The Diaries of Nella Last

by Patricia Malcolmson

  I’ve a nasty feeling that Birmingham is as badly hit as Coventry. I got a feeling of seriousness this morning [Sunday, 24 November] when the clergyman in the morning service prayed so earnestly for ‘sufferers through air raids and those who had been killed’. I have a curious reaction to war news – I like to know the worst and find my own ‘bright side’, or feel pity and mourning for hardly hit people and places. If I don’t know and only fear the worst I feel a nagging worry that is worse than actually knowing that things are bad. I don’t know whether my cold is making me a bit pessimistic but I cannot ‘maffick’† over Greece. I remember Finland and the outcry of delight at her ‘splendid resistance’, and soon she was beaten flat by Russia. I cannot think Hitler will let Mussolini lose face too much and will soon help them and Greece will not have it all her own way for long.*

  Monday, 25 November. I had a visit from a very old friend I’d not seen for years – quite three years. She was up our way and called for a cup of tea and told me she had had to give her work up – Spirella Corsetiere – and take an Insurance Book to collect. I was very surprised for I remembered the last war when anyone with anything either different or expensive made their fortunes. Miss Jones said ‘This is a different war altogether and we are getting down to it early and all steel will go into aeroplanes’ etc. She told me that the big Spirella works had only a third for corsets and would soon have less to do when steel and rayon were further restricted. She lives in Hindpool, a suburb where the Iron and Steel works are situated and her brother has a good position there although in slump he was like the rest and without work at all.

  She tells me that although money is good it’s not the same as last war and we discussed it. We wondered if people with a different standard of living spent their money differently. She recalled the time when all the pawnbrokers’ shops were full of unredeemed pledges – rings, brooches and watches – and fat red hands had rings on every finger and sometimes two – costing from £20 to £60 each! – when every boy had a gold watch, the height of his ambition those days, when as much as £40 and £50 was going into a tiny house, where father and several sons were working at Iron works. Those days rent was paid and no one moved and furniture was ‘good enough’ and granny’s patchwork quilt was thought quite the thing! Now, Miss Jones said, the houses on a new adjacent estate have been sold, and just before the war the jerry built ‘outside fanciness’ of them deceived no one and seemed a white elephant to builder. Her ‘book’ is partly in the new estate and she said she had known most of the families for 40 or 50 years – she will be about 58 or 59. Among the things they have bought, beside the pretty big deposit on new house, are grandfather clocks, eiderdowns, wireless sets, bicycles for all the family, fur coats, perms for mother, dancing classes for children etc. I said ‘What about pianos?’ and she said ‘I did not see one – funny now I come to think of it for that was the old “standard” of prosperity in many homes, wasn’t it?’ I said ‘Well anyway, it’s better to buy things to give pleasure and give warmth than the old days of the riotous drinking of the Ironworkers, when only liquor brandy and even champagne was the weekend drink and beer was swilled like tea or water.’

  A woman came in to pay a bill while Miss Jones was in and as it was so cold I said ‘Come into my “workshop” and have a drink of tea’. She might be classed as a ‘new rich’ for war has trebled – at least – her income. She looked at my row of smiling dollies† and said in a grand tone, after asking me how much I charged, ‘I’ll take the lot. They will do for Xmas presents and I can send what is left to Hospital’! I said ‘I’m sorry but these are all ordered – by friends – and if I’d time to make another dozen I’d send them to Hospital myself’. She sat and ate all the chocolate biscuits in my little glass dish and as Miss Jones pointed out put three lumps of sugar in each of her two cups of tea. Miss Jones said ‘Greedy pig. They have so much money they are losing their manners.’ I said ‘Well, Mrs Milne never was greedy in the old days. I think it’s thoughtlessness and forgetfulness on their part and they don’t realise there is any shortage yet. So far their money has been able to buy anything.’ It was really a gesture to put out my whole quarter pound of chocolate biscuits. I hate stint and myself could never in any circumstances ‘polish off’ a whole lot, either from a diet or manners standpoint, so I did not think anyone else would do so! Added to that she said ‘Try and get me some of these delightful little biscuits at your grocer’s, and a few tins of sardines if you can. My grocer will only let me have one tin a week.’ I said ‘I cannot get any more chocolate biscuits – they are finished – and as for sardines, well, we like them ourselves and I can only get an odd tin’.

