Last

Nella Last’s War was my favourite read from 2010, and when I tell you that Nella Last’s Peace is more of the same, then that should tell you how impressed I was by it.  (Thank you Profile Books for sending it to me.)  True, I didn’t warm to it quite as much, and I’m not sure it’s of quite such historical importance, but it is only repetition that will inevitably place this book lower on my reads of 2011 – last year I was expecting mediocrity and was bowled over; this year I expected Nella Last to be as good as she is.

For those who have thus far missed the whole Nella Last phenomenon, she was a ‘Housewife, 49’ (to quote the television adaptation title) when she signed up to write for the Mass Observation project.  Every Friday Last posted her diaries away, recording the everyday life she observed so shrewdly, and in such plain but crafted language.  Actually, ‘crafted’ is the wrong word – it seems to have just flown from her pen.  ‘And what he thought,’ as the First Folio editors said of Shakespeare, ‘he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’  Except with Nella Last it was true.

I said at the top that Nella Last’s Peace might be less historically significant than Nella Last’s War, but I’m already beginning to doubt that statement.  Although the war years were doubtless more momentous, they are also well documented.  The earliest peace years, with its hardships and regrets, has given birth to far fewer records – but Nella Last kept going, indefatigably.

Without her war work in the canteen, and with different anxieties concerning her boys, Nella mostly turns her attentions to her recalcitrant husband, large circle of neighbours, and everyday life when money is scarce and rationing in full flow.  She grows more impatient with her husband (I start to sympathise with him at times!), and readier to give her friends the rough side of her tongue, but remains practical, thoughtful, and a force of commonsense to be reckoned with.  There are any number of activities and opinions I could quote from her diaries, but I’d be in danger of typing out the whole lot.  Instead I’ll quote a trip to the Lake District which shows how gifted a writer Last was – not solely as an observer of people and pastimes, but in a strain which is almost poetic:

My husband had to go to Ulverston and we decided to go on to have a look at frozen Windermere, if the roads were not too bad.  We felt a queer awe at the steel grey sheet that was the friendly rippling lake of summer – it looked austere and remote.  The sun was smiling behind a shoulder of a hill, and its slanting rays seemed to lick out every shorn hillside, every ugly gaping gully where trees had been dragged to the road.  There was not a sound anywhere.  An awful stillness seemed on everything and that queer atavistic desolation gripped me.  I felt I wanted to lift my voice in a wild ‘keen’, if only to break the silence  We seemed the only living and moving things left on the earth.  I felt thankful to leave the unfamiliar scene.  The hills around were patched rather than crowned with snow.  The fields were white instead of freshly ploughed as they should have been by March, and heaps of dung stood frozen and useless.  I wonder if it will mean a bad crop and harvest, with so late a season.  Heavy sullen clouds rolled in from the sea, looking as if we would have more snow, and we were glad to get home to a fire and our tea, with the table drawn close to it.
One thing I wish I could do is reach across the decades and reassure Nella Last that she is a talented writer – and that her writings would not be forgotten.  Here is a glimmer that she understood this herself – and yet the terrible fact that she did not realise her own worth and the books which would eventually be published!

As she later writes, ‘whatever else that one is or has been, there’s never been a trace of dullness!’  It is evident to me that the lack of dullness has little to do with events, and everything to do with Last herself.  She is a fine example of making the most of any situation – and an even better example of the powers of keen observation.  To her perceptive eye, nothing could be dull – and we are forever lucky that she kept this diary for so many years.

30. Nella Last’s War

I’ve mentioned a couple of times on here about Nella Last’s War, which I’ve been reading gradually for a few months. I knew that I was one of the last (no pun intended) to pick this up, but hadn’t realised that it was first published back in 1981 – before I was born! So it’s taken me my whole life so far, but I’m delighted to have finally come upon this – I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t feature in my favourite books of 2010.

For those not in the know (or thought it was Nella’s Last War – or, like me, confused Nella Last with Nella Larsen) this diary is taken from a Mass Observation diary compiled by ‘Housewife, 49’ Nella Last during World War Two. She documents the war from the perspective of a mother in Northern England, with solider-age sons (Cliff and Arthur), living a fairly ordinary life with an ordinary husband in an ordinary neighbourhood.

But this diary is anything but ordinary. Though Nella did not think herself a clever woman, nor believe that she had fulfilled her half-held ambition to be a writer, she has a quite astonishing gift. I’ve read quite a few diaries and letters and similar, but only Virginia Woolf compares – they both have an intelligent voice, a way of describing everyday events with unusual images or perceptive insights which reveal so much about them. Unlike most people’s diaries (certainly unlike mine) there is little repetition, no undue introspection, no references to unknown people who appear and disappear. True, these may have been edited (I don’t know how substantially) but had Nella Last intended to write a novel, the structure, and precision in her language, couldn’t be bettered.

And of course, the period was not uneventful. I find reading about major events from an individual’s perspective so illuminating.

Wednesday night, 5 June, 1940
This morning I lingered over my breakfast, reading and re-reading the accounts of the Dunkirk evacuation. I felt as if deep inside me was a harp that vibrated and sang – like the feeling on a hillside of gorse in the hot bright sun, or seeing suddenly, as you walked through a park, a big bed of clear, thin red poppies in all their brave splendour. I forgot I was a middle-aged woman who often got up tired and who had backache. The story made me feel part of something that was undying and never old – like a flame to light or warm, but strong enough to burn and destroy trash and rubbish. It was a very hot morning and work was slowed a little, but somehow I felt everything to be worthwhile, and I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and rescued.I could quote so much from this book, but I’m just going to give you another – one of my favourite excerpts, a beautiful passage, all the more beautiful because it is from true experience, and not a honed image from a novel.
Saturday, 6th November, 1943
How swiftly time has flown since the first Armistice. I stood talking to my next-door neighbour, in a garden in the Hampshire cottage where I lived for two years during the last war. I felt so dreadfully weary and ill, for it was only a month before Cliff was born. I admired a lovely bush of yellow roses, which my old neighbour covered each night with an old lace curtain, to try and keep them nice so that I could have them when I was ill. Suddenly, across Southampton water, every ship’s siren hooted and bells sounded, and we knew the rumours that had been going round were true – the war was over. I stood before that lovely bush of yellow roses, and a feeling of dread I could not explain shook me. I felt the tears roll down my cheeks, no wild joy, little thankfulness. Oddly enough, Cliff has never liked yellow roses. When he was small, he once said they made him feel funny, and his remark recalled my little Hampshire garden and the first Armistice. Now Cliff is in another war – and we called it the ‘war to end all war.’
A year or so ago Nella Last’s Peace was published, which carries on her diaries until 1965 – Our Vicar’s Wife has a copy, so I’ll borrow it from her at some point. I didn’t see the TV programme Housewife, 49, based on Nella Last’s War, with the rather wonderful Victoria Wood – but apparently it was rather good. Which is only fitting for a book, and a woman, so exceptional as Nella Last. As a diary, it can scarcely be bettered – and as a perspective on the Second World War from the home front, this book is invaluable and should be read for many years to come.