Working in the Mass Observation Archive, and with MO material, is always a pleasure, and we continue to be grateful to those at the University of Sussex who have supported our research. We wish in particular to thank Fiona Courage, Adam Harwood, Rose Lock, Jessica Scantlebury, and Karen Watson in Special Collections; and Owen Emmerson and Catrina Hey for doing a great deal of work on our behalf. Several people connected with Nella Last or persons mentioned in her diary have generously shared information with us, notably Kathleen (Holme) Emery and Margaret (Atkinson) Procter, both of whom also lent us family photographs, and Jerry Last and the late Peter Last, Nella’s youngest and eldest grandsons. We have also appreciated the advice given us by the BBC Written Archives and the Cumbria Record Office and Local Studies Library in Barrow-in-Furness. Matthew Taylor, our copy editor, saved us from numerous errors and confusions, and our discussions with Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown have always been helpful and clarifying.
At Profile Books, we very much appreciate the keen interest of Daniel Crewe in Nella Last, her writing, and our work as editors. For this volume, we are especially indebted to Lisa Owens, who has been intimately involved in its production. She persuaded us to revise some of our editorial approaches, and this rethinking prompted us to produce a better and more wide-ranging book. She also made many detailed comments on the text, which gave us the opportunity to eliminate repetitions, tighten some passages, reconsider occasional statements, and anticipate possible questions and concerns of readers. We are glad to have been able to benefit from her sensitive editorial advice.
Nelson, British Columbia
June 2012
During Nella Last’s lifetime British currency was calculated in the following manner:
12 pence = 1 shilling
20 shillings = £1
One shilling was written as ‘1s’, a penny as ‘1d’. A farthing, by then little used, was a quarter of a penny. A guinea (‘1 gn’) was worth 21 shillings. A sum of, say, two pounds and four shillings was usually written at that time as £2-4-0 or £2/4/0; such an amount is presented in this book as £2 4s 0d.
Efforts to propose modern monetary equivalents are rarely helpful. Since the 1940s were years of widespread rationing, both during and after the war, the price of an item was sometimes less important than its availability (so while wages went up in wartime, finding suitable ways to spend money could be a challenge). Moreover, the household economy was for most people simpler and more spartan than it would be a couple of decades later. Material expectations were generally modest, some produce was home-generated, borrowing and bartering might be an alternative to buying, and recycling was normal. Nella was very price-conscious, and she is constantly reporting the prices of items in shops and elsewhere.
Among the reference points to keep in mind is the weekly wage: most full-time male wage-workers in Barrow in the 1940s were probably earning between £4 and £10 a week: the former for unskilled labourers, the latter for workmen with desired skills. Men were almost always paid considerably more than women. In 1947 Nella was paying her cleaning helper 1s 6d an hour, plus a hot lunch; and in 1948 an older man who was working for her as a gardener charged ‘only’ 2s an hour. During most of the 1940s Will supported his parents with £2 10s every week from his joinery business (one of the reasons Nella had to be frugal). It is useful to keep in mind that Nella’s housekeeping budget in the early 1950s for one week was £4 10s 0d, and from this sum she had to pay for sundry items such as medications, periodicals and bus fares as well as make her purchases of meat, fish and fresh and processed food, not to mention the shilling a week that she bet on the football pools. Her husband seems to have been responsible for maintaining the car. The Lasts’ household had little leeway for luxuries, especially after Will retired in 1950. They (for example) rarely ate out in the early 1950s, except on food they brought from home.
In her vast diary the four topics that Nella Last writes about most often are the weather, ill health, preparing meals and shopping. Together they probably comprise at least half of her output. These matters appear infrequently in this book for they rarely show her at her best as a writer. Writing about such mundane matters did, however, ensure that she was never out of practice, and that words always flowed readily from the tip of her pencil or pen. When she did have something interesting to say – stimulated, perhaps, by a Sunday outing in the car or an encounter in a shop or on Abbey Road, or an acquaintance arriving at 9 Ilkley Road, or some incident that brought back memories of childhood – she was well poised to put her thoughts into words. These are the occasions when she was most likely to tell a good story, or recount a lively conversation, or compose a vivid description of the countryside, or disclose some of her deeper feelings about the meaning of life. And these are the passages that we have chosen to highlight. Since they appear irregularly and often unexpectedly during the sixteen years covered in this book, some periods of her writing life are represented much more fully than others. For the editors of her writing it is as if they are viewing a collection of tens of thousands of snapshots, taken daily over many years, and choosing only the best to publish regardless of the date.
