THE DIARIES OF NELLA LAST
PATRICIA AND ROBERT MALCOLMSON are social historians with a special interest in diaries, Mass Observation and everyday life. Patricia is also author of Me and My Hair: A Social History (Chaplin Books, 2012). They live in Nelson, British Columbia.
THE MASS OBSERVATION ARCHIVE at the University of Sussex holds the papers of the British social research organisation Mass Observation. The papers from the original phase cover the years 1937 until the early 1950s and provide an especially rich historical resource on civilian life during the Second World War. New collections relating to everyday life in the UK in the twentieth and twenty-first century have been added to the original collection since the Archive was established at Sussex in 1970.
ALSO AVAILABLE
Nella Last’s War
Nella Last’s Peace
Nella Last in the 1950s
THE DIARIES OF NELLA LAST
Writing in war and peace
Edited by
PATRICIA AND ROBERT MALCOLMSON
Published in Great Britain in 2012 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Copyright in selections and editorial matter © Patricia and Robert Malcolmson, 2012
Mass Observation Material copyright © The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, 2012
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Nella Last’s Family, Friends, Neighbours and Associates
PART ONE: WAR, 1939–1943
CHAPTER 1 Points of View: August 1939–September 1940
CHAPTER 2 Watching, Working, Waiting:
September 1940–April 1941
CHAPTER 3 After the Bombs: May–June 1941
CHAPTER 4 Facts of Life: June–September 1941
CHAPTER 5 Past and Present: September–October 1941
CHAPTER 6 Steady On: October–December 1941
CHAPTER 7 Winter’s Tales: December 1941–February 1942
CHAPTER 8 Time Passes: February–June 1942
CHAPTER 9 At Home and Abroad: June–September 1942
CHAPTER 10 ‘End of the Beginning’: September 1942–August 1943
PART TWO: PEACE, 1945–1955
CHAPTER 11 Cheers and Tears: May–September 1945
CHAPTER 12 A Sort of Peace: September 1945–January 1946
CHAPTER 13 Darkness and Light: February–September 1946
CHAPTER 14 Everyday Scenes: November 1946–October 1947
CHAPTER 15 Highs and Lows: October 1947–August 1948
CHAPTER 16 Lots to Talk About: January–February 1950
CHAPTER 17 Pleasures and Perturbations: May–December 1950
CHAPTER 18 Defining Moments: June 1952–August 1955
Epilogue
Glossary
Money And Its Value
Editing Nella Last’s Diary
Mass Observation
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index
‘I like to feel near to the “beat” of life’ (Nella Last, 20 September 1941)
INTRODUCTION
‘Words have always fascinated me.’ (Nella Last, 24 March 1945)*
‘If I’d been clever or had a less sketchy education, or perhaps more time on my hands, I’d have loved to write. Funny how things work out. I often think of the many books my letters and my diary would make!’ Nella Last wrote these words in early 1942 in a letter to her elder son, Arthur. Clearly she thought of herself as a writer (‘When I was a girl I always craved to be a writer’, she declared on 20 October 1940) – at least she did in her more confident moments – though hardly anyone else did until the 1980s, well after her death in 1968. Now, decades later, Nella Last is the author of three books. Nella Last’s War was first published in 1981 and reissued in 2006 with some new ancillary material, including photographs and a few words by her younger son, Cliff, written shortly before his death in 1991. (This volume was the inspiration for the television film Housewife, 49, starring Victoria Wood.) Her more recent two books, also published by Profile Books, are Nella Last’s Peace (2008) and Nella Last in the 1950s (2010). She is now a writer whose work has been enjoyed – and admired – by tens of thousands.
While selections from Nella Last’s diary have been published in these three volumes, most of what she wrote between 1939 and the time she ceased writing, in February 1966, actually remains unpublished. This is mainly because the quantity of her writing is vast. Nobody, to the best of our knowledge, has read the diary from beginning to end; a rough estimate is that it may be around ten million words in total. In many years she was writing at least a third of a million words – perhaps more like half a million in some years. Her discipline and commitment to writing are extraordinary; she wrote regularly even when little was happening in her life, which she deemed to be for the most part ‘uneventful’ (19 September 1939), and this meant that when something out of the ordinary did occur, she had her pencil or pen at the ready and was primed to record her thoughts. In one diary entry in November 1941 she wrote that she was feeling ill all day – and yet she could still produce in the evening (this is when she did most of her writing) some 2,000 words. And she did this almost every day, year after year, except when she was really sick or travelling. Of course, it is virtually inconceivable that all these words can be published – or indeed should be published.
