Book recommendation - Nella Last's War

Yesterday's sunrise - aren't the colours wonderful? I rather like the reflection in the icy puddles too.



In between jobs, when I need a five minute rest, I am reading Nella Last's War. This is her personal diary written during WWII and submitted for the "Mass Observation" project and I am sure will already be familiar to some of you. I have wanted to read it since friends at Creative Living mentioned it, and the subsequent recently-published Nella Last's Peace (which I also bought from Amazon). I am only in the first year of the war, but her writing has made me think about the demands on my time and how I would cope with the demands made on HER time then. Quite besides the managing on next to nothing, the knitting for our servicemen, the recylcling of surplus garments, material and wool into crib quilts and cot blankets for evacuees, Nella had the constant worry of air-raids (she lived at Barrow-in-Furness, and the shipyard there was an obvious target) and whether her sons were involved in the current battle abroad. Nella was very resourceful, and even used old woollen socks cut and opened up flat and then sewn together to form a utalitarian, but warm, cover. At an auction last summer, two very rough-and-ready quilts made from real oddments of mis-matched material were held up, and a rip in one let the contents fall to the floor - it had been lined with old woollen socks - at the time I thought it was necessity being the mother of invention, but now I realize that perhaps it had a different story to tell . . .

The WVS helped to organise the townswomen into productive groups, and the women in Nella's group were handed out wool to knit bedcovers and the material from dozens of tailors' pattern books taken to be sewn together into something more useful. These women knitted indefatigably: jumpers, socks, balaclavas, mittens, gloves, scarves, for servicemen and seamen. They made pretty things which could be raffled as a way of fund-raising for the war effort. Their hands were never still and a great sense of obligation drove them to push themselves ever-harder.

In Nella's diary, she had a knock on the door one day and opened it to find a young man with a bag, which he handed to her saying that the Dr had sent her something to care for (having come upon her nursing a sickly hen in the past). Inside was the tiniest baby she had ever seen - pre-term - its parents were terribly ill with influenza (the mother had a chest infection) and the baby would not have survived if left with them, as they were bed-bound and the grandmother lay dieing in another room. Unperturbed, Nella turned a dressing table round and made the baby a little bed from the drawer, warmly lined with a blanket from the bed, and with the electric heater on to warm the room, the baby was tucked up, swathed in layers of cotton wool and fed an eggcup-full of Nestle's milk and water every hour from a spoon, as there was no bottle available. The only washing it could have was to have a tiny corner of skin wiped down with olive oil and when that ran out - cod liver oil (bet it smelt wonderful after a week of that!) I was thinking how I would relax if the Dr suddenly sent me a tiny pre-term baby to care for in the middle of winter. My own husband spent the first months of his life also in a blanket-lined drawer under the dining table (in case of bombing - this was Manchester), as his mum had first flu and then pneumonia. His aunt and uncle looked after him.

Radio 4 are serialising Nella Last's Peace this week, and I sat down quietly to listen to it this morning, and like Nella, kept my hands busy cutting up strips of red and green materials to tie like hair-rags (does anyone remember their mum making curls for them that way? Devilish to sleep on!) to make a Christmas swag to go over the fireplace. I felt very connected with Nella, and all the thousands like her. She sounded very much stronger and more forthright than she is at the beginning of the war where I am in the book at present. At the beginning her nerves were twanging like piano strings and she sounded like she needed to top up her B vitamins and probably menopausal too!

It is a curtain day here again - have my new ex-display ones hung in the bedroom now and HOW much warmer it makes the room. OH has just handed me some (WWII!) brass curtain rings which I am to sew on the back of the Medieval (ex-shop-display) pelmet so he can do a Heath Robinson system of hanging it across the archway in the hall . . . Photos to follow.

Today's walk

The day started with a heavy frost and freezing fog - and guess who forgot to wipe the mist off her lens glass before taking a photo . . . Most of these should enlarge if you click on them.



I've just got back from my walk - the first for a week now, and I'm feeling good again. I decided to walk up to my furthest neighbour to take up a Christmas card and a small pot of jam. The views were fabulous - seeing the Brecon Beacons in the distance never fails to lift my spirits. I find that I have taken 41 photos today! I'm just loading them now and will see which ones to keep and which to put up on here too.



I had a fruitful morning at the Car Boot Sale, which was busy despite the dire cold. I got a brand new never-been-out-of-the-box Pasta maker for £3 (I think they cost about £30 in the shops); then a beautiful hand-painted cake stand and three matching plates (pre-1892) for £2 (excuse blurry picture above); a piece of red material for 50p which is going to be turned into a decoration and an old ladies' sewing tin for 50p, with old wooden cotton reels in it and bits of wool for darning. It seemed to be the morning for stuffed foxes and I was kicking myself for leaving the camera in the car. First of all the BIGGEST fox I've ever seen - stuffed or otherwise - in a case. It must have been nearly five feet long from nose to tip of tail and stood nearly as tall as a collie. Then there was a dealer wandering round with a stuffed fox (out of its case) under his arm.


