‘I feel quite a lot better for my little holiday’, Nella wrote from home on Friday, 13 August, ‘and ready to start off again next week at the shop and Centre. I’d hate not to have my settled work to do. When I feel so tired sometimes I feel it such a blessing I have it that it would be a sin to grizzle over aching back and feet.’
* * * * * *
When Nella was on foot in Barrow, she occasionally remarked on the signs of a nation at war. On Sunday, 2 May 1943 she and Will were out enjoying the warm day and saw groups of Dutch and French Canadian soldiers from nearby camps ‘strolling along’ the roads. ‘I looked at the ugly Nissen huts, at the training planes overhead, and at the gorse, so brave and gay. I felt “There will be golden gorse and larks when all the ugliness of huts and torn up country roads are past and when khaki is not general wear”. I’d a queer sadness on me somehow that not even the sunshine could dispel.’ But the battles that were being fought abroad rarely came up in conversation – ‘Not one word of the war’, she might report after a day spent in the company of others. On 24 June she remarked in her reply to M-O’s Directive that month, ‘it’s surprising how little the war is discussed – even mentioned.’ Among her WVS colleagues ‘the chatter is of everything but the war. If war is discussed it’s in that personal way – sons and daughters in the Services and their needs, leaves, parcels etc., points’ values, Home Front recipes’, and similar close-to-home concerns. ‘Beyond saying “Aren’t our lads doing well?” or “We gave ’em it last night again,” or occasionally a queer wave passes over the town and an “It won’t be long now” attitude is taken up’, war news featured little in conversation.
On those infrequent occasions when Nella did dwell explicitly on war, optimism failed her.
Thursday, 19 August. A shadow falls over me somehow. Maybe the weather, maybe the thoughts of this dreadful invasion of Europe starting. I often think ‘It will indeed be a “new world” after the war. All and everyone seem hell bent on destroying everything in the old one.’ Sometimes when I sit quiet a chaotic montage whirls through my tired head, the ‘civilization’ we boast so much about, and where it has led us. Fabulous riches found to train men to destroy each other, to equip them with more and more death dealing weapons, when such a fraction of the thought, energy and money could have done so much good. The world is ‘coming to an end’ indeed. If all the bad cruel Nazis and the ‘wicked’ Japs were being wiped out, we could think it for the betterment of all, but it seems so many of the flower of all races are going. Two women have sat side by side for four years at Centre sewing at bandages. One has lost two sons at sea – and now learns her airman son has to be ‘presumed dead’. The other one’s three sons work in the Yard – have good jobs. The daughter of 28 is ‘reserved’ as she is considered necessary as a secretary to a boss in the Yard. The other woman’s daughter had to join the WAAF. I look round the big room at faces I’ve known and loved for over four years. My heart aches. Even in that small circle, the bravery and courage, the ‘going on’ when only sons have been killed, when letters don’t come, when their boys are taught to fight like savages if they are Commandos, when they are trained and trained and trained for bodies to be made to endure, to go kill other women’s lads, to wipe all the light from other mothers’ faces.
PART TWO: PEACE
1945–1955
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHEERS AND TEARS
May–September 1945
After a prolonged hiatus, Nella’s diary resurfaces in the Mass Observation Archive, dated Friday, 4 May 1945. Hitler was dead, although many people did not believe he was; Germany was in a state of complete collapse and largely occupied by Allied forces; and the end of the war in Europe was obviously imminent – peace arrived officially on 8 May. While war in the Far East continued, many – perhaps most – Britons were by now thinking a lot about life after the war, and what sort of peace they would confront. ‘There will be no spectacular change to sweep things away on V.E. Day’, Nella thought on 4 May.*
During the war Nella had often imagined the post-war future, usually gloomily. She had felt (when she thought about the matter at all) that the extraordinary upheavals of wartime were bound to leave an unhappy legacy. ‘They talk of the “world after the war”’, she wrote on 27 October 1941, ‘I wonder how much effort it will take to clear up the mess before even beginning to rebuild.’ Would future generations ‘see a clear path out of the morass’ (11 October 1942)? On 22 August 1942 she was talking with a Mrs Clarke, who ‘went on dreamily “I wonder when all is over and finished, will people have a deeper sense of values, or will it be only a race again to make and sell for money alone?”’ When Nella worried about Cliff – and whether he would return safely – she was a realist and recognised that, even if and when he and other young servicemen eventually did come home, ‘We will never see them again as we knew them. Life will have altered them for good or ill’ (17 October 1942). She often anticipated hard times, even chaos, when peace came, just as the years after the First World War had been marked by unfulfilled promises aplenty. ‘I look ahead’, she mused on 28 December 1942, ‘and see rationing for so many years. In fact I often argue that the worst periods will be after the war when the help we talk of to the starving people of Europe will be a fact. Every possible thing will have to be shared, not just food. I often think when I hear people talking how few have any idea of the mighty problems and adjustments ahead.’