While the main task for editors of Nella Last’s manuscript diary is to select what to publish and to shape these selections into chapters, there are several other ways in which we have exercised judgement and revised what she wrote. The following are the most important of these editorial interventions. (1) Since Nella did not use paragraphs, wherever they now exist they are our creations. (2) Her punctuation was casual, often whimsical. (Mispunctuation is a common feature of M-O diaries, indeed, of most diaries whose authors lacked the time or incentive to revisit what they had written.) We have routinely re-punctuated her writing to make it as clear and smooth-flowing as possible. (3) Obvious errors – she almost certainly wrote in haste, and usually at night – have been silently corrected. These include misspellings and phrases that lack a necessary word, such as a preposition, article or conjunction. (4) Very occasionally an additional word is needed to convey the meaning of a sentence. In these rare cases we have silently supplied a suitable candidate. (5) We have standardised the usage of particular words in order to ensure, for example, that a word is always spelt the same way, or that it is consistently capitalised or not capitalised, and that the prices of goods and services and other numerals are presented in a consistent form. (6) Nella was much given to underlining words for emphasis and to putting a great many words and phrases in inverted commas. We have eliminated these practices except in cases where they are helpful or even essential to grasping her full meaning, such as when she is reporting words actually spoken by others or when she had chosen language that was regarded as colloquial or not yet in common usage. (7) Three dots are used to indicate omissions in a day’s entry other than those made before a selection starts and after it concludes. Omissions at the start and the end of what she wrote on a given day are more the norm than the exception, for her first and last sentences are generally less interesting than what comes in between. Many entire days of her writing – and she wrote almost every day – have been omitted altogether.
This may seem like a rather long list of editorial interventions. The need to make them stems in part from the fact that Nella had no reason to think that she should edit her own work, to polish or perhaps even to re-read what she had written. So her writing, while frequently rich and robust, tends to be raw. The photograph overleaf shows a page from her handwritten diary for Tuesday 26 March 1940 and gives a sense of the decisions that any editors would routinely have to make in converting her handwritten diary into pages suitable for a book.
Mass Observation, which was set up in 1937, was created to meet a perceived need – to overcome Britons’ ignorance about themselves in their everyday lives. MO aimed to lay the foundations for a social anthropology of contemporary Britain. Given that so many basic facts of social life were then unknown – opinion polling was in its infancy, social surveys and field studies had just begun (with a few exceptions, such as those of London by Charles Booth in the late nineteenth century) – how, it was asked, could the nation’s citizens adequately understand themselves? This lack of knowledge was thought to be especially pronounced with regard to the beliefs and behaviour of the majority of Britons: that is, those without social prominence, and who had little political or intellectual influence.
It was vital, according to MO’s founders, to focus on norms, customs, routines and commonalities. The goal was to help bring about a ‘science of ourselves’, rooted in closely observed facts, methodically and (sometimes) laboriously collected. And in order to pursue this science of society, MO recruited hundreds of volunteer ‘Observers’, who were asked to describe, to pose questions to others, to record sights and sounds, and sometimes to count. Their efforts at observing were likened to those of an anthropologist working in the field. One of the early publications that drew upon these findings was a Penguin Special from early 1939 written by MO’s two leading lights, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain, by Mass-Observation, which attracted lots of attention at the time.
Volunteers were crucial to MO. Without them it would not have been possible to acquire the facts on which a proper social science would have to be based. And it came to be accepted by MO’s leaders that these Observers would not only be data-collectors; they could also function as ‘subjective cameras’ that captured their own experiences, feelings and attitudes, and circumstances of living. This acceptance of the legitimacy of subjectivity in MO’s enquiries was a major reason why diary-keeping came to be promoted as a promising vehicle of both social and self-observation. A diary was one way of recording; and it was a way that inevitably tapped into the individuality and inner life of one personality. MO’s striving for a better social science, then, facilitated the production of a particularly personal form of writing; and from late August 1939, with another great war imminent, some people responded to MO’s invitation to keep a diary and post their writing regularly (usually weekly, fortnightly or monthly) to MO’s headquarters. Nella Last was one of the dozens – eventually hundreds – who responded to this initiative. She was, though, one of the few who wrote regularly during the war and continued to write regularly after 1945 – and her diary entries were unusually detailed.
These diaries – some 480 of them – have been held since the 1970s in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. Numerous books have drawn upon these riches. Sandra Koa Wing (ed.), Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War, by the Writers of Mass Observation (London: Profile Books, 2008), is an excellent anthology of extracts from MO’s wartime diaries. Dorothy Sheridan’s edited volume Wartime Women: An Anthology of Women’s Wartime Writing for Mass Observation (London: Heinemann, 1990; later paperback editions) includes extracts from numerous diaries. Simon Garfield has edited three collections drawn from the MO Archive, all published by Ebury Press: Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain (2004); We Are at War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (2005); and Private Battles: How the War Almost Defeated Us – Our Intimate Diaries (2007).
