Nella Last's Peace

by Patricia Malcolmson

  Wednesday, 24 November. It’s been so wild and cold, beyond the paths and front windows Mrs Salisbury and I didn’t do any outside work. She brought a parcel with her and said, ‘Phyllis’s doll has come, so I brought it up straight away’ – I’d promised to dress it. I opened the box. It was a very nice ‘baby’ doll, and I said, ‘What a nice dollie. How much was it?’ She flushed and looked a bit guilty as she said, ‘Thirty-five shillings – but all the war I couldn’t buy them toys and every Xmas I promised to buy Phyllis a nice dollie. She has never had one and she is nine. Our Mary says I’m crazy, but I’ve paid in a club every extra day’s work I’ve had.’ I thought of all the half hours each way she had walked to do the additional half days, for which she gets 6s each time. I looked at the tatty, untidy little thing, growing old at thirty-five. I said, ‘Of course you are crazy, but you know, my dear, you are giving your children precious memories that will bind you all together when they are grown up.’ And I told her I’d dress it to look like a £5 dollie, and make a carry cot if we could get a suitable box. Her eyes sparkled and she sang raucously all morning as she rubbed and scrubbed. I always feel it a privilege to help her in any way.

  The butcher brought two little sausage pats. I grated onions and mixed them with cold mashed potato, bound with an egg, and made little pats and fried them brown, and there was tinned tomato soup, potatoes, turnip and apple sauce, and yesterday’s remains of sago pudding.

  When I phoned to the hospital yesterday, they told me that Ena’s husband had gone home. I went out early and did a bit of shopping for her, when I did my own, and took it over. Billy has gone to a skeleton, and the doctor told him he was lucky to be living at all. Only modern science had saved him. He has been lucky in his pals. All his potatoes are in pies† earthed over, his field of turnips which he grew for winter growing is chopped and ready for the wintering ewes, fences are mended that the squatters in nearby Army huts tore down for fuel, and I felt the old man who had taken over the care of the glass houses had some magic not possessed by any of the Whittams. I never saw such lovely sturdy crysanths in any of their greenhouses, and he had taken notice of my remarks about the forget-me-nots and purple primroses.

  Thursday, 2 December. I mused as I came home through the wet and dark how far-reaching and true the term ‘new era’ really was, how people’s minds had ‘surged and boiled’, altering actions and behaviour. I felt if I thought hard enough I’d see my life in three distinct slices, though I cannot recall things very clearly before the South African war. I can remember country life best. There was a big country house near. Several girls I knew as children, daughters on farms near Gran’s, went as parlour maids to people who stayed there, and I heard them talk. The owners of the house were relatives of the Cavendishes, not at all rich but exclusive to a degree. No Jews ever stayed and I remember the real amazement when an American was actually invited! I was such an intensely, not to say nosey, kid. I loved to keep quiet when elders were talking, knowing better than to advertise the fact I was there by asking questions. Day after day I prowled round the lanes like a tracker, hoping to catch sight of this American, complete with feathers, blanket and axe. I was lying on the grass one day, just listening to some grasshoppers whirring and hoping I could see if they did do it with their legs and not some mysterious instrument, when a tired kind voice said, ‘Little girl, are you lost?’ I said, ‘Ah no. This is my gran’s field.’ He said, ‘Then perhaps you can tell me how to get to Gawrith Field?’ – the name of the Egeletons. I was up in a flash. Such luck. Why he might have seen the American! We walked slowly – it was one of my crutch days – and he asked about my accident and I politely answered all his questions, feeling I could ask mine in return, and then I blurted out, ‘Have you seen the American? Has he come yet?’ I was old enough to feel horror at my ‘dropped kick’ when he told me he was the American, and hadn’t seen an American Indian till he was much older than I was!