  I seemed to sew and sew but make little impressions on dolls’ clothes – fiddling things to do – and the wireless was impossible on all stations and my head and face ached so I came to bed early and wrote to Cliff. He is a lot better and hopes to have a few days leave soon.

  Wednesday, 27 November. My husband said ‘You look so quiet and sad as you sit there sewing those everlasting dolls. Why don’t you talk instead of thinking?’ I felt really startled but I said ‘Well, if I think aloud you will only say “Oh, don’t rave about things you cannot alter and bother your head so about shelters and ships and loneliness and fear” – for my mind is only a jumble tonight’. He said ‘I’ll never say such to you again as long as I live. I cannot argue with you as the boys do but all the same, tell me.’ After years of ‘What odd things you say’, ‘I don’t hear any other woman talking of things like that’, ‘Why do you bother so about such things?’, ‘Don’t be silly’, ‘Oh, stop thinking about it’, it’s hard to begin new habits and with my husband not liking people in at nights when he was home I’ve got into the habit of ‘stitching my thoughts’ into my words – he does not like me to get immersed in a book and ‘too far away’. Now I believe he would let me bring anyone in and talk to them and I’d not have the guilty feeling I’d driven him from his own chair by the fireside or the reproach of preferring someone else’s company. War is changing people but it worries me when my husband is so different – I fear he is ill.

  I had such a queer dream the other night – no sense in it at all to put into words but a feeling of such aloneness that might fall on the ‘last man left in the world’. It set me off thinking how lonely really most people were, if they were stripped of all the little rags of custom and usage and habits of everyday life. There must be a lot more soul sadness than we know among the bombed cities. If everyone bombs everyone else and cities and towns are bombed flat in England and Germany, when will they be ever built? Not in our lifetime – if ever. Miss Ledgerwood talked of a book written by the women of Poland to the women of America and touched on the contents. She said ‘I’d like to read it, wouldn’t you?’ I said ‘Dear God, NO. My heart would break in pieces. I’m not very strong minded and what I cannot help I shun.’ It’s good for the people of America to read no doubt for they are far away and are not having their own people bombed. It seems so odd to think of our own people suffering, and so near for Liverpool gun flashes can be seen across the Bay.

  Thursday, 28 November. One woman came in to Centre to ballyhoo that we had not acknowledged her daughter’s previous gift for £5 raised by making felt posies. Mrs Machin is very methodical and clever and turned up her book for last month and said ‘Oh Mrs Dodds, I wrote a letter myself’. Mrs Dodds said ‘That’s not it. I think it’s as little as you can do to publish it in the paper’! They are rolling in money at usual normal times and now, as I said, wallow in it and could afford to give £50 and never think of it again. Mrs Dodds puffed and wheezed and waved her arms about and I said suddenly ‘What lovely perfume you have. I never smelled anything like it quite.’ She said ‘Mr D brought me a case from London with four £7 10s 0d bottles in and ‘Djew know Mrs Last, the lot was not as big as a double whiskey.’ She should know: they made their money in pubs and, report says, switching brands of whiskey after a man had had a few and his palate was dulled! When she w
ent out of Committee room it was just a cattery for awhile and among things I heard were that Mrs D had had a German mother, never had kept a maid as all food was locked up and doled out, kept a bottle of whiskey in her bedroom etc. etc. Suddenly Mrs Waite laughed loudly and said ‘Look at our pussy sitting there and listening to us all and never saying a word’. I said ‘Oh I was waiting to say the worst thing. She pays £7 10s 0d for a teaspoon of perfume when little children have to wait for fresh warm clothes after an air raid, when so much could be done with 7s 6d, never mind £7 10s 0d. After all her morals and her disposition are her own concern but for the sin of wasting so much money I would have her whipped.’ When I thought of how we planned and worked and collected our raffles, and begged, I felt no punishment could fit the crime of not only Mrs Dodds but of many more, not the big people but the ‘new rich’, and suddenly I saw greed and ugliness in what we have gaily laughed at and told each other little odd jokes about.