Nella Last’s wartime MO diary was the first to appear on its own as a book, in 1981, and others followed, including Dorothy Sheridan’s edited Among You Taking Notes …: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison, 1939–1945 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985). Several other MO diarists have recently been published in volumes of their own. These include: two East Anglian diaries edited by Robert Malcolmson and Peter Searby, Wartime Norfolk: The Diary of Rachel Dhonau, 1941–1942 (Norfolk Record Society, 2004), and Wartime in West Suffolk: The Diary of Winifred Challis, 1942–1943 (Suffolk Records Society, 2012); Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary, 1939–1942, by Olivia Cockett, edited by Robert Malcolmson (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005; 2nd edn, Stroud: The History Press, 2008); and four volumes edited by Patricia and Robert Malcolmson – A Woman in Wartime London: The Diary of Kathleen Tipper, 1941–1945 (London Record Society, 2006); A Soldier in Bedfordshire, 1941–1942: The Diary of Private Denis Argent, Royal Engineers (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 2009); Dorset in Wartime: The Diary of Phyllis Walther, 1941–1942 (Dorset Record Society, 2009); and Warriors at Home, 1940–1942: Three Surrey Diarists (Surrey Record Society, 2012; one of these three diarists, Leonard Adamson, wrote for MO). James Hinton, who is preparing a history of Mass Observation, has recently published a stimulating account of some of MO’s most interesting diarists: Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
The Mass Observation collection is open to the public and is visited by people from around the world. In 2005 it was given Designated Status as one of the UK’s Outstanding Collections by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Much helpful information, including details of the Friends scheme that helps to finance the Archive, which is a charitable trust, is available on its website: www.massobs.org.uk.
* Mass-Observation dropped the hyphen from its name in 2006, thus becoming Mass Observation. We have chosen in this appendix consistently to adopt the current usage, except when the hyphen is used in titles.
* In reply to a question from MO about names (DR, May 1946), Nella reported that her parents had wanted to call her Deirdre but the Canon objected to its Irish roots, so she was named Nellie, which she always hated (this is the name on her birth certificate). However, her mother called her Deirdre, ‘which got shortened to Dearie and which the boys as well have always called me’. The name Nella was once used in a school concert; she was delighted, and it stuck.
* Priestley spoke this week about the first anniversary of the outbreak of war, and of how ‘The true heroes and heroines of this war, whose courage, patience and good humour stand like a rock above the dark morass of treachery, cowardice and panic, are the ordinary British folk’: Postscripts (London: Heinemann, 1940), pp. 60–65.
* Fred Lord, Nella’s only sibling, was eleven years younger and a bachelor. He lived in London and was a photographer with the London, Midland and Scottish Railway.
* The devastation of Coventry is well recounted in Juliet Gardiner, The Blitz: The British under Attack (London: Harper Press, 2010), chapter 7. Unusually, the Government allowed details of this catastrophe to be published. In the words of Gardiner, the Ministry of Information ‘decided there was more morale-boosting potential in revealing the extent of the damage, thus giving the impression of the enemy as a brutal bully … and also that London was not the only city in the front line’ (p. 164). Chapter 4 of Gavin Mortimer, The Blitz: An Illustrated History (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2010), includes some excellent photographs of the damaged city.
* Her prediction was sound; German forces attacked Greece and occupied it in April 1941.
* Rest Centres were set up as temporary shelters for people who might be made homeless as a result of air raids (Barrow had as yet been hit by only a few bombs).
* Household pig-keeping, where it was feasible, was actively encouraged in wartime as a way of offsetting consumers’ demands for commercial meat production. Moreover, Denmark, a traditional supplier of bacon, was occupied by the enemy. Pigs could be and were fattened on all sorts of kitchen waste.
* Much of Nella’s writing about the bombing of Barrow and its immediate consequences up to 10 May has been published in Nella Last’s War (2006 edn), pp. 117–44. She understood that in the April raids ‘there are only 30 killed, although many in hospital’ (17 April). Officially, 79 civilians in Barrow were killed by German bombing in 1941, all or almost all of them in April–May; there were only four further deaths from raids in Barrow during the remaining four years of the war (National Archives, HO 198/245).
* J. B. Priestley’s famous radio talks started on 30 May 1940 and ended on 24 September that year. They were vastly popular (his popularity rivalled that of Churchill), although many Conservatives objected to his socialist leanings, and it was widely thought that his BBC appearances were terminated as a result of political pressure.
* It is likely that by the early 1940s, at the latest, Nella and Will had ceased to have sexual relations. (The Directive Responses for 1941, including hers, have not survived.)
* She had woken up in fear from a bad dream that she attributed to a ‘horror play’ that had been broadcast a few days earlier on the BBC.
* Nella’s conflicted views on race are revealed later, pp. 381–84.
