The Diaries of Nella Last by Patricia Malcolmson & Robert Malcolmson

Author:Patricia Malcolmson & Robert Malcolmson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2012-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

A SORT OF PEACE

September 1945–January 1946

Thursday, 20 September. The years slipped back to six years ago, when war had only started and we were sewing cloth rugs, in very spare moments. When our minds were half crazed with fear for the future I loved talk. Men were being called up. Now it’s over, the fighting and killing part, but it’s dreadful to read of the food and fuel shortage and the winter coming on. Poor gay Vienna again facing famine, and all the Balkan states, which are only a name in the paper to us. Greeks, French, Dutch – all the same, hungry and cold. I’ve had to pinch and scrape at times, economise the rest, to make things go round, but have always managed to serve a tempting meal if it had only been baked potatoes and herrings, when the boys rushed in ‘simply starving, Dearie’ from school. There has been always a fire to welcome them home, a door to shut out the worries and hurts of the day, a bed for tired heads to sleep and wake refreshed.

When I think of those poor women who suffer twice – once for their families and then for themselves – my heart aches. I’m rather glad that Mrs Woods has not been with us all these last weeks. Today she jarred on us badly when she said that half Europe should die out including the treacherous French who had ‘let us down and didn’t deserve help in any way’. I thought as I looked at her ‘Well, after all, if we all got our deserts you might be in prison for bribing shop girls to give you extra rations and buying everything you could in the black market’. She thought Mrs Higham and I had ‘no sense of proportion’ when in answer to some girl about sending the baby bundles which might be used for a traitor French baby, I said there was no such thing as a traitor baby and Mrs Higham said if there were a thousand bundles and she knew they were going for German babies it would be all the same! I felt a row was very near. We don’t think alike on a lot of subjects and Mrs Woods has that hateful air which many teachers have – that ‘Be quiet, silly ignorant child, don’t you hear me speak’.

Margaret brought some magazines back. There is a decided coolness now between us. I think my remarks about the Australian pilot have offended her out of all proportion – several times she has got in a dig about such a girl ‘seeming to be good enough for so and so’. Useless to say anything. The cap has been crammed down over her ears and not just fitted. I wonder in my heart if I started a train of thought that night, if Margaret suddenly sees how many ‘friends’ she has had, how many ‘heartbreaks’. Her friend Linda is married and very sedate, rather snobbishly and slavishly so! She pauses to think how her husband – now left town – would like every little action.

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