Nella Last in the 1950s Read online

  I fell into a train of thought as I wondered where the curious lack of responsibility to others began. Our generation taught children ‘Don’t leave gates open or the poor little moo cows will get lost and not find their mammies and be cold and lonely at bedtime’, ‘Let’s bury this nasty sharp glass so no one will cut their feet’, ‘Such lovely flowers, but we will only pick some for the glass jug and leave the others to grow – they like growing as much as little boys and girls’, ‘It’s ugly to be dirty – look how pussy washes herself and then begins to purr and sing because she feels so nice when she has washed herself’. Now they talk of ‘repressions’ and ‘fixations’ and hidden things in children’s minds. I’m old-fashioned enough to think a child is less complicated than the clever ones think. The security of comforting arms, a sharp slap when needed, busy hands and minds and the example of elders would be better for growing children than all the new and clever ways.

  Tuesday, 4 July. Mrs Howson and I both had shopping before going to the WVS Post-War Club meeting. I got potatoes, pears, tomatoes, apples, apricots and a quarter pound of mushrooms – only 9d today – and so my shopping bag was full and rather heavy. We had such a good speaker, a local farmer’s sister who joined the YMCA at the outbreak of war and went overseas. She told of her experiences in North Africa, the desert towns and northern Italy. She had had a wonderful experience. She is a most attractive woman, now about 35 but looking less, for she is so gay and vital and must have met thousands of eligible men from all over the Empire as well as the British Isles, but in spite of all hasn’t even an engagement ring. I wonder why. I’m sure she must have had some offers of, if not marriage, that ‘understanding’ that leads that way. I wondered if ‘Clogs weren’t good enough and shoes never came her way’, as they say in Lancashire.

  Before the war she kept house for a farmer brother, who got married and left her rather at a loose end, and she had never been far from the district so it was a wonderful experience. She gossiped about people and places and her work, and made us rock with laughter at her ‘most embarrassing moment’. In a very full YMCA in Italy, a slightly tipsy soldier lurched up to the counter, stared hard and shouted, ‘Hallo, aren’t you going to speak to me?’ His friend asked if he ‘knew the lady’ and he bellowed, ‘Know her – she was my last mistress in England’. She said, ‘The silence that fell on the group round the counter could be felt. I leaned forward and said – making matters sound worse – “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten exactly who you are, or where we met”. He said, “I was your brother’s cow man and was there the year so many heifer calves were born. You must remember me, Miss Coward. You used to laugh at my checked shirt.”’ Miss Coward said it sounded as if a sigh of relief went up!

  It’s the first Civil Defence meeting to arrange training classes on Thursday evening. As we moved into groups for a cup of tea, we began to talk of the beginning of the last war. With a half humorous, half dread of tomorrow, Mrs Higham and one of her neighbours made us all laugh as they related their experiences with a very ‘superior’ lecturer. He had everyone so in line, doing every precise action with the stirrup pump, moving limbs to allow ‘full action of muscle’ etc., while others trotted up with full buckets of water for ‘chain’ service. He said, ‘Now I want you to watch this carefully so as not to leave a gap in operations while the empty bucket is changed for the full one’, which entailed a finger put in one place and the stirrup pump clasped a certain way. The homely little woman who had hurried up with the full bucket of water looked at him and said quietly, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I just poured this water out of my bucket instead of fiddling with the stirrup pump being lifted out of one bucket into another?’ Mrs Higham said the look on that man’s face as he agreed was ‘something to see’.

  Thursday, 6 July. I got ready to go to Civil Defence meeting, and was down for 7 o’clock. With the exception of about half a dozen women, all the rest were WVS and we feel a bit put out and bewildered to find we will have to go through the whole Civil Defence training – gas, bomb training and disposal, rescue, fire fighting, etc. etc., and do a three years course! There’s no WVS member in our lot who can either stand up to such a course or feel it necessary before they can do all the homely jobs they did all the last war. In fact many very valuable members blinked at the notion of jumping out of windows, going through gas chambers, working in ‘teams’ at rescue work, etc., and everyone, including myself, said we would never have joined if we hadn’t been misled! Mrs Diss looked dismayed. WVS Regional had told her we could take our training in the afternoon. There was an air of complete dissatisfaction on every hand. As a whole, none of us were capable of such rough, tough training. The two youngest women were Mrs Howson and Mrs Fletcher. The latter has asthma bad if there is any untoward smell and said she ‘would leave it to chance’ whether she got gassed, but wear a gas mask and ‘play around’ she wouldn’t and couldn’t. Mrs Howson even surprised me by her outburst in the porch as she talked of ‘Did you ever hear such darn rot? Anyone would think war was coming any time.’