There was, then, a lot to worry about – the plight of millions of refugees, the revengeful feelings of the victors, the prospect that ‘we will be more or less poor’ (DR, 29 August 1943) – although she was enthusiastic about the Beveridge Plan, a blueprint for the welfare state, and she both hoped for and expected improvements in education and welfare services. She also anticipated with pleasure the renewed possibility of driving with Will to their Lakes (not possible since severe petrol rationing from mid-1942) and ‘sit all afternoon, so quiet and still, and leave all frets and worries in the peace of the quiet hills’ (25 December 1942). Now in 1945, with hostilities in Europe concluded, she was to start experiencing postwar changes directly, and in all sorts of ways.
Friday, 11 May. It’s been a real heat wave day, sultry and thundery but with a clear blue sky. I had to tidy round and go shopping. I hoped the oranges would have been in, but it will be tomorrow. I left a casserole of the two little chops, onions, carrots and potatoes cooking and a sponge pudding on the same heat, and made sauce when I came in. I had no soup and was only sorry I had to cook a hot meal. I’d have preferred salad. I’d not time to go up to Mrs Waite’s but I rang her up and she said she felt a bit better. She is worrying now for Centre to be closed as quickly as possible. She cannot bear to think another would take her place, even for a few weeks!
I had to be down early at Canteen, to get the dried eggs scrambled and the marg beaten up with milk, a tiresome job in the heat. We were not too busy to have little friendly chats to the boys who came in, several of whom were POWs who had returned. They could not know of our efforts in the little shop, but to hear them talk of the Red Cross and parcels brought tears to our eyes. They said it was not just the food, but the looking forward to something that kept them going. I’ve always felt a blessing rested on that little junk shop. I felt very happy. An American lad was on leave, from Germany. I felt surprised, wondering if we would yet see Merl and Brin [American soldiers]. The camps are all being dispersed and done up and all huts made spruce. It looks as if they will be used soon. New Zealand sailors and our usual Polish airmen came in and one of the latter brought us a 6d ice each from a nearby ice cream shop, saying it was a ‘peace celebration’. One whom I know well, with coming in for over a year – he has been instructor to his fellow countrymen – was telling me he intended to settle in Canada, ‘get his citizen papers’ and never return to Poland, for his home is now part of Russia and he says ‘home no more’. He says his father and mother are well and ‘maybe will die in Poland as they know it’, but he and his brother will make
a new home. His sister committed suicide with many more highly strung girls when the Germans drew near to their town. He once said simply ‘They preferred to die virgins’.
I felt my aching feet and ankles would hardly carry me home, and I felt sorry for the girls who came into the stuffy smelly place for the evening shift. I had a cup of tea with the window open to catch the little breeze, and read the paper and rested, and then Margaret came in and we talked. She had a ‘chameleon’s hump’. I said ‘Anyone would think the war had started instead of finishing’ and she said ‘Well, things are flat somehow. It’s not a bit like what I thought the end of the war will be.’ In Barrow no heads of anything did any planning. I really think wolf had been cried so often, people’s hopes raised and then died so often, that no one could grasp the fact this time that it was nearly over – and then suddenly over. The poorer more demonstrative people in little streets seemed to have parties planned. Odd how a little bit of ground in front of a house and a garden gate – and even more so a real garden – seems to have a different effect on the occupants of a house. It seems to breed more aloofness. I’ve noticed it in quite small Council houses. If people are moved from terrace houses they have soon lost that ‘gossiping round doors’ habit. Sentimentalists call it neighbourliness, and I suppose up to a point it’s good, but beyond that point it’s a breeding ground for much of the misery of the very poor. Lack of privacy, wasted time, and gossip leading to quarrels are a few things not taken into account when speaking of the way they have parties and celebrations and the snooty suburbanites don’t bother. Personally I hate to have my actions supervised and dragooned!
Margaret hopes the Americans come. She says ‘There was more life in town then than even when the Scotties were here so long’.* She talks of ‘clearing off’ as soon as she is 21. She has had to ‘pipe down’ for her mother told her she would not go till she was 21 and Margaret at present rather wonders how far parental authority can go! For once her vitality was quenched a little. She is at a loose end. I said ‘Well, you’re not blaming the end of the war for that, surely?’ She said ‘No-o, but somehow everything seems altered. I’ve never known anything but war plans and talk. It’s upsetting somehow, like coming to the end of a long journey and not knowing what will happen and where to find lodgings etc.’ She will not be alone in her reactions. It seemed another little sign of the chaotic state ahead. The peace will have greater and more difficult problems than ever war had. This war will have such ‘roots’ it did not grow up in a night.
I wonder sometimes what is happening in Germany, where slave workers are in numbers strong enough for brigandage and reprisals on their hated masters, and in places where any authority by the Allies is not near enough to make for law and order. I don’t think the end of bloodshed has yet come for the German people – or the misery and death. That American lad who had come on leave spoke of Cologne as a gigantic rubbish heap which could only be tackled from the edges, working inwardly as roads had gone altogether. I thought of the hundreds of people who might have been trapped in underground shelters, to die a lingering death, and the pestilence and death which might result from the bodies and lack of drainage and sanitation. I wonder what will happen when the aggressive German POWs are released. I feel I’d like one huge V bomb to fall on Grizedale Hall where I hear all the big wigs of the German Army are being brought! It might solve a few problems in the future.* I thought Steve Howson’s theory that the next war will be against Russia with Germany as our allies was a figment of his imagination, largely due to his phobia about Russia, but I’ve been really amazed to hear little remarks with the same trend – trivial remarks like ‘Russia will have to be watched’, ‘Look how Russia is trying to upset things at San Francisco’, ‘After all, our Royal Family are descended from Germans, you know’, ‘Russia will take generations to be really civilised – they are only bossed now and the majority never reason or think anything for themselves’.