* Nella had observed earlier in this entry that ‘he works harder now than he ever has done since a young man and has so much outside work in draughts’. Repairing damaged buildings was keeping men in the building trades exceptionally busy. Nella thought of both Will and herself as people of delicate health, probably with reason.
* A few weeks later, on 12 December, there was a follow-up to these canteen encounters with conscientious objectors. ‘I was taken aback by one big dirty soldier whose leather jerkin showed he was on labour duty. He said “Cup a tea, lady, and I ain’t a conchie”. I said “I beg your pardon” and he said with a jerk of his thumb “My mate said ‘If you want a smile and a joke with ’em at the counter, tell ’em you’re not a conchie in spite of being in the Labour Battalion. They never joke with conchies – just pass their tea and grub over and say thank you.’”! We must have shown it plainly.’
* These were staple lines from ITMA – It’s That Man Again – a comedy show starring Tommy Handley that was on its way to becoming one of the most popular and celebrated radio programmes of the 1940s.
* The Minister of Food was in fact a Unitarian. Anti-Semitism was rife in Britain at this time, and Nella occasionally gave voice to it herself.
* Nella had views about male–female friendships. ‘I don’t believe in platonic friendships in the least. One always gets hurt sooner or later has been my experience since once as a girl I hurt someone very much without meaning to, and which was a severe lesson to me, so that I would never believe that a man and a woman could possibly be the same in friendship as two of the one sex’ (13 August 1941).
* Dick, Kerr & Co. manufactured Hampden and Halifax bombers.
* On 21 June British forces in Tobruk, Libya, surrendered to the Germans and Italians. The Axis powers took 30,000 prisoners and large quantities of matériel.
* Of course, she was right; no Allied landing in France was possible until 1944, although southern Italy was taken in later 1943.
* ‘He never realises,’ Nella had written of her husband the previous summer, ‘and never could, that the years when I had to sit quiet and always do everything he liked and never the things he did not were slavery years of mind and body … Recently I made my vow – to be a soldier till the war ended, to play the game and never grumble and never to ask anything else except that my boys could be guarded and live their life fully’ (28 August 1941).
* They had presumably wired to wish her well on her fifty-third birthday, which was the following day.
* A line made famous by the vastly popular radio programme It’s That Man Again.
* The purpose of the Furness Association for Social and Moral Welfare, according to the Furness and District Yearbook for 1939 (p. 110), was ‘to protect the tempted and restore the fallen’. Its concern was primarily with extra-marital sex and pregnancy.
* Substantial selections from the week just before and after VE Day are in Nella Last’s War, ed. Broad and Fleming (2006), pp. 265–75.
* A woman in the American Red Cross, Elizabeth Richardson, was for a few weeks in late 1944/early 1945 posted in Barrow, because of the presence of US servicemen, and wrote a number of interesting letters and diary entries from there: James H. Madison, Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys: An American Woman in World War II (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 107–37.
* Grizedale Hall, south of Hawkshead in the Lake District, was a POW camp for German officers. In mentioning a ‘V bomb’, Nella probably meant a V-2 rocket, invented by the Germans and first used to attack southern England in September 1944. There was no defence against it.
* On several occasions this month Nella gushed enthusiastically about the sudden availability of goods that for long had been hard to obtain.
* Charles Craven was Chairman of Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd from January 1936 until his death in November 1944. He had been responsible for getting a lot of business for the Barrow shipyard in the 1930s, thus protecting the town from severe unemployment.
* Nella’s mother was born a Rawlinson; and the family ‘were known as the “proud Rawlinsons” – a name that has been associated with Hawkshead and Lake Windermere as long as there has been written records. Yeoman farmers, independent and free thinking people … The women were always the stronger-minded and more go-ahead, the men folk were content to dream and plan’ (DR, May 1946). Nella was an admirer of Hugh Walpole’s regional fiction the ‘Herries Chronicle’ (1930–33), which comprised four historical novels (one of them was Judith Paris: see below, 6 October), featuring narratives of violence and romance, and set in the Lake District in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
* Field Marshal Earl Roberts (1832–1914) had advocated a robust British rearmament to defend against (as he saw it) an understandably expansionist Germany. In a speech in Manchester in October 1912 – when Nella was young and recently married – he had declared that ‘there is one way in which Britain can have peace, not only with Germany, but with every other Power, national or imperial, and that is, to present such a battle-front by sea and land that no Power or probable combination of Powers shall dare to attack her without the certainty of disaster’ (Lord Roberts’ Message to the Nation [London, 1912], p. 9). A street in Barrow is named after him.
* Cliff had proposed marriage to a young woman in the WAAF. She later turned him down (which was just as well since he was gay).
* Harold Laski, a forceful and outspoken socialist, was Chairman of the Labour Party at this time – and much reviled by non-socialists (and not entirely popular in his own party). Clement Attlee had been Prime Minister since the end of July.