  Friday, 7 July. I got such a shock of surprise in the grocer’s. It will be some time before I forget it! A customer and I spoke of having had one or two bad eggs recently in our dozen or half dozen. The proprietor’s wife said, ‘You should have mentioned it to the girl who served you’. I said, ‘I did. I told her my eggs were costing dear when out of six I’d one really bad and one so doubtful I didn’t use it for cooking’. When she came through she put a bag on the counter with half a dozen eggs in and said, ‘That will make up for them’. I said, ‘I shall begin to believe in Santa Claus after this’ …

  My husband was busy clipping off dead roses. When I see him occupied in any way I feel so happy for him, and he had cleaned two pairs of my shoes I’d put out to clean when I came back – so beautifully too. I wonder why men often get such a much better shine on shoes – more weight behind their rubbing, perhaps. I had vegetable soup to heat, and potatoes and peas to cook, to eat to corned beef. I made custard and stewed some prunes I had, and when I packed tea of cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, a loaf and butter, I put in a jar of fruit salad by adding a few prunes to the stewed apricots and segments of apple. I wanted to change our library books. I got a ‘Crime Club’, and one of Muriel Hines’ novels for my husband, feeling another little thrill of thankfulness when he has settled to reading more, and got used to his glasses better. We went to the Coast Road and sat on a rug on the shingly shore. The tide crept slowly in, no wind at all, and the air heavy with the scent of hay going past on carts and lorries, so lovely and ‘green dried’. We had tea and walked on the sands – it was only low tide – and I settled to read a while.

  My husband seemed so much less despondent. He said suddenly, ‘Do you remember anyone called Clamp? The wife came several times about air raid damage and I once heard her tell you her daughter was getting married. Mr Clamp worked in the gas showrooms.’ I knew then who he was referring to and nodded. He went on in such a queer thoughtful manner. ‘He went past when I was in the front garden when you were out. He too has had to retire through nervous trouble and he is younger than me.’ There was a pause and then he went on, still in a wondering tone. ‘He spends most of his time in the park. He says if he stays in, he and his wife quarrel fiercely and she isn’t a bit sympathetic. She dislikes sickness of any kind and loses patience when he has no memory for anything.’ I said, ‘Well, it takes two to make a quarrel. Perhaps he is bad to do with. You cannot judge till you hear both sides.’ I thought a bit grimly of the many quarrels we two could have if I didn’t keep self-control, didn’t pray so earnestly for patience and kindness, but felt tears rise in my eyes as the poor dear went on. ‘You’ve always been so understanding, such a pal. It’s good when sex dies to feel there’s something even better.’* I nodded, and realised as often, it’s always been a mother he has needed as much as a wife.

  Saturday, 8 July. Two cars only were parked in the ‘draw in’ space where we like [to stop at Coniston Water], and I could tell
they were a party of friends. One was an old lady with such a lovely smiling friendly face that seemed vaguely familiar. As she hobbled slowly along looking for flowers for a little nosegay she was making, she kept looking at me as if she expected me to speak, and then suddenly someone called, ‘Nellie, I think your mother wants helping down to us’, and a plump elderly woman I did recognise came up and took the old lady’s arm – only as a guide though; she planted her feet firmly and chattered happily as she went to join the group on the shore. I made rapid calculations, and with a slight gasp jumped out of the car and joined them and said, ‘Why Mrs Thompson, you haven’t altered a bit – in how many years?’ The sweet old face crinkled in delight as she said, ‘A good many years – and I knew you at once, Dearie. I knew it was Lord before you were married.’ I looked in real awe as she went on to speak of my father’s people, of mother when she knew her first, before even her first marriage, of little events when I was a lame child who didn’t get about and used to sit and talk to her in the little sweet shop she had on the corner. I turned to her daughter and whispered, ‘How old is your mother now, Nellie?’ I thought my whisper was very quiet, but Mrs Thompson heard and said gaily, ‘I’m 96. It was my birthday this week, and that is Annie’s boy and his daughter.’ She would have been a pretty active 76, and her mind was clear and nimble as ever. She was a delight to be with. I remember her always as ‘old’ to my childish imagination and somehow she had not aged much. I had some Callard and Bowser butterscotch and gave her some, and when I said, ‘Good isn’t it? But not as good as the butter toffee you made’, we began to talk of treacle toffee and peppermint sticks, stick jaw with nuts in and toffee apples we loved and which she made so well.