  It’s difficult to believe nowadays the exclusiveness of the Edwardian era, or the rapidity the younger ones plunged into their ‘brave new world’, which no doubt felt as strange to the older ones as our atomic era. We lived in a big, well-built house – big for Barrow – and we moved into it from an outlying fishing village, where my parents lived for the first few years of their life. Mother was enchanted to find gas laid on, and a small room we could have made into a bathroom, yet never did for years, a sponge-down being considered quite enough each day! When Mother got a gas stove and a gas fire after a trip to Manchester, we felt very go ahead. And she lived long enough to see Dad’s fears materialise – he was a great fan of Lord Roberts, who always feared trouble with Germany. I thought of all the wonders I’d seen – cars, planes, wireless, household use of electricity, amongst the everyday wonders. I felt the ‘new era’ had started some time ago – and only now is showing.*

  I had to hurry to make my husband’s tea, for I expected Mrs Newall from the office to choose a dollie for a friend’s little girl. It was pouring down and she looked tired out. She has such a gift of friendship, as had her husband, before he left her to live with someone else. All his friends and relatives still visit her, and lately she has had her London evacuee and her little girl staying. She is not very old and has had a bad breakdown. Raids, flying bombs and two evacuations from bomb-damaged houses failed to break her spirit – it’s been left to her husband’s mother to do it. She is like my husband’s mother but, in addition, dirty in her personal habits, never sleeps in the night and rouses the house several times by knocking them up; and one thing and another resulted in an illness for Mrs Hawkins and a longing for the peace she knew in Barrow. Mrs Newall is worried. She has been here three weeks and looks better but begins to shake and cry at the thought of going back to London. I pointed out to Mrs Newall it was most likely all her shocks and troubles had overtaken her – it was not only the fear of going back to ‘old Grandma’. She wants to stay till after Xmas, and Mrs Newall wants to invite her sister and husband, and though there’s room, she says they won’t mix.

  I always feel Mrs Newall cherishes the hope her husband will return. They used to quarrel so much, and he was often unfaithful; and she knew it, and took it for granted it was ‘Bob’s way – he’s an old tomcat’, which covered any heartache she felt privately. I see him with the person he now lives with when we pass sometimes through Ulverston. There’s an old married look about them, as if their relationship has rooted. I cannot see him coming back. Life’s a tangle.

  Friday, 3 December. I had tea ready, salad with a hard-boiled egg and grated cheese, wholemeal bread and butter and jam, toasted fruit bread and cake. There was a leaping wood fire and warm slippers and the curtains drawn to shut out the cold and wet – rain was falling heavily. I saw my husband was very upset, and thought perhaps his mother had been revolting today, but he said, ‘More trouble. I’m sure I’m the unluckiest man living with staff troubles. Alec has asked for his cards.’* He did once before, when his pal went into the Navy, and only his mother’s persuasion [changed his mind] after I’d had a talk to her and told her how worried I’d been over Cliff not having a trade when he came out of the Army. I explained how Cliff had not finished his apprenticeship, and how he had had to strike out afresh – and off to Australia. Tonight I said, ‘What’s his idea now? He has over two years of his apprenticeship to serve.’ My husband had told him he was a bound apprentice, and refused, but Alec is going to see if he cannot break it to go into the Army or Navy permanently.

  I felt really sick with worry. I told my husband more strongly than kindly that ‘If you have the same attitude at work as at home, you will soon have no one left.’ I told him that it was only that streak in me which made it imperative I should feel satisfaction with anything I did, irrespective of how others felt, that kept me cooking, etc. I said, ‘You never say a thing is nice or give a word of thanks for any effort, and you pounce on any little error or fault. It’s insulting to say the least of it.’ I told him he often frightened me by his growing res
emblance to his mother, to her fault finding, dislike of every little social contact, her complete indifference to anyone’s opinion, comfort or wishes. He looked blankly at me and said, ‘I cannot help how I’m made, can I?’ I said, ‘Well, judging by results, you had better begin trying. You would be surprised if I asked for my cards, and went off to Cliff in Australia.’ I could have laughed out loudly at his look of horror!