* A few weeks later (2 February 1946) Nella again voiced her sense of the limitations of modern materialism: ‘When I feel the most blue, I feel Nature is beginning a war now, as if man’s stupidity has roused some destructive force – and there is always the atom bomb and its dire possibilities’ (DR, December 1945–January 1946).
* Portraits of life in post-war Britain are presented in two highly informative books: David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), part 1, surveys the period admirably.
* Earlier that evening they had listened to an episode of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga on the radio. Nella admired Galsworthy – and disliked Anthony Trollope: ‘I always feel Trollope portrays a period from which sprang “socialism” in its more rampant form’ (28 December 1947).
* Nella’s mother’s first husband died shortly after their marriage. On 16 December 1947, when Aunt Sarah was speaking of her (she died at fifty-two) 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’.
* ‘My father was absolute monarch and the house was run for him’, Nella had declared in her Directive Response for July 1939.
* Jessie and George Holme, who were expecting their first child this month, lived in the house adjoining the Atkinsons’, two down from the Lasts.
* The well-paid Magistrates’ Clerk for Barrow and Ulverston, a married man in his fifties, had recently left his wife in favour of a woman in her thirties, also married. The scandal was a major topic of conversation in Barrow, and his picture was reproduced on the front page of an issue of the Daily Mail.
* This show was apparently a bit disappointing, for the next day Nella wrote that ‘there was a very good variety bill, but Sid Millward’s “Nit Wits” wearied me, the brass was so piercingly loud, and two good comedians who gave two turns – “The Finlay Brothers” – seemed to exhaust the humour of grotesque clowning’.
* Often in the first half of 1948 Nella and Will took car trips on Saturdays, for he could usually find some business-related excuse for these journeys, which was not possible on Sundays. ‘I do long for the time petrol can be used’, she had written the previous day, after an outing to Ulverston. ‘Even to go and sit by Coniston Lake would be good for him, and now there is the wireless in the car, he would settle happily.’ Since the petrol ration was about to be restored, initially at a lower level, Sunday motoring would soon be resumed. Petrol rationing was not entirely eliminated until mid-1950.
* George and Jessie Holme, who moved to Preston in 1953, both lived long lives: he to eighty-eight, she to ninety. According to their daughter Kathleen Emery, whom we met in March 2012, they were devoted to each other, their long marriage was harmonious and strong, and her own upbringing very happy.
* She is referring to Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne in 1936 in order to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson. King Farouk (b. 1920, king from 1936) was notably corrupt and incompetent, and was overthrown in 1952.
* On the evening of 12 January the patrol submarine Truculent, which had been built in Barrow and launched in 1942, collided with a Swedish ship in the Thames estuary and sank. Sixty-four men lost their lives. Building submarines was a specialty of Barrow’s shipyard.
* J. B. Priestley’s ‘The Labour Plan Works’, one of a series of party political broadcasts, was published in The Listener, 19 January 1950, pp. 112–13. Priestley did, indeed, profess political humility and a common-sense outlook. His socialist thinking was not to Nella’s taste.
* Maurice Webb was a political journalist and broadcaster, a Labour MP and Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He had spoken on the radio two nights before (published in The Listener, 2 February 1950, pp. 201–2), and Nella had described his speech as ‘a triumph of wishful thinking mixed with sincere conviction. If things could be as rosy and serene as some of the Labour speakers make out.’
* Norman Raby, one of these boys, doubted in 2011 that the headmaster said or would have said this. A photo of the ‘Poker Club’, taken shortly after they were caught, appears as Plates, p. 6. Mr Raby recalled that ‘in some ways we were a little proud of our notoriety’.
* Wilfred Pickles (b. 1904) was a celebrated entertainer and radio personality from Yorkshire. This edition of Have a Go had been first broadcast on the Light Programme on 1 February and repeated in the North Region on 3 February. According to Erin O’Neill of the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, there is no surviving script, probably because the programme was originally broadcast live – from London Zoo, which accounts for the joke about elephants.
* Later that week Mrs Higham was visiting, and she ‘was really shocked when he went on to tell her he had “never believed in any kind of insurance”, and she learned that I’d have nothing from any source if he died’ (23 February 1950).
* Megan Lloyd George (1902–1966), daughter of David Lloyd George and a Liberal MP from 1929 to 1951 – she later joined the Labour Party – championed radical causes in her party, whereas other Liberals were moving, or had already moved, to support Conservative positions, a trend that Nella approved of.
* In fact, women did not at that time have the vote, except in some local elections.
* ‘This interest he has taken in the election has been a pleasure to both of us’, she wrote the next day. ‘I wish something else would come along.’
** She means that the somewhat meek and reticent committee members, who had been pushed around by the domineering Mrs Waite, retaliated by being active, assertive and effective.