  Much as I enjoyed our meeting, I think the old pet enjoyed it even more, and there was no hint of ‘not exciting mother’ as all laughed and egged her on to tell of bygone days. My husband was amongst us, enjoying it as much as anyone. He said, ‘I thought your Aunt Sarah was wonderful for 84 – but 96. It would be grand to be old and enjoy life still.’ I recalled the bitter struggle Mrs Thompson had had till she raised her family of four to help. I could feel the warmth and laughter and the friendliness packed into that tatty little sweet shop on the corner flow even across the years. Little scraps of memory thronged my mind – bits I’d heard Mother say. How her family loved and clung to her, her in-laws as well. Both daughters are widows. One son ‘went’ in the First War. The youngest, a technician of some kind who volunteered his services on some kind of radar, was torpedoed in this last war. She has not escaped troubles, she has ‘rode’ them.

  Thursday, 13 July. To say my feelings are mixed is to put it very mildly. My husband has found an interest!!! Wood beetles. Nasty little brown ‘woody’ bugs that bore round worm holes. We had a basket chair in a bedroom, and last year when Arthur and Edith were here, they carried it on the lawn and broke a leg as Edith sat down heavily when it was wobbly against the rockery. Such a train of minor destruction seems to follow Edith and she is so ‘unlucky’ with electric irons, cups and saucers, etc. I didn’t think much when Arthur said, ‘The leg is worm eaten. No wonder it snapped.’ Later I noticed little clusters of round holes at the top of my good oak panelled doors, and used Flit, and nagged gently on and on, finally saying I’d get someone in to see to them if my husband wouldn’t tackle them. Still he didn’t bother. He had that ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude, till there was something on the wireless last night. He had done the tops of the doors with Cupressol, a mild form of creosote, but after hearing the seriousness of neglect, I got really on the war path today, and the house looks as if stirred with a stick. He found signs in a wardrobe and a dressing table back, and both have been ripped off and are waiting hardboard. He says three-ply is the wood that encourages them. Clothes from two wardrobes strew the bedrooms, mats and carpets are rolled up or askew, there’s litter as if for removal. BUT, I heard my husband whistle for a while!! …

  I packed tea, raspberries and a little evaporated milk, a loaf and butter, cakes and two flasks of tea, and we went off to Walney, though black clouds were rolling up from all directions. Few had gone to the beach for the half holiday. We walked on the sands a while, before it rained, and then had tea. On the way home, I got off at the schools where Civil Defence classes are held and found the rain had held up a lot from coming where a bus wasn’t handy, and it made a late start. It was more of a ‘settling in’ than learning anything, and seven gas masks were fitted. The sergeant said, ‘More will be available lately, but I don’t know when.’ I felt faintly sick as he talked of ‘zone’ and the possibility of Barrow being considered as such, and I watched the gas masks being fitted with a sick pity as I thought of all that had happened since I last was at a school where we got ours, that fateful Munich year, wondering ‘Is this another Munich warning?’ It’s the dreadful acceptance of many people that chills me most. When the sergeant spoke of the effect of an atom bomb on a place like Barrow – destruction with a 5½ mile radius, and the evacuations to a ‘cushion’ belt – and the remarks of the morbid, pessimistic London man who sat beside me, a queer ‘sooner it’s over, sooner to sleep’ feeling stole over me. Ordinary people can do so little – only pray.