The three volumes mentioned above present perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of Nella Last’s handwritten diary, although some periods of her writing are more fully represented than this. Thus, most of her diary has never reached a wider audience. A major reason for producing this new volume is to bring more of her writing to public attention, especially what she wrote in the early 1940s, much of which can only be read in the Mass Observation Archive or at Mass Observation online. The editors of Nella Last’s War, Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming, were pioneers. They, in a sense, discovered Nella Last in the Mass Observation Archive, digested what she wrote during the upheavals of the Second World War and produced an immensely appealing book of a manageable size that embraced the entire period of the war. Inevitably, given publishing constraints, they could not include a great deal. Consequently, much writing remains unpublished that is vivid, sensitive, engaging and astute. This previously unseen material comprises almost all of Part One of The Diaries of Nella Last, which concerns the years 1939–43 and in many ways builds on Broad and Fleming’s wartime edition. There is minimal overlap between the two books; less than 5 per cent of the material in this volume is also found in Nella Last’s War. Part Two,
‘Peace’, is different. It presents highlights from Nella Last’s Peace and Nella Last in the 1950s, along with a few previously unpublished selections from her post-war diary, mainly from May and July 1945 and 1955. Part Two, then, presents a retrospective of Nella Last’s experiences of post-war living, writing and social change.
In this book the Nella Last who features most prominently is the disciplined and skilled writer who was a keen observer – an observer of herself, her family, her neighbours, the natural world and the larger society in which she was living. In one passage (24 February 1941) she wrote of how it would be nice to have the gift to compose music, but, she went on: ‘Best of all, though, I would like to write books and travel to far places to see and hear things to write about.’ She imagined herself discovering and writing about ‘wayside treasures’. Nella never did travel very far (although her son Cliff emigrated to Australia after the war); in fact, she did not travel much at all outside her rather isolated home town, Barrow-in-Furness, its adjacent countryside and the nearby Lake District. But within her limited geographical world she was always on the look-out for wayside treasures that could be remarked on and described in her diary at the end of the day – remarks overheard, interesting conversations in which she participated, unusual incidents, stories of comedy or tragedy, changing attitudes and customs, noteworthy public events, current history, the peccadilloes of family and friends, gossip and rumour, feelings and emotions (hers and others’), individual actions that in her view warranted praise or criticism.
Diaries are documents of everyday life, and they are often packed with mundane, unremarkable details. But along with Nella Last’s accounts of preparing food, house-cleaning, gardening, shopping, bodily complaints and the vagaries of the weather are hundreds of pages of her writing that contain passages of narrative richness, psychological insight and colourful observations of people forging lives for themselves in often challenging times. Nella had an excellent eye for captivating moments; and when she saw or heard them, she possessed a skill with words that allowed her – perhaps almost compelled her – to write about them. While it might be said that words came naturally to her – ‘I get a pencil and gallop away’ (30 July 1940) – this knack was certainly learned and cultivated, for it was to a large extent a consequence of her immersion as a child in books and the thousands of hours in which she absorbed herself in reading. Because of a childhood accident, she was lame, often forced to be sedentary and solitary, and pushed towards private pleasures, notably engaging her mind in literature and the world of the imagination. ‘I was a queer, intense child’, she wrote in her reply to M-O’s questionnaire of February/March 1939, ‘who at a very early age learned to escape from pain and loneliness into books – any books.’ The novels of Charles Dickens had been central texts for her in these formative years of self-education.
Editing Nella Last’s diary might be likened to mining for ore. The valuable ore is there, in those millions of words, but it needs to be extracted and separated from writing of less value. And judgement is exercised and has to be exercised in deciding what is good enough to publish, or even what must be published, tasks about which editors, past, present and probably future, are bound to differ. A passage that strikes one editor as highly appealing might strike another as unremarkable. Moreover, whatever is selected needs to be given shape. This shaping includes the creation of chapters (they, of course, are not in the original diary) and paragraphs (which she rarely constructed), the composing of passages that summarise and characterise weeks or even months for which no diary selections are presented, and the shifting of certain pithy observations from the diary entries in which they appear either to these connecting passages or to occasional footnotes. At all times our principal objective is to show Nella Last at her best as a writer and as a sharp-eyed witness to her life and times in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
* * * * * *
The various characters that appear in Nella’s diary are identified on the following pages. The appendix ‘Editing Nella Last’s Diary’ (pp. 432–34) outlines our criteria for selecting passages to publish and summarises the more technical aspects of our editorial practice. A few quotations in this book are drawn from her responses to M-O’s regular (usually monthly) questionnaires, called ‘Directives’; these are identified below as ‘DR’. The symbol † in the diary indicates a word defined or a proper name identified in the Glossary (pp. 427–29).