Now the walk:

The view I never tire of - looking across to Black Mountain from Top o' Bank.

A small triangle of rough land fenced off could once have housed a cottage.

Another view across the valley.




The lane goes on and ends at the farm of another neighbour. Once it turned left and joined up with a road further over, but someone (local farmer's dad) managed to take a piece of heavy machinery along there and there was a land-slip or something, too bad to repair, and the lane was just abandoned. I mean to try and get along it one day, secateurs in hand (though it most likely needs a bulldozer!)


The view across our valley.


The frost was lingering on the slopes which didn't catch the sun.


Going back towards home and past a neighbour's farm (they have a stuffed fox in a case in their parlour, strange to tell!)


The mound just in view mid-picture is Dryslwyn Castle.




Back down the hill towards home.

This published a day late because the internet connection went walkabouts yesterday again . . .

In the bleak midwinter.

A corner of the garden in this week's frosts. Pretty much the same again this morning too.



I haven't done ANY walking this week, but hope to remedy that today when I walk the long mile and deliver all my local Christmas cards on foot. I am looking forward to it. We have had such DIRE weather - another day of skating rink conditions where we couldn't go more than two steps along the path, let alone make it as far as the car. Walking was definitely NOT on the agenda, which at least helped me get some inside jobs done. The sitting room decorating is finished, I am glad to say, and I am hoping to get back to the Morning Room again next week. OH has hit on a good way of getting the carpet laid which involves putting our huuuuuge Victorian pitchpine cupboard/glazed top bookcase in auction with a reserve. We do want to sell it, as it is too big to take with us when we downsize, but we will put a reserve on and if it comes home, we will have to hang on to it a bit longer. In the meantime, we can get the carpet laid . . .


The sitting room is now looking tidier and lighter.

Middle daughter is now safely home and the house feels more lively again (think loud music emanating from her attic eyrie). Eldest daughter is going to be brought home next Friday - not sure which of us has drawn the short straw for the trip to Yorkshire yet. Then I will be content - all my family home for the holidays.

Latest sewing project . . .

I had a brainwave the other evening, when I was stood shivering by the front door, as it's very draughty despite there being a sand-filled draught-excluder across the bottom.








I had a dig in my huge feed bin full of material and found this gorgeous Medieval-looking piece which was exactly the right size - so exactly in fact that I had to sew some extra material to the top to make it long enough to have a hem. OH and I hit upon the idea of tabs as he found - amongst his souvenirs in the old cart shed - this Victorian mahogany towel rail which was just the right length. I didn't have any plain lining material but I had been given this checked flannelette which was exactly the right width and a bit left over. It makes it really warm. I had bought the cord tieback and tassel when I got the material. As the walls and everything are wonky in this house, I had to allow for this and sew a hem one inch deeper on the left than the right, but it worked out OK. Now I am tempted to start on the new curtains for the kitchen . . .

The Thought-Fox - Ted Hughes

This seems appropriately wintry and I am busy sewing right now, so apologies - back to normal tomorrow I hope.

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

A Free Day . . .

This is Paul's Himalayan Musk which grows in the greatest profusion across the back of my garden and which presents me with thousands of blossoms in June . . . I needed a reminder of summer today, when it is like the Cresta Run outside . . .



Well, put it this way, instead of having to rush around trying to put cards in envelopes and stick on stamps this morning (which I gave up on doing last night when my eyes were drooping), we are Confined To Barracks and no school for D. It was rain on top of frost again this morning and when I saw Trixie fall over on the path when I let her out before it was light, I roused my dearly beloved from bed to come and Do The Driving. However, like one day last week it was SO slippery underfoot - sheets of ice, not just black ice in patches - that we are going nowhere until it thaws a bit. So now I have the time to write the cards, add to the Christmas letter, pack the parcels and generally Get Sorted.

I am going to get my sewing machine down from the sewing room too , as that's up in the attic, and perishing cold - certainly not conducive to sitting down and sewing for more than 2 minutes at a stretch. I've looked out a length of heavy brocade material in a lovely deep aubergine colour with gold in it, that is destined to be a curtain for the front door, to keep the draughts out. OH has to do his bit and put up a curtain pole.