  Saturday, 22 July. When I was coming up in the bus I noticed some nurses from the Hospital sitting opposite me, in the long seats by the exit. As the bus stopped at my bus stop a smartly dressed, coal black African girl rose from the front of the bus and prepared to alight and I idly wondered if she was visiting the African oculist on Abbey Road. As she reached the three nurses sitting opposite one said, ‘Hallo – thought you were going shopping. We would have waited if we had known you were coming this way.’ The black girl murmured something and the nurse said, ‘Always changing your mind, daft cat’ and gave her a friendly slap – a chummy slap – on the rump of the girl, who laughed so jolly and happy in return, as if colour and race were one.

  We walked side by side. There’s three or more African nurses and I don’t know one from the other, so speak to all. I was really surprised when the beautiful honey voice said, ‘Beginning to think about your rag bag babies yet?’ Granted I’d met them twice on Xmas Days I’d gone to the ‘visit of Santa Claus’, but was surprised when she had remembered I made them. She said, ‘Matron often speaks of you when she gets a hoarded dollie out of the cupboard. She likes to keep a few back. Last week she found a cowboy for a badly burned little boy and gave it to him. If you could see how your dollies are loved you would think your work worth doing.’ I felt tears start to my eyes – dear knows why. I said, ‘How nice of you to tell me, my dear. Are you still happy in Barrow?’ She paused at the gate where she was going to call at the African doctor’s and her wide mouth split into a huge happy grin as she said, ‘I’ve never known such happiness I’ve found here. The memory will linger all my life.’ I said, ‘Matron is the most wonderful person I know – and I’ve known her for over 30 years.’ She nodded as she said, ‘Yes – but we have found happiness and kindness everywhere. The children love us, and we had been warned small white children might fear us because of our colour’. I said, ‘Children are the best judges of people. They would soon realise your kindness and love. Matron told me she wished she could have a full African staff of nurses, if only for the warmth and love of nursing you all had, as well as your sunny dispositions.’ She said, ‘Now it’s you who are nice to me’.

  The house door opened and my little happy feeling seemed to sour. A lily pale woman [the wife of the black doctor] stood in the doorway, with a tiny coffee-coloured baby in her arms, a darker-skinned little kinky-haired girl, and a really dark, goggle-eyed ‘nigger’ little boy rushed excitedly down the steps in welcome. Whatever the views I hold of ‘some day, one colour, one creed’, the sight of half caste children seems to strike at something way deep down in me. I say I’ve no ‘colour bar’, but wonder if really I’ve a very deep-rooted one. I could work with coloured people, enjoy their society, attend their wants in Canteen, fully admit them to positions of trust an
d service, but know, finally, I’d have died before I could have married one, or borne coloured children. So perhaps I have a ‘colour bar’.

  Nella had earlier disclosed some of her racial prejudices and mixed feelings, when she made her usual Christmas visit in 1948 to the hospital and encountered two African nurses, one of them the nurse she spoke with on this July day. They were, she wrote, ‘the Basuto type – their uniforms intensify their really frightening ugliness. One was helping the one-time little patients into coats and scarves, her huge capable hands seeming to attend several children at once. They looked up so “inaffectedly”† as if a hideous black face was the one they would have chosen to hand over them. She passed where I was standing and impulsively I put out my hand and said, “A very happy Xmas, nurse. I hope our cold grey skies don’t make you homesick for your lovely sunny land.” A soft, rather guttural but very pleasant voice said, “Oh no, madam. We love it here. England is a wonderful place and we have met nothing but kindness. No one in Barrow seems to have noticed we are coloured.”’ Nella and this nurse agreed on Matron’s virtues, which led Nella to write that ‘the enveloping clasp of that huge black hand, its firmness and warmth that was not only physical, made me say, “Why my dear, you have something Matron has always had – perhaps it’s what is called being a born nurse”. It was such a feeling of strength. I’d have felt every confidence in the little black thing.’ Later Nella spoke with Matron, who said. ‘It was kind of you to talk to nurse. She is a really splendid person – they both are. I’m amazed to find such understanding and quick intelligence in people who have so recently been “civilised”. They put a lot of the rest to shame’ (25 December 1948).