  Will wound down his joinery business in 1950 and retired, and he and Nella spent the rest of their lives in Barrow. Nella never did get to Australia. Cliff enjoyed a successful career there as a sculptor; his work is documented in Geoffrey Edwards, Clifford Last’s Sculpture: A Retrospective Exhibition (Mel-bourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1989). Arthur and Edith had two more sons, Christopher and Jerry, and in time moved, first to London and later to north Somerset. Arthur, who occasionally acted on the BBC, became a skilled bookbinder and opened his own bookshop in the 1960s. Nella’s adeptness at handicrafts and her feel for colour and form undoubtedly influenced the younger generation, notably her sons. Her mentorship on these matters is remembered fondly in 2008 by Margaret Atkinson Procter.

  Nella continued to write her diary until February 1966. On the 17th of that month she was thinking of giving it up. ‘I wonder if it’s ever read or if the need for it is past now.’ She died in 1968, and Will outlived her by little less than a year.

  * Since sheets wore out towards the middle, where people slept on them, it was common to cut them down the middle and sew them so that the unworn edges were attached in the middle.

  * Cliff had been wounded in the war.

  * Nella had different feelings about the atmosphere at the weekly whist drive a few weeks later, on Tuesday, 14 December, when some squabbling broke out over alleged deficient play. ‘I said to the one who had been so bitchy in her remarks about Mrs Atkinson’s play, “You sound cranky today, Mabel. Don’t begin your monkey-shines with me. If you begin passing personal remarks, you’ve had it.” In a wordy battle she wouldn’t stand a chance. I know too much about her.’

  * Nella was well aware that not all this change was for the best. ‘I get little sick feelings about atomic warfare,’ she had written on 15 November 1948, ‘not for the huge bangs that wreck buildings – they are a trifle and can be built again. It’s for what radioactivity could do to precious soil and water that will be most devastating.’

  * ‘Cards’ were an employee’s documents held by an employer. To ask for them meant to quit.

  AFTERWORD

  Family was not, perhaps, everything to Nella, but it was certainly central to her sense of the meaning of life. ‘I’m a homebody really,’ she wrote in response to MO’s Directive in October 1942, ‘and raising my boys and making a home for them was the happiest and most blessed part of my life.’ She pitied women who had not had children – she would have liked to have had more herself – and she was pained by the tragedies that overtook and perhaps overwhelmed families she knew. She often reminisced about her own family, especially about the good times. These ‘I remember’ moments, as she called them on 10 December 1948, ‘seem to cling round the boys and their happenings so much’. She was sensitive to how children grew up in families and experienced life and developed their own personalities. She was drawn, almost despite herself, to Mrs Whittam’s buoyant, somewhat chaotic, slap-happy and gregarious family; and two of her favourite novelists, John Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole, were admired mainly for their family chronicles.

  When Nella wrote about Arthur, she frequently mentioned his intelligence, aspirations and domestic life, and she worried about his health. When she thought about Cliff, she often had mixed feelings. She regretted that he was so far away after 1946 but was content that he had done the right thing by going to Australia. She was both distressed by and fond of his ‘differentness’. But she never – at least up to 1950 – records any explicit acknowledgement that Cliff was gay, though a few passages suggest that the thought had crossed her mind (for example, 27 October 1945 and 16 September 1946), and he had told her on 29 October 1946 that he ‘never was the marrying type’. Perhaps her son’s homosexuality was simply too painful to contemplate. Perhaps, too, she was reluctant to speak openly of sexual inclinations which, if acted upon, were at that time a criminal offence. Christopher Last, Arthur’s middle son (born in 1951), recalled talking with Cliff in London around 1980, ‘when he said – and these would be almost his exact words – that his family had always found it hard to accept his sexuality’. As for Cliff’s own feelings about his coming of age in Barrow in the 1930s, they may not have been particularly happy, given what he apparently told a writer in Australia many years later. Cliff was reported to have found working with his father ‘irksome and unfulfilling’; he ‘derived no great pleasure from either the work of cabinetmaking or the Barrow environment with its industry and smoke and cold coastal climate’, and he disliked ‘the established routines, the monotony, and the drabness of his working environment’ – ‘it was this that his whole sensitive being rejected’. Life in Barrow, for Cliff, was said to have been ‘unrewarding, unsatisfying, leaving him restless and searching for something; for a personal fulfillment which he now realised he would not find in his local environment’.* Nella, certainly, was aware of his need to spread his wings.

