The Diaries of Nella Last

by Patricia Malcolmson

  All is so hushed and still and the rising moon so bright. The balloons only look like floating silver toys in the soft light and the scent from my lilac bush is overpoweringly sweet. I’ve a great bunch in the dining room and a bowl of lily of the valley – on top of air raid shelter! So quickly have I got adapted to that steel monster I don’t think anything at all about it now and get ready for bed and turn in comfortably and securely. The planes and guns ‘terrify’ me and yet don’t ‘frighten’ me – a queer subtle difference. The recurrent noise makes me feel very sick and ill but not that I’d run away and hide. Rather does a hot wild feeling creep over me, a mixture of rage and stubbornness and a passionate desire to strike back. In my way of thinking Hospital Supply and its continuance, the tea made and served by the Jolly Roger, even my dollies and little chicks are a part of my weapon – a feeling of ‘I’ll not give in; they are MINE and I’ll fight for them’. If I’m beaten that’s that, but I’ll not give anything I’ve got up without a struggle, and I find hidden strength and hardness in my nature that I never suspected. I’ve always been so weak minded and loved peace that I’d give way often when I’d rather have done other things, but that’s gone and I know I’m really fanatical if I thought a thing was right and nothing would make me turn aside. I wonder if this feeling is the English way that makes people say we are good fighters. It’s a new and remarkably strange feeling for an up-to-now gentle woman who liked peace above all things and to whom stubbornness and pig-headedness was a fault if not a downright sin!

  Thursday, 5 June. We heard last night that our smokescreen lamps were to be lit and were warned that food had to be covered and any silk materials in the way of curtains etc. taken down. Mrs Atkinson and I were both tired and we decided to close windows, and open them if there was an alert. I hate closed windows even though I tried to get plenty of fresh air in house earlier in evening and then left the dining room open and work ended with a heavy sickly headache and it was a big effort to get ready to go to Centre. I felt thankful I’d mixed my chicks’ food last night and I left extra bowls of water about for them and scattered a lot of coarse crumbs. Mrs Higham called and ran me down and after opening up I went shopping and to see if wool shops had had any instructions about further wool supplies for us. There were queues for chocolates at one shop – they allowed 1s worth for each person – for tomatoes at 6s 6d a pound! – cigarettes, sausage, biscuits, silk stockings and meat pies!! I said to my grocer ‘I wonder what some of them will do when war is over. I don’t think they can bear to see anything in a shop window or on shelves.’ He said ‘That’s a fact, and there’s a greedier spirit growing daily. If I get anything in I keep it in the back now. I don’t keep it on show.’ We share a real prejudice against queues and the feeling behind them and we often talk over ways and means to do away with them – there is really no need. If people would be content with a little share, as grocer decided his stock would divide, and all took it when and how it was best, it could be managed and marked off a card issued privately. The Co-ops here have a good non-queue system, except in the chemists who carry cigarette stocks. It’s a list of things like tinned salmon, tinned fruit, milk and dried fruits and before they were rationed syrup, honey, jam and cheese. A card did not guarantee a supply exactly – women had still to go once or twice a day on the days the stocks arrived – but if the man who put up order saw the ‘green ticket’, as list was called, had few stars to cross off any dainty bit, he had a small stock to draw on, and it makes for a much fairer distribution and stops the real hunting instinct possessed, or generally said to be so, by all small boys and many men – ‘What a funny thing, let’s kill it’, or ‘collect it’, as the case might be. We laughed at ourselves over lunch. We had all seemingly passed through the stage I had when, after the blitz and we saw many people’s furniture carted off, I wondered if my store cupboard and shelves were a debit rather than an asset and started to use things rather freely; and anyone who was short I let buy with less thought of the future. I soon settled down but talking today I got a glimpse of a difference in thought – an acceptance that life was changing and would change in increasing tempo …