NELLA LAST’S FAMILY, FRIENDS,
NEIGHBOURS AND ASSOCIATES
Agnes (Schofield)
Former girlfriend of her elder son, Arthur
Arthur
Elder son
Atkinson, Mr and Mrs
Next-door neighbours
Boorman, Mrs
Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) worker
Burnett, Mrs
Head of Barrow’s WVS (up to 1941)
Cliff
Younger son
Cooper, Mrs
Cleaning helper (1945–47)
Cumming, Mrs
WVS member
Dearie
Nella herself (as she was known by family)
Dick (Redhead)
Norah’s husband (post-war)
Dickinson, Mr
Port Missionary in Barrow
Diss, Mrs
Head of Barrow’s WVS (from 1941)
Doug (Hines)
Friend of Cliff
Edith (Picken)
Arthur’s fiancée, later (from 1944) wife
Eliza, Aunt
Sister of her late mother
Ena
Cleaning helper (1941–43)
Fletcher, Mrs
WVS worker
Fred (Lord)
Brother
Garry
Dog (from 1952)
George (Holme)
Neighbour; husband of Jessie
Gorst, Jack
Friend of Cliff
Gran
Deceased maternal grandmother; a Rawlinson
Harry
Brother of Will
Heath, Miss
WVS worker
Helm, Mr and Mrs
Neighbours in the house attached
Higham, Mrs
WVS worker; later a good friend
Howson, Mrs
WVS worker, neighbour and friend
Hunt, Mrs
WVS worker
Isa (Hunter)
Neighbour, wife of Jack, a prominent grocer; disliked by Nella
Jessie (Holme)
Neighbour, wife of George
Joe
Cousin of Aunt Sarah; lives with her
Ledgerwood, Miss
WVS worker
Lord, Mrs
WVS worker
Mac, Miss
WVS worker
Machin, Mrs
WVS worker
Margaret
The Atkinsons’ younger daughter
Mary
Cousin (a generation younger than Nella)
McGregor, Mrs
WVS worker
Miller, Dr
Family physician
Mother
Will’s mother
Murphy
Cat
Nelson, Mrs
WVS worker
Norah
The Atkinsons’ elder daughter
Parkinson, Mrs
WVS worker
Pattison, Mrs
Cleaning helper
Peter
First grandchild (born 1948)
Ruth
Cleaning helper (up to 1941)
Salisbury, Mrs
Cleaning helper (1943 and post-war)
Sarah, Aunt
Sister of her late mother
Shan We
Cat
Sol
Dog
Steve
Husband of Mrs Howson
Thompson, Mrs
Head of WVS canteen
Wadsworth, Dr
Psychiatrist
Waite,
Mrs
Head of Hospital Supply
Walpole, Hugh
Author of the Herries Chronicle (4 vols, 1930–33)
Whittam, Mrs
Friend; farms in Walney
Wilkins, Mrs
WVS worker
Will
Husband
Willan, Miss
WVS worker
Woods, Mrs
WVS worker
PART ONE: WAR
1939–1943
CHAPTER ONE
POINTS OF VIEW
August 1939–September 1940
Barrow-in-Furness, once in Lancashire, now in Cumbria, and largely surrounded by the sea, had a population of a little over 70,000 at the beginning of the Second World War and was overwhelmingly a one-industry town. Its giant shipyard – Nella commonly wrote of it as ‘the Yard’ – dominated the seafront and employed in 1942 around 18,000 people. Almost all the women known to Nella had husbands, or uncles, or brothers, or fathers, or boyfriends/fiancés who worked at the Vickers-Armstrongs shipyard, some as ‘bosses’, others as skilled or unskilled labourers. Since September 1936 Nella had been living in a new semi-detached house – 9 Ilkley Road – on a pleasant estate a mile north of the centre of town, just off Abbey Road, Barrow’s longest and most important artery. Her husband, Will – she almost never refers to him by name – had his own joinery business in partnership with a brother on an older street where they had previously lived. Nella situated herself socially as one of the ‘ordinary middle class people’ (12 November 1940). The Lasts were prosperous enough to own a car but in the early 1940s did not have a telephone; Nella portrayed herself – almost certainly accurately – as less well-off than many of the women she worked with in the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS), some of whom presided over large houses. Both her unmarried sons had, as boys, won scholarships to the grammar school. Arthur (born 1913) was a trainee tax inspector living in Manchester; Cliff (born 1918) was still in Barrow at the start of the war and about to be conscripted into the Army.
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