Saturday, 12 May. It would have been a gorgeous day for July today. I rose early and began to pack things away in the bathroom. We can manage to get to the wash bowl and must do till Monday night with a sponge down. In small houses when a general upset is made, there is so little place to put things. My husband brought up George, the apprentice, again and lifted all carpets and I got all my odds and ends of soiled tablecloths and woollens, overalls and a folk weave bedspread washed and on the line. I did chips, cabbage and sausage for lunch and made a cup of tea and we had stewed bottled gooseberries and a piece of plain cake. I felt about all in and had planned a rest as my husband intended to write, but he said ‘I don’t feel like staying in – let’s go on the bus to Millom’. It was a bit of a rush but it was one of those journeys when everything fell into place. We thought it best to go down by town bus to the starting place, but could have got on as it came past the street, and at Ulverston there were only a few waiting and we got a seat. Although in sight across the estuary, the winding hilly road took nearly 1½ hours by bus, and they had had a very heavy thunder storm in the night and the green of grass and trees was dazzling after the rain.
There was a group of boys rather hard to place sitting near, but when one began to hum ‘Mairzy doats’ I knew one of them – and remembered the London evacuees I’d taken by bus to Millom last autumn. I began to talk to them – such charming boys – two of whom I’d gladly have brought home myself. They had the keen intelligence my own lads had and when I reminded them of that Friday and our chat about stone walls and roads built yet as the Romans did when here they remembered me. I bet their people will get a shock when they meet them, if they have not seen them! Their quite good schoolboy suits looked two sizes too small, their hair was like springy grass and partings seemingly abandoned, but it was their speech which really amused me – ‘summat’, ‘lile’, ‘yon’, ‘gitten’ for ‘something’, ‘little’, ‘over there’ and ‘got’ and the soft Cumberland dialect mixed with the quicker London way of speaking. I asked them if they were wanting to go back. One lad of 12–13 said seriously ‘Well, yes. I’ve begun to worry a little, thinking of my future. I’m all set to be a doctor in my own mind. Dad says it will depend largely on what scholarships I win – and I feel I’m losing time here in the country.’ I looked at his keen young face. I thought ‘Nothing would make you lose time, my dear. You will have gained something by your six months stay, if only in health.’ One thing they all liked – being able to run and play on moor and field and ‘no one saying anything’ and ‘it being so nice when you fell down, to smell the grass and heather’. They had seemingly all had good homes and spoke as if their friends had been happy and of one little boy and girl who were staying altogether as they had lost both parents and grandparents in London raid and the little girl was ‘chesty’ and needed care. The wise way he spoke of ‘papers going to be signed and all done properly, you know’ made me smile. Two didn’t like the hills, said ‘All was ever so nice and flat’ where they lived, and none seemed to have seen many hills before coming north – I remembered their reactions at the time. They are going back very soon. It must be unbelievable to the Londoners that all their terrors are past.
We had time for a Cumberland tea – sandwiches of homemade potted meat, new rolls split and made into open sandwiches with a thick layer of chopped hard boiled eggs, a huge plate of warm buttered tea cake and four large cakes – for 1s 3d each, after they had ‘checked’ what was eaten and expressed surprise at our small appetites! We had to go back to the bus stand and we queued for about 15 minutes as the timetable had been altered. Such an odd collection of folk for sleepy out-of-the-world Millom. A good sprinkling of evacuees, their once smart city clothes rather shapeless and smart costumes worn with peasant handkerchiefs or no head gear, gloves or stockings. Land girls, two Polish airmen, ultra smart girls who looked as if they might be barmaids for their accent did not quite match their Hollywood getup. A couple with two children fascinated me – foreigners of some kind. I heard two women discussing them. The man, strangely enough in a kh
aki service battle dress, was a Russian and the mother a Czech. The children were really lovely with dark curling hair and smoky grey eyes. The father’s head would have interested a student of heads – unless it’s general to a type of Russian. The back view was a quite normal shape and size, but the side view was so sloped [she drew a picture] that he had less forehead than anyone I’ve ever seen. His features seemed so small and compressed that his curling hair stood out like a wild halo. I thought ‘If the brow is the sign of a thinker, you cannot do much reasoning or thinking’ and wondered again if it is typical of a type of Russian. The mother looked like a goddess. Later her splendid framework might grow heavy looking, but at about 30 she was a delight to see and watch her effortless grace when on leaving the bus they had rather a steep path to climb. Not a couple to find in out-of-the-way Cumberland – another sign of the general mix-up today.
The Diaries of Nella Last Page 25