  The odd and really bewildering thing is how little people – myself included – talk of war. When I can recall the really bitter arguments of my Dad and his friends over the Boer War when I was a child and the endless conjectures and ‘Now I would have done this, or that’ of Great War, and now when it looks as if it is the Armageddon of Revelations that was foretold, well, people just don’t seem to bother nearly so much. When I see people I know who lost their homes and shops and businesses in our blitz, I see their ‘sayonara’ acceptance and I cannot quite understand what it can be. It’s not bravery or morale – or is it the latter, I wonder, a hybrid word for a hybrid state of mind? We used to say ‘Poor Mrs So & So, she never got over the loss of her husband, or son etc.’, and when I saw Noel Coward’s Cavalcade and Diana Wynard’s moving acceptance of the loss of her loved boys I’d a feeling of ‘beautiful, but not quite true to life’. Now every day I hear of something as beautiful – loved boys who will never come back, quite young wives whose husbands are going overseas and who turn to work and not to ‘dance little lady’ ways of thought and living, and a general feeling of ‘we cannot alter things – why worry – if it happens it happens’.

  Tonight we went to sit by the sea and met a local Home Guard. I teased him about the second in command, Chislett, our Town Clerk, who was such a valiant soldier until the guns went off and now goes off at 6 o’clock and returns at 8 in the morning, and the worst of it is that where he sleeps is quite three miles even from a phone. I mentioned a few more ‘gingerbread’ soldiers, in a teasing mood, but he was not to be drawn. He just smiled and said ‘There’s going to be a bit of a shock all round this next fortnight – you will see’, but would say nothing more. By the hooky, though, I’d like to see a few of them made to remember that they were Home Guards and ARP Wardens and AFS. The latter have tightened up and Isa complains bitterly that ‘poor Jack cannot get out to Ulverston every night but has to sleep in the nasty old AFS station every night’. A really vindictive spirit possesses me about some of our Home Guard. I looked at them when they joined and knew it was only a save-my-skin policy rather than a desire to do their duty to their country, and the ones who have stood fast are in most cases men who would be liable to crack through health or age in a big struggle.

  Sunday, 8 June. At Ulverston yesterday I watched the plainly dressed country folk buying eagerly – ‘real’ country folk whose grandams and grandys had to rear big families on such tiny wages. Everything alters so quickly nowadays as if things change and go faster and faster. There were few farm hands about in spite of the Whit week – Martinmas [11 November]. There used to be big fairs at our country towns and big hiring days when likely lads and lasses who did not ‘want to stop on’ lined up for inspection down the main street. The strongest looking were snapped up first and in a bad year – and looking back the farmers had so many of them – few but the best got hired and one met disconsolate farm hands with a knot of straw in their buttonholes – a sign they sought service – wandering round the cheap jack stalls and merry-go-rounds and freak shows. How I loved the fair days when I stayed with Gran for school holidays and when nothing would have stopped me going for Whit. People on farms divided into shifts – two generally – and the older ones got up and went off and left the young ones to milk and do morning chores and returned early to do evening milking and feeding – why worry when the fun, including the dancing, started at 9 o’clock in the morning (!!) and went on till midnight on at least four days of Whit week? Gran never hired from the Fair – not in my memory for her servants ‘stopped on’ and when they left there always seemed younger additions of the family who were eager to follow older brothers and sisters, so our visits to Fair were for fun and to meet friends not likely to be seen for another year. Every corner of Ulverston seemed changed yesterday – memories of ‘that’s where the Circus always stood’
and ‘that corner always had a fat man with a trumpet who played a few ear splitting notes and then yelled WALK UP, WALK UP’. I was always so curious about it all, until I heard my Uncle and his friends roaring with laughter and plotting something in which an Ambleside ‘wrastler’ were mixed up and I think it must have been a boxing booth and one of the Lakeland lads I think got the better of the professional.

  It’s odd to lie scribbling for a thing like M-O under an indoor iron shelter and think of peace filled leisurely days like those – only ‘over my shoulder’ and yet as far away as the days of ancient Rome! …

  Today at Morecambe Bay two carfuls of happy people sat within earshot and I caught scraps of conversation, and there was so little of war and war worries. Even the clothes coupons were dismissed with jokes about ‘having to go into pants to save stocking’ and an energetic little boy was begged to ‘remember his pants’ as he scuffled happily on concrete edge of grass edging, but the rest of the talk seemed to be of ‘whether our Margaret should stand so much of Bill’s nonsense – girls were daft nowadays to bother about things like that’. I was so curious about Margaret’s particular daftness! Priestley was discussed and dissected and argued over. Opinions were divided whether BBC had given him a ‘raw deal’ and whether he was ‘touchy’ and wanted a fuss made over him. One man ‘believed that Priestley and Churchill were not too friendly’ and one said JBP was a Communist really and was ‘agin the Government’ all the time. Odd how I’ve never read anything like that in his kindly human talks.*

