Nella Last’s War – a great book

It’s a lovely bright sunny day. It’s still very cold but it really lifts my spirits after all of the bad weather.

I’m reading a very interesting book at the moment. It’s called Nella Last’s War and is the diary of an ordinary woman living in Barrow in Furness during the Second World War. It’s mainly about day to day life and it’s fascinating to see how things have changed. For example she spends her evenings cutting up old worn out clothes and linen to make new stuff. She made children’s nighties out of old flanelette sheets and took them to the local hospital. Amazing thrift. Today we would throw these things away.

There was a very sad entry where she went to the WRVS centre where she is a helper and found a woman in tears. This woman had a daughter who was expecting her second baby and she wanted to come home to have it, but she and her mother didn’t get on and there had been a family upset when she had come home to have her first. The mother was feeling used and had put her foot down because the daughter had enough money to pay for help. The author met this woman in November 1940 two days after the Coventry bombing. The daughter lived in Coventry near the cathedral. I can’t imagine how the mother got over that.

In spite of everything Nella copes with life and still enjoys things like a trip to Lake Windemere  which they have when a neigbour gives her husband some petrol coupons she doesn’t need. One thing she says is very beautiful and I wanted to share it here –

God gave us memories so that we may have roses in December.