* Albert Modley (b. Liverpool, 1901) and Norman Evans (b. Rochdale, also 1901) were variety entertainers and comedians.
* The Windmill Theatre in London was famous for its (more or less) nude performers. Two years later Nella made her views on nudity clear. ‘As for people who have little or no clothes on, well, they haven’t, and that’s that. I never could see anything shocking in nude or semi nude figures, always provided they weren’t gross untidy ones’ (12 June 1952). By the standards of her time, Nella did not hold particularly rigid views concerning sexual propriety. On 1 February 1951 she borrowed from the library a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, although she did not report what she thought of it.
* On Monday the 21st Nella was back in Rampside to view the wedding presents. There was no sign of austerity – ‘I never saw such a collection of “covetable” things. It looked as if the cream had been skimmed from every good shop in town’ – and she proceeded, admiringly, to list the gifts in copious detail.
* The Prime Minister was in the American capital for talks with President Truman and senior American officials. Britain was striving to contain the increasingly dangerous conflict in Korea (China had actively intervened in November) and discourage the use of atomic weapons. The script for this speech, broadcast at 9.15 p.m. on the Home Service, is not held in the BBC Written Archives Centre, presumably because it was transmitted from abroad and no copy was deposited with the BBC. It was probably the speech that Attlee gave at the National Press Club in Washington that day (The Times, 7 December 1950, p. 4b).
* The younger Lasts’ home was at 64 Blake Road, N11; the nearest tube station was and still is Bounds Green, on the Piccadilly line, about half a mile away.
* Will was not always sensitive to the protocols for using the escalators in tube stations. ‘My husband has been unpopular a few times’, Nella wrote on 1 July. ‘In spite of my warnings – and given by Cliff – to keep always to the right, he will use the left, and has been bumped as well as told curtly “keep to the right”.’
* ‘You carried flowers for Shan We as if he was a person’, Will had remarked (20 July).
* A succinct account of these floods is presented in David Kynaston, Family Britain, 1951–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 257–9. At Barrow’s WVS Club meeting on 2 February 1953 ‘quite a number wondered if “H and atom bomb trials could possibly be the cause of the high tides”’ that had inundated some coastal areas.
* Will, for a man, was even slighter than Nella: he was 5 feet 3 inches in height and weighed 8 stone 8 pounds (8 June 1951).
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.
In late August 1939, when the international crisis seemed very likely to lead to another terrible war, Nella and other volunteer ‘Observers’ had been invited by Mass-Observation (M-O) to start keeping a diary, and she responded enthusiastically, although she had doubts about her writing skills. Her self-doubts, we now know, were unwarranted.
Thursday, 31 August. The weather is still so oppressive – real crisis weather – and makes people jumpy. Downtown this morning no one seemed to be talking of anything but food and I saw as many prams parked outside Woolworths, Liptons and Marks and Spencers as on a busy Friday afternoon. Inside it was the food counters in Woolworths and M & S that were the busiest. I heard the news at 1 o’clock and felt as if the worst had happened in spite of the assurance that evacuation was not to be considered ‘inevitable’. I felt that if I stayed in I’d worry so went down earlier to the WVS meeting. I got a real surprise for the big room was filled with eager women who settled down to swab making or evacuation or evacuation supplies. Our ‘Head’ [Mrs Waite] is a darling ‘young’ woman of 72 who had charge of Hospital Supplies in last war. She told us a more central room had been taken and ‘for the first’ [of September] would be open two afternoons a week. Four machines were to be installed and we were to make in addition to swabs etc. pyjamas and all Hospital Supplies. It was odd to me that there was so little talk of the big issues – just a planning of how household affairs could be arranged to enable as much time as was needed to be given. When coming home I encountered the usual ‘Hitler beaten, and we are doing this to bluff him’ and I wondered if it was faith – with a capital F – or stubbornness which made those of us who thought ‘something will happen at the last minute’ cling to their disbelief in the worst happening. When I was a small child I remember a prophecy my dad heard – that little Prince Edward would never be crowned king and that in 1940 a world war would start that would end things. I’m no more ‘scared cat’ than the average but I have a cold feeling in my tummy when I think the first came true. Feel so tired I cannot keep awake but my eyes won’t stay shut. Wonder how the people who live on the ‘edge of things’ keep their sanity. Know I’ll have to work hard to keep from thinking. Wish I liked meat and stout and had a good appetite to keep up. Will try and drink more milk. Wonder if I should give my faithful old dog and my funny little comedian cat ‘the gift of sleep’. Perhaps it’s as well my husband insists on the light out for the night.
