Xmas. Not to speak of the really beautiful electric clock I’ve got my husband. Oddly enough I’m never offered black-market goodies. Mrs Woods seems to get anything that way.

  The fish was really delicious. I do so love nice food to cook and serve – and eat too if I feel picky and tired of simple same food. I said to Cliff, ‘Ah, for the days of mixed grills and good ham and fish, and lots of fruit of every kind.’ My husband said, ‘Well, I’m quite content. Any grumbling comes from you. I never know there is a war or shortages’, which, considering my dodging for different flavours, was really gratifying! Cliff went out. My husband did a bit at his book-keeping, but we both felt very tired and came to bed early. The phone rang at intervals – all for Cliff and two long-distance calls at that, one Manchester, one Lancaster. That one is certainly popular, and candidly speaking I’m often slightly puzzled.

  On Monday, 17 December – ‘such a mad crazy day – I’ve laughed myself limp!’ – Nella had a foreign visitor, Jacques, a French-Egyptian friend of Cliff.