  I could not help seeing their picnic and spread from where I sat and wonder if they had the curious little feeling I had about stored things – a wonder if it was worth going on saving them so closely. There was tinned fruit and cream and chocolate biscuits to help out the marg and bread and they were so happy and gay. At one time I would have envied their gaiety and longed to have the boys or friends of my own, and it would have made me chafe at my husband’s dislike of company, or what was worse at times his spasms of liking it and then if I invited people I had the agony of wondering if he would offend, or amuse, which was so hatefully worse, by his attitude. Now nothing ruffles me, and I seem in some odd way to have reached a feeling or state of ‘being’ rather than ‘wanting to be’, a queer acceptance of all that comes along. I wonder if it’s the war or the fact I’m getting older and the fires of youth are dying. So hard to define really. It’s not that I’m getting resigned. I find myself ‘going up in the air’ and sticking to the point of things as never before. Rather is it a ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ feeling and that each day as it dawns has to be threaded on to a chain smoothly and fairly, not ground by worrying, not chipped by regrets or attempts to alter it by futile attempts that only fray the chains and don’t alter the ‘bead’ – not really. It sounds like a cheap Eastern philosophy when defined – best not to think of it at all.

  Tuesday, 10 June. There was a tendency to blame Chamberlain for his way of ‘giving in’, but we have been at war 18 months and muddle and overlapping and wishful thinking rule. Will we never wake up, or fight with tooth and nail and with every scrap of energy and force? Sometimes I see us dragging on for years and years and years, killing, destroying, maiming, starving in those countries where fighting is fierce and there is no chance of a harvest. Fighting and muddling on and coaxing workpeople not to take holidays or buy luxuries and save their money and their paper and old iron – coax, coax, coax. When the boys were small I ruled supreme – as wisely and kindly as I knew how – but supremely because I knew best what was good for the future for them and because I was wiser than they were. Why don’t clever wise people rise and take a lead? Aren’t they asked? Don’t they want to bother? I’ve always maintained that a small select body of men, strong and ruthless as Churchill is, clear seeing and experienced as he, should be in full charge. Parliament as we know it should go – and for good. Talk about the ‘will of the people’. I’ve met more silly boring flannel-brained people who were in Westminster, or wanted to get there, than seems possible. I’ve listened to such silly, childish, one-sided arguments, such fiery windbags with views and opinions that made me either annoyed or smile indulgently as I listened. To even think of them making broth for those running the country would be bad enough, never mind about them having power to shilly shally. Those poor lads on the beaches, the broken hearts and lives of the women who loved them – is there no magic or power in their agony? Must all be in vain and go on repeating itself until everything is gone? I look at barricades of coiled wire netting, smokescreen lamps, A-A guns and balloons floating up in the air. Men must pull together to think and carry out schemes like that, but in big things there always seems such a muddle.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FACTS OF LIFE

  June–September 1941

  Wednesday, 11 June. We have had papers round from billeting officers to fill in giving in all particulars as to space etc. in houses. I’m curious as to what happens. I feel I should be let keep the boys’ bedroom for them and I’ve got some of my sister-in-law’s things here until they get their house mended fit to live in and I’ve two days at Centre and half a day on mobile canteen. In our short road there are 12 houses empty at nights and for best part of day, for owners do not get in until 10 and leave again at 4 or so. Five are empty altogether and owners are staying out of town for duration. I feel I cannot possibly undertake to work and look after billeted men, not without giving up Centre, and I feel that there are so many who should be made to do their bit, and may well never do it until they are compelled, and after all it’s over two years since I joined with WVS and kept on steadily and sometimes I feel as if it’s less and not more work I want and especially of late.