I woke at 5 a.m. again - having fallen into bed just gone 9 p.m. last night. It was too cold to get up so I laid there for an hour, my mind busy. All sorts of random thoughts going through my head, about books I had read years and years - half a lifetime ago. Does anyone remember the books by Derek Tangye? They told the story of how he gave up his life as a newspaper columnist and his wife abandoned her PR job at the Savoy in London to live in a tiny cottage on the cliffs at Minack in Cornwall. How they earned a living by picking their early narcissi and daffodils for the London markets, and packing them to go up on the milk train. They had cats and donkeys and an enviable lifestyle. I recall when his wife Jeannie had to go to Hospital to have a possible cancer checked out, wearing a bright red coat, and walking back down the lane in her bright red coat, knowing that her life was nearing its closure as she refused treatment for her cancer. I don't know why that should suddenly come to me, but it did. Along with John Seymour's Self Sufficiency, The Good Life on tv, Elizabeth West's 'Hovel in the Hills' and subsequent books Garden in the Hills and Kitchen in the Hills, and compounded by the wonderful books of Jeannine McMullen, who wrote of her smallholding here in Wales (not a million miles from me as I think she was close to Black Mountain and probably still is) these things gave me a leg-up onto the path in life I chose to take - moving here to our smallholding in deepest rural Wales.

Llanarchaeron - a gentry estate

Llanarchaeron is now owned by the National Trust. My husband and I visited it on Sunday as they had dressed the house for Christmas, and there was a Crafts Fair and Farmer's Market.



There had been a hard frost overnight again, and after doing the grocery shopping we drove up towards Aberaeron along the main road via Lampeter, rather than going our usual back roads short-cut way.

By the time we got there, the car park was packed, but we managed to get a space. I was very disappointed to discover that the very thing I wanted to photograph MOST (e.g. the "Christmassing" of the house) was forbidden, so you will just have to rely on my descriptions. All the voluntary staff were dressed in Victorian costume. The contents of the dining room table is best described as a page from Mrs Beeton. There were bowls of tangerines and nuts and sugared almonds; a massive (cardboard!) iced Christmas cake; a huge bowl of fruit; and of course silver candlesticks and gleaming silver cutlery and the best plates and napkins neatly folded.



In the hallway there was a splendid tree and someone had done a wonderful job of tearing sheets of cotton wool carefully to lay on the branches and represent snow - must try that. It was carefully guarded by a really authentic-looking butler too, whose florid face looked as if he had the key to the wine cellar . . .

In the kitchens they had the most wonderful cream Aga (once the Only colour). It was a double sized one and the room was SO warm. A scrubbed kitchen table was laid out with a cornucopia of winter vegetables - leeks, onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbages, swede etc. I recall seeing a wonderfully-restored range too in another room. OH and I would love one, but our Hergom (black enamelled cast iron with brass rails and fittings) is a passible replacement.


Someone was playing Christmas carols on a piano when we went back to take this photo of the house. It sounded so right, and made me long for a Christmas where entertainments were all from the home and not the television . . .

Because of the craft fair, the usual displays had been squirrelled away. This is a cream seperator from the Dairy. I actually have the business part (made by a company in Haverfordwest, as this one was too), and I am now nagging my husband to make me the base. It would dress the bottom kitchen, with its enormous inglenook, perfectly . . .

In the photograph below, you can see the cheese press - you would have built up some good muscles moving these stone-weighted presses up and down . . .


In the wonderful courtyard at the back of the house, rooms which originally house the Dairy, the Bakery, the Laundry, the Brewery, the cold room for hanging Game etc, housed the poor Crafts people selling their wares, and huddled, shivering in corners. I felt sorry for them and hope they sold lots. There were more stalls in small tents beyond the yard, but they had problems with condensation and the lady with the hand-made soap had to move out as her stock was being ruined, and the man with the turned wood items wasn't best pleased either. My husband fell in love with a beautiful turned yew-wood box (he has a thing about yew) and I bought it for him from our offspring as a joint Christmas present. I also spoke to Jane ??? who had some marvellous hand-made baskets and picked up a leaflet about two courses she is holding at the end of January and I hope to go to the two day one and carry on with my basket-making skills, as I really enjoyed the course I did at Lluest last year. In one of the (lovely) Victorian stables, someone had seen fit to allocate a loose box to several rocking horses which were for sale! I wish I'd taken a photograph . . . I was fascinated by the hay rack which was built against a circular scoop in the wall, rather than just being put against a flat wall, which was the norm.






I couldn't resist this photograph as someone on Creative Living forum was hankering for a basketwork shopping trolley recently.


The Farmer's Market was excellent, and we both had roast lamb rolls for lunch, which certainly hit the spot, and then a wander around the walled gardens, marvelling at the beautifully-pruned and maintained old fruit trees.

The gardener's loft-cottage (one assumes!) which was above the stables.

There were fan-trained cherries all along one stretch of the walled garden.

One of the rows of wonderfully-managed fruit trees.


Between the borders of fruit trees were vegetable plots.

More fan-trained fruit trees and herb beds.

I wish my apple trees were pruned like this - so much easier to pick! The varieties were old apple species, eaters and cookers, designed to supply the house with fruit from autumn to late winter.