I did not want Nella to leave when she finished with her diary of the years from 1939 through 1945. She'd become a friend and I her confidante. So I went on Amazon and now I have Nella Last's Peace and Nella Last in the 1950s. Her time dovetails from my parent's and into my childhood and I want to revisit it.
As for Nella's first book (she had always wanted to be a writer), I will use her own words:
22 January 1940
I feel as if my efforts are so tiny and feeble - so little to help all the trouble and pain in the world.
(Nella had started to do volunteer work for the Woman's Volunteer Services as soon as war had been declared.)
5 March 1940
...I thought of all the mothers whose boys have gone off to fight and who suffer, and I felt pity wrap me like a flame.
(Nella knew that at least one of her sons would see combat.)
12 May 1940
But a riot of pink and white apple blossom, soft misty fields, woods of hyacinth blue...
(I've been to England in the spring and her descriptions actually made me homesick.)
3 January 1941
Dorothy L. must have been pleased to see her brainchildren come to life.
(Nella wrote this after seeing a movie based on a Dorothy L. Sayres book. Nella was a great reader and the icon Dorothy L. was one of her favorites)
1 August 1943
On the way women were beginning to dress and other changes, in herself:
I feel pants are more the sign of the times than I realised. A growing contempt for men in general creeps over me...I'm beginning to see that I'm a really clever woman and not the 'odd' or 'uneducated one' woman that I've had dinned into me.
(Nella had spent a marriage catering to an unresponsive husband and the war had caused her to discover that she was quite good in managing a business, albeit a Red Cross second hand shop.)
6 May 1945
On seeing newsreels of the concentration camps:
No power can be left so alone that, behind a veil of secrecy, anything can happen.
Nella was a woman of her time and ahead of her time.
I cherish "knowing" her.
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This book has been in my "find" list for over a year. Now I feel more urgent about locating a copy! Sounds wonderful. :)
ReplyDeleteReina,
ReplyDeleteYou could "watch" her grow as a person and watch how this war affected an English town and its people.
You mentioned Mass Observer work. Was she one? I have "London at War" by Philip Zeigler, which summarizes many of the reports made by the Observer corps.
ReplyDeleteJayne:
ReplyDeleteNella was part of the Mass Observation Project and would submit her diaries.
I never knew about it until I began reading this book. Americans are not taught what England went through during WWII.
Mitzi