Friday, 1 September. I feel tonight like a person who, walking safely on the sea sands, suddenly finds his feet sinking in a quicksand. Odd how I should have believed so firmly in my astrological friend when he assured me that there would be NO WAR. Today the town was full of women carrying huge rolls of brown paper from the printers to black out. I knew my younger boy had to go in a fortnight but now when it looks as if he will have to go any time and at such a time I realise his going. He is such a cocky bright eyed lad, so full of jokes and such a ‘know all’, I know he would be offended if he knew I kept seeing the little funny boy who was so difficult to rear. I feel I’d rather go and serve six months in the Army than let him go!!!!
I’m so tired I can hardly see for I’ve been shopping – had to do tomorrow’s shopping as the bus service is going to be seriously curtailed as the buses are to go to help take evacuated children into the more remote Lake villages. Then I’ve been machining dozens of tailors’ samples of about 2 × 4 inches into evacuation blankets and then tonight there has been the problem of the blackout. Ours is a modern house with huge windows rounded at one end. We took the usual weekly groceries for an aunt living about 12 miles away and found her busy getting things ready in case they brought her any children whom no one could put up. She would ‘really not like more than four as winter is coming on and washing and drying is such a problem’ – and she is 75!! When I got undressed and into bed I thought the process should have been reversed for all today I’ve had the feeling that it was a dream that would pass.
Saturday, 2 September. I decided after today’s rush and work I am not the crock I thought! I’m sure the thoughts of the housewives struggling with paper, drawing pins, dark blankets etc. would be quite sufficient to cook Hitler brown on both sides! Paper jumped from 3d or 4d a sheet to 9d. My next door neighbour, who had been most careful to lay in an extra supply of bottled beer and whiskey, left getting dark out materials too late and then could not get any. Frantic SOS all round got enough bits and pieces to manage but she naturally had to wait till we had all finished. An Air Warden friend called and told me of what might easily have developed into an ugly situation. The market, library and all shops not blacked out closed at sundown. The others drew down blinds and tied paper on light they could not do without. An Italian chocolate and ice cream shop had all lights as usual and a crowd gathered muttering. The proprietor took no notice and police were sent for who dispersed the crowd and the light. I could not understand his attitude at all for he and his brothers were from here and have always talked ‘British’. It seems though that he has lately had his wireless tuned in continually to Italy and quotes Mussolini freely. My elder boy who is home from Manchester for the weekend says he has noticed a growing feeling against Jews, particularly foreign Jews. I hate the shut in feeling of closed windows or paper curtained over ones, wonder what it must feel like down a coal mine or in a submarine. The Air Wardens seemed to think we might hear of something ‘big’ tonight but now it is tomorrow as my boys used to call after 12 o’clock and we are still wondering. My cat seems to feel the tension for he is a real nuisance and follows me round so closely I have tripped over him several times. Last night he hid until I’d settled off and then jumped quietly on the bed and settled on my feet – not a trick of his at all!
Sunday, 3 September. A violent thunderstorm has cleared the air and it’s cool now. It’s been so close and heavy for over a week – just as it is before a storm breaks. I’m having a morning in bed to rest but don’t feel like resting. The boys say there is an important announcement coming over at 10 o’clock so have decided to get up.
Bedtime. Well, we know the worst. Whether it was a kind of incredulous stubbornness or a faith in my old astrological friend who was right in the last crisis when he said ‘no war’, I never thought it would come. Looking back I think it was akin to a belief in a fairy’s wand which was going to be waved. I’m a self-reliant kind of person but today I’ve longed for a close woman friend – for the first time in my life. When I heard Mr Chamberlain’s voice so slow and solemn I seemed to see Southsea Prom the July before the last crisis. The Fleet came in to Portsmouth from Weymouth and there was hundreds of extra ratings walking up and down. There was all ‘sameness’ about them that was not due to their clothes alone and it puzzled me till I found out. It was the look on their faces – a slightly brooding, far-away look. They all had it, even the jolly looking boys, and I wanted to rush up and ask them what they could see that I could not – and now I know.
The wind got up and brought rain but on the Walney shore men and boys worked filling sand bags. I could tell by the dazed looks on many faces that ‘something’ would have turned up to prevent war. The boys brought a friend in and insisted on me joining in a game but I could not keep it up. I’ve tried deep breathing, relaxing, knitting and more aspirins than I can remember but all I can see are those boys with their looks of ‘beyond’. My younger boy will go in just over a week. His friend, who has no mother and is like another son, will go soon – he is 26 – and my elder boy is at Sunlight House in Manchester, a landmark. As Tax Inspector he is at present in a reserved occupation.
Tuesday, 5 September. Tonight I had my first glimpse of a blackout and the strangeness appalled me. A tag I’ve heard somewhere, ‘The city of Dreadful Night’, came into my mind and I wondered however the bus and lorry drivers would manage. I don’t think there is much need for the wireless to advise people to stay indoors – I’d need a dog to lead me. Heard today that a big new Handicraft Centre is commandeered for a hospital. I wondered why we were not starting making shells etc. as in last war. It’s a good thing that my husband likes his bed and insists I go up when he does. I feel so over strung tonight I ‘could fly’ and know if left alone would have gone on sewing – silly to knock oneself up so early. Best get into the jog trot that stays the course.