  We had a big round – two big rounds of tea. I had a woman driver – Mrs Cumming was engaged – and we could not pass the smoke blackened soldiers toiling in the hot sun clearing the smoke screen lamps. We are only supposed to look after demolition gangs but the YMCA does not get round much. We were pestered to death to do something about getting cigarettes and tobacco in van; we only have tea now and when we had anything else it was only sandwiches. The bulk of men – some hundreds – come into town each day, some having a two hour coach journey and they have neither time to queue up at home in Cumberland or in Barrow. I said ‘Sorry, but we cannot help you. You must get your wives to queue at home for you. Women have to do it here for their husbands.’ One man said ‘What I want to know is – where is all the tobacco and cigs going, for by all accounts there’s a shortage everywhere, even in army canteens?’ When we drove off, Mrs Ricketts, my driver, said musingly ‘I believe everyone is smoking more. I rarely smoked or bought sweets and chocolates until recently and now I always feel I want a “cig or a choc” handy.’ I said ‘It’s a pity that Wrigley’s chewing gum seems to have vanished – and “sucky” sweets’, and she heartily agreed. We wondered if rather restricted diet had anything to do with ‘craves’ for cigs or chocs, and for the way women queued for them …

  Tonight we went and sat by the sea on Walney Island. All was so peaceful and still – and happy. Far out in the low tide soldiers bathed and frolicked on the sands and happy children – and dogs – played. Strangers laugh at the Walney dogs for, like those of Scarborough, they know when the tide is coming in and gravely trot off alone, if no one takes them, for a swim in the hope of meeting someone to throw a stick in water for them. They swim, play awhile and then make for home. More and more rolls of barbed wire are being put round Walney and Irish Sea and Morecambe Bay, and I wondered if the ‘big ones’ – some of them – had got bees in their bonnets about Ireland. My husband and the boys have always been amused at my insistence on Eire being such a danger spot but when I read in papers odd bits lately I fear I am not alone in my dread of that divided land – not that unity in a land is much good against the terrible might of Germany. They seem to have tapped a source of force and evil that never before had been tuned into by man – some dreadful ‘natural’ force.

  Sunday, 15 J
une. I packed tea after all and we went and sat by Lake Windermere, and to our surprise found it a lot warmer – must be a sea wind. All was so lovely after the rain and I’m astounded at promised crops on new ploughed land – green sheets of grain blades without a weed and huge fields of potatoes neat in their banked rows. The haysel† is well up – quite a foot – and will soon be ready for first cutting. What really puzzles me is how all the crops round here will be gathered, and especially when I think of all the extra crops sown in the rest of the country. More than school boys or ‘proffered labour’ will be needed. My husband reminded me of last war and German prisoners helping but I cannot see, in the view of invasion, that it would be feasible now. The peace and quiet was like a blessing and at Bowness hundreds of people had come from mill towns in motor coaches – I counted 49 big ones on one parking place alone and there were many more. When I look at car registrations from so far away I’m always amazed at the amount of petrol they must have – people I can tell are on holiday or on a short school day trip.

  As I sat so quiet and still a question in M-O that I had done this morning came back into my mind – the war’s effect on sex. Speaking personally, I could only say that at 51 sex questions answered themselves, war or no war.* But I began to think, perhaps it was the scantily clad girls with shorts rolled back to show thighs – so many unfortunately would have been better covered. It’s so rarely a girl with really shapely limbs bothers to display them, and also the too thick or thin, the bandy, spotty red or knock kneed girl who delights in exhibiting them! It came as a real surprise to go back in thought to when I was a girl, and after all that’s not such a very great while since. I remembered an incident that a parish nurse once told me. Before Health Insurance most churches had a nurse to look after the sick poor of parish and this one was so good and kind – did that little more always. She was attending a woman who was far on her journey with TB and who had at times to stop in bed. Hearing she was not so well nurse went round early to get the children washed and ready for school. Not expecting nurse so early the woman called wearily over the stair rail and thinking it was her husband off night shift, ‘Is that you John? Do you “want me” before I get dressed?’ The husband came in just then and not quite catching what was said shouted ‘What’s that?’ and on the question being repeated said ‘Aye’ simply. That seemed the whole keynote of married life. To greater and lesser degree, a woman was expected – and brought up – to obey. We had not got far from the days of Victorian repression. Men expected to be masters in, widely, sex questions. No woman was ever expected to be out, for instance, when her husband came in for a meal. Gosh, how I’ve nearly broken my neck to race home in time to brew tea and pour it, although rest of meal was laid ready! No woman was let go on a holiday alone – that is in Barrow. I think perhaps Barrow was extra provincial by its geographical position, shut off as it were on an island.