  As well as Cliff, Nella’s in-laws were at times much on her mind – usually painfully, sometimes passionately. On 16 November 1948, when speaking of Nellie, Harry’s wife, she virtually exploded in fury. ‘It’s one thing for one’s husband’s relatives to have the idea you are slightly mad, a “fine lady” and at best “peculiar” in outlook and rearing children, etc., but for an in-law, and one for whom I’ve always had that little contempt I feel for narrow-minded boneheads, to reveal the depths of jealous spite as she did for my sons’ “success” and “luck”, in not costing a lot of money to “make them gentlemen”, as well as the way she acted when Dad died, made me feel the barest politeness was all I could offer in the future.’ Privately, as her diary for 31 January 1950 recorded, she saw this sister-in-law as ‘one of those featherheads who open their mouths and let every passing thought out’. In most in-law disputes Will sided with Nella.

  As for her marriage, readers of the diary are bound to wonder what drew Nella Lord to Will Last in the first place. In one brief passage, written on 30 January 1950, she sheds light on this question. She had known Will since he was nineteen, and ‘I thought his extreme shyness so attractive – so different. I’d never known what it meant to feel shy or out of place. I was so gay and lively, so full of life and fun. That’s what attracted him – and what to him was such an attraction. I could “stand up anywhere and recite or tell jokes”. Odd he should so quickly think differently, should think I should keep all and any gaiety for him alone, and to show such boredom and aversion to going amongst people as soon as we were married. If I’d not been so young and inexperienced I could have seen the danger signals. If I’d been stronger minded and made a firm stand, perhaps then he would have grown to like company.’ Clearly, Will was an anxious person, a worrier, preferring to keep himself to himself, and prone to nightmares that Nella thought stemmed from ‘deep fears’. On 21 August 1947 she mentioned that he didn’t like eating in public. Perhaps in a later generation he would have been diagnosed as having an anxiety disorder. There is little doubt that his temperament and hers were very, very different.*

  On her own side of the family, Nella’s mother was a rather limp presence. When, on 16 December 1947, Aunt Sarah was speaking of her short life and ‘of her sadness and inability to take life as it came’, Nella ‘had a vision of the sadness and aloofness of my mother’s face – Dad always said she should have been a nun’. Nella’s kindest words were reserved for her father and, in particular, her grandmother Rawlinson. She wondered on 13 November 1948 if ‘I measure people by my gran, and my father, who in their different ways were so wide in outlook. My father was an accountant, but had an interest in starting the first music hall in Barrow, and he also w
as a great reader and seemed to know every answer to a child’s eager questioning, or would help me to find out for myself.’ Nella valued curiosity, engagement and the imagination – she admired her deaf Aunt Sarah, who apparently read a book every couple of days and followed current events closely. ‘Gran’, too, had been a thoughtful, clear-thinking woman, whom Nella almost always wrote of with affection and respect. ‘She as a Quaker learned to read and write, though far from town,’ Nella recalled on 8 December 1948, ‘and educated herself by reading, finding time and ways in her so busy life, and taught her family and servants who wanted book learning. I wondered how many rebel thoughts she had planted, teaching grown farm men to read.’

  What can be said about Nella’s own religious views? She denied being a Christian – ‘I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell, in the resurrection of the body.’ In November 1944 she mentioned some reasons for her disbelief, including ‘a father who showed me an escape from pain and loneliness through reading and an inability to take things for granted without conviction or proof’. She did, however, believe in a supernatural power. She seemed to hold the view that God was everywhere and in everything, and she sometimes spoke of a ‘Force’ or ‘Plan’ or ‘Rhythm’ in life, as if she felt that humans were in some sense under the firm direction of a higher being. She almost certainly held some belief in the occult – she was not at all averse to having her fortune told, and occasionally she told fortunes herself. She also had a Hindu-like conviction that individual life continued after death. ‘I’ve always had a strong belief in life going on,’ she wrote on 28 February 1950, ‘not a Heaven where there is singing and walking by green pastures, but somewhere where we got the chances we threw away, or never had, to grow.’