Thursday, 7 September. Today Ruth, my ‘morning girl’, and I were a bit dumpish. We can generally find a bright side to talk or laugh over but this morning all was quiet. Suddenly I heard laughter and she said ‘Well, God love it!’ I went to where she was in the clothes closet in hall and found Murphy my cat sitting snug on a rug under the dinner wagon. ‘He has found his air raid shelter like a Christian’, Ruth declared. Bless my little cat and his funny ways. He seems to ‘work for his laughs’ like a seasoned trouper and he scores a point in his cat-mind if he makes me laugh, I’m sure!
We took a large room for WVS and find we could do with one twice as big! No one was actually turned away. Tailors’ pieces or wool for blankets were given to those who could not sit down but those of us who were sitting down worked under such cramped conditions that our output of swabs and pneumonia jackets was lessened and we all had bad heads. I’ve often felt ashamed of my sex but never so proud as the way the ‘right’ women have rolled in. No ‘butterflies’ who want particular jobs, no catty or what is worse bitchy women, and when an old woman who it seems had had some authority in the last war got peevish at being ‘one of the crowd’, she hushed and blushed at the way her complaints were received. I get the oddments any tradesmen give us to look over and advise best things to make for I have clever fingers.
Saturday, 9 September. I went into the Maypole and jokingly said to the girls ‘What – got stuff on the shelves yet? Seems to me you girls are not trying!’ It was a feeble kind of joke and I was startled at the way they laughed and gathered round for a ‘crack’ – there was no other customer. They asked ‘How long the war would last’ and I said ‘Just a day at a time and the first seven years were the worst’. The manager and counter man joined up to join in the laugh and he said ‘Well, it’s a treat to find someone who can find something to joke about these days’. With two sons and a brother and the knowledge that my husband’s men (four for a start and two later) [might be conscripted], which will mean there will be little they can do as shopfitters etc, I don’t know I’ve got much [to laugh about] but it gave me an idea. I’ve always been able to joke and see the funny side up till now and I’ll keep on if I crack my face doing it. If my nonsense can raise a smile I’ll think it worth the effort and perhaps it will take the picture of those naval boys out of my mind. It’s all right when I’m working and have to keep my mind on my work but if I relax they pass before me. Gave myself a treat today. I hate stitching pieces of cloth together for hospital blankets – am not a good routine worker. I like to design or plan and see others do the drudgery!!
Sunday, 17 September. Decided as petrol was still unrationed to go and take a last look at Morecambe – a favourite Sunday run. It was a lovely day and many were like ourselves – only there for a short time. Coming back we were hailed by a girl of about 22 and a boy of 8 or 9. Barrow people, they had missed a connection. With them a little way off was another woman, a cripple well known to us. A Jewish family reared in the town, she had something to do with her when small and her bones never hardened. She walks with the greatest difficulty and is in a metal frame from the waist down. Our car is a Morris 8 and she about filled the back – she is very broad and fat. We could have sent the boy on a friendly motor cyclist’s pillion but the look of wild terror on the boy’s face made us pack the two in the tiny space left, the boy sitting on the girl’s knee. He smiled but said little and we women talked about WVS and ARP† and got very interested in each other’s talk. I turned round once to ask the little boy to come and sit on my knee for a change but he only smiled and said he was ‘quite alright’. His English was a little broken and I said ‘Is Eric a foreigner?’ for he was a fair, blue-eyed, pink and white type. I learned he was a German Jew from Barrow who had made a long journey across Germany and to England in the company of other refugee children, and his parents and brother had come later on last train and boat allowed to leave Germany. After over an hour’s drive we got to Barrow and when the car stopped no one offered to get out! Miss Wolf the cripple could not without help and Eric, white-faced, was trying to get to his feet. We found that the iron of Miss Wolf’s ‘frame’ had pressed to the bone in Eric’s little thin thigh and calf and he had stuck it with a smile, said it was ‘quite alright’ – a phrase he uses a lot. Miss Wolf said he must have gone through terrible things on his journey for he never complained of any inconvenience and was puzzled at the way people ‘dared’ to protest at things. One of the oddest things was his hero worship of policemen – went out of his way to walk past them and if they looked at him pleasantly or smiled! – well, Eric was happy. When Jews were spoken to by ‘Nordia’ and came into the shop and talked in the ordinary way he behaved so oddly that the Wolfs feared they had taken a mental child. He has been six months or so with them now and settled to our ways but somehow that nice ordinary little boy brought home to me what cruelty and oppression really meant in Germany.