  The war does make me intense about things. I never realised that I could get so carried away. It’s perhaps a good thing I’m so busy or else I’d be off carrying a banner for something or other. I feel I want to DO THINGS – help in a real way, for there is such a lot to do everywhere.

  During the next couple of months Nella wrote a great deal about domestic matters and the management of the household economy: shopping, shortages, food prices and provisioning, preparations for Christmas, house-cleaning, gardening, preparing meals, household efficiencies, sewing and mending, making dollies, sitting by the fire, listening to the wireless, her dog and cat, nursing herself through a cold or the flu, receiving visitors (some were welcome, some were not) and looking forward to seeing her sons – Arthur came for a Christmas visit, Cliff was home on leave for a fortnight from 1 January. Nella was a proud and fastidious homemaker, and her husband often lauded her skills. Just before Christmas, on 22 December, she wrote of how the men in her family ‘always tease me about getting the best out of things, but I could have purred like a happy cat when I saw my tea table. It was loaded with goodies and there was not one thing I’d acted meanly to get – that was the happy making part of it. I’d hoarded out of my rations to make paste for jellied apple pie. My lavish “butter” was a beaten mixture of butter, margarine, and milk done in my cute little jar churn. My lovely cake, which tasted just as good as it looked, was the result of forethought last Spring as was my mince meat and rum butter. I’ve plenty to share with whoever comes in.’ Nella, an enemy of waste and extravagance, was a great proponent of planning, thrift and prudential practices. ‘My recipes are all so very economical’, she wrote on 7 January 1941, ‘and I’ve a real gift for making a tasty meal cheaply, but even the most economical of them I ponder over and wonder how I could make cheaper without taking from food value or too much from taste and appearance.’ Will had good reason to see her as the model housewife.

  Nella’s diary also included details on her unpaid work outside the home – WVS, Hospital Supply, Sailors Home – and occasionally during these weeks she remarked on larger public matters. On 6 December ‘I Listened to the Postscript ‘In Poland Now’ and I felt sick to my soul case† as I realised that if such dreadful horrors are broadcast, what were the hidden ones?’ A week later (13 December) she wrote of the frustrations of people who had been evacuated to the Lake District. ‘Round Greenodd, where mothers came with children, it did not make for happiness for they found fault and criticised and the children took the cue from them and were bad to manage. Where children were by themselves they seemed to adapt themselves and soon be part of the family. I cannot see evacuation ever being happy unless it’s done on a base where families can be families in their own place, if it’s only one room.’ She also thought that many evacuated women from towns and cities missed ‘the pulse of life felt where people do things and think things’. ‘All the talking and talking by men cannot know the real torture that a lonely uprooted woman can feel, both for herself and her children’ (15 December). Then there were the personal tragedies that forced themselves upon her. On 30 December ‘The face of a little boy I saw the other day came to me. He is here from Liverpool. He saw his mother and two sisters killed, spent seven nights in a shelter before and after his home was shattered at Liverpool and finally was trapped with an elder sister and lay on her dead arm for hours before rescue – and he is seven. His eyes are frenzied and he talks in stutters and if he fall asleep wakes in a lather of fright and shaking and screaming. He is lucky – he has come to a kind understanding aunt – but what of the others?’

  Wednesday, 22 January, 1941. I had a caller this afternoon – she comes to Centre to sew – a nice gay little woman whose daughter married her soldier sweetheart and who has spent her brief married life living near wherever he was stationed, and now he has gone overseas for two years. She is a tall handsome ‘brooding’ kind of girl – only 22 – and today [when she and her mother called] her beauty was clouded and dimmed and the gay amusing hat she normally looks so chic and smart in looked like a carnival hat stuck on anyway. My heart ached so for her, and for all the unhappy girls like her, and when she was going I felt my tongue – my tongue that can generally find something inconsequential to say to bridge any gap – stick to the roof of my mouth and not one word of comfort could I utter. I felt so full of pity for her I was speechless – like meeting a friend after she has lost her husband or child by death. She seemed to understand that I felt what I could not say and as I showed them to the door she turned to me in hall and said ‘Isn’t life odd, Mrs Last? Bob and I adored each other and longed passionately for a child, and no signs, and we were married nearly a year. If I’d been a soldier’s pick-up I’d have had a baby in my arms by now.’ Mrs Holt, her mother, flushed scarlet and said ‘Laura, you shock me when you talk like that’ and I felt sorrier still for the girl. If she cannot talk and say whatever she likes to her own mother and find understanding and sympathy, where can she do so? …

  I find I’ve prepared over 30 dollies, cut their bodies out and fixed waxed faces on ready to embroider. I’ve stuffed over a dozen of them and finished two Gretchens and got well on two gollywogs and two cowboys (ordered) so in spite of a wretched backbone that aches in every joint and makes turning my head a pain – just nerves, I expect, and after effects of my wretched cold – it’s been a good day. I like to feel my days are worthwhile – it keeps away black thoughts like howling wolves in the night – and if I know I’ve done ‘something to help’ it’s better than aspirins to make me sleep. Ruth said ‘I never remember you having so little for Sailors Home’ and I said ‘I’ve only got two waistcoats and those books and papers are no use for them – they are Women’s Weeklys and will go to Hospital. I think everyone is busy collecting for Rest Centres for town.’* Mrs Waite said yesterday ‘Would you like me to buy some children’s clothes – coats and suits etc. – from Mr Bell (a tradesman from whom we get part of our wool and blankets and sheets for sick bays for the soldiers at Fort)? She says he has got a job lot† of things and for £5 would let me have a good consignment. I think they will be salvaged. I said ‘Let’s look at them first and if they look good value we will buy two lots for soon I’ll be making more money [from raffles etc.] and you could spend half of whist drive money that way’. Bless her, she knows my love of spending money and always tries to let me spend and shop for as she says ‘If you see the value of money, pussy, you will have fresh encouragement to make some more’!

  Thursday, 23 January. As I listened to These Men Were Free, to my way of thinking the most marvellous and thrilling feature the BBC have ever had, I could not help thinking how lucky England – Britain – had been for as long as history records. Our Civil War and small uprisings were either local or quite gentlemanly affairs compared with the massacres and overruling of other countries and I wondered if in the eternal ebb and flow we were to have our turn as have all the countries on Continent. Everywhere I hear talk of invasion, but not defeatist frightened talk. It’s either a ‘Better get it done with’ attitude or else a j
oke made about it – like when a date is fixed a gay remark is added like ‘invasion permitting’ etc. … Today at Centre there was lots of remarks I overheard that still seemed about invasion, but in a light vein. It even overshadows the small meat ration as a basis of women’s conversation and the wail of ‘What can we make for dinner and what can we make soup of’. Many take so badly to having money and not being able to ‘live really well’ – chops, roasts, fowls and lots of expensive fish like plaice, hake and halibut.

  Saturday, 25 January. Ruth called in on her way to another ‘day place’ and her first words were ‘Did you hear Mr Brown’s account of what Germans would do if they conquered and won?’ I said ‘Yes – we have no need of thrillers to chill and curdle our blood nowadays, have we?’ She said ‘Well, Lil’ – her friend – ‘and I talked it over carefully, Mrs Last, and if invasion takes place and there is any chance of falling into Germans’ hands we will carry a safety blade always. We went to ambulance classes and “know our veins” and would never hesitate to open one if the worst came to the worst.’ She stood there so calmly, such a sweet, strong young thing with steady kind grey eyes, and a shadow seemed to fall on my heart as fresh problems rose in my mind and a pity for mothers of girls crowded out the feeling I always have for mothers of boys.