Life must be filled up

Volume one left me wanting more of Channon’s scandalous, fascinating diaries so I was delighted when the second volume came up as a Kindle deal. Part two begins in 1938: politicians are still divided into appeasers and the rest. Channon is by now almost in love with his hero, Neville Chamberlain. ‘My god’, he calls him, and cherishes every little word or smile he gets from him. He is still working with Rab Butler at the Foreign Office, which he relishes because he feels at the heart of government. His enemies remain Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper and others opposed to appeasement. Is he beginning to see through the Nazis? He wonders if the Germans have ‘gone mad’ because their treatment of Jews is ‘cruel and unnecessary’. This doesn’t prevent his making shockingly anti-Semitic remarks throughout the rest of the diary. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Channon seems more annoyed that Hitler broke his word to Chamberlain than he is by the fact itself. The war, he opines, is all the fault of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. How he hates them! (Simon Heffer captions a photograph ‘Churchill and Eden mongering war’). Yet he says of Churchill, ‘I hate him but we can’t do without him’. According to him, the mandarins (i.e. in the Foreign Office) have ‘always wanted war’ and ‘Jewry the world over triumphs’. His private life is less happy than his public one because of the coldness and unpredictable humours of his wife. He loves her and wonders if she is ill. Little Paul, their only child, is still the apple of his eye.
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I’ve just started Simon Heffer’s mammoth work, a new edition of the diaries of ‘Chips’ Channon. A collection was published in 1967 but was heavily redacted, partly for fear of libel suits. Now, Channon’s grandchildren have given permission for a complete edition. Chips Channon is a name you often come across in biographies of his contemporaries but I knew nothing about the man except that he wrote scandalous diaries. I can see that it will take me a very long time to get through this first volume (which was 99p for the Kindle a few days ago) and that I’ll be reading quite a few other books at the same time.
( How to be a social climber )

I dearly love a diary, whether it’s genuine, like Pepys’ Diary or the fictional The Diary of a Nobody. More than any other medium it seems to take you right into the writer’s life, so that you feel you are living with them. Nella Last, who wrote such long reports for Mass Observation, had a great gift for describing her home, her neighbourhood and her friends and relatives; no detail was too trivial for her to record. This must account for the great publishing success of Nella Last’s War & Nella Last’s Peace. Now Robert and Patricia Malcolmson have put together Nella Last in the 1950s, a slightly misleading title as it only covers 1950 -52.

Nella and her husband Will are still living in the same house in Barrow, with one son in Belfast and the other in Australia. Their circumstances have changed, as Will has been forced to retire early due to ill health, money is tight and prices are rising. Due to post-war shortages there are regular power cuts; there’s so little fuel that even respectable people like the Lasts turn beachcomber and bring home driftwood for the fire. Nella is of course the queen of ‘making-do’ when it comes to sewing and cooking and her industry is quite tiring to read about. These are not happy diaries. At times Nella feels nostalgic for the wartime community spirit and the feeling of belonging and helping that she had in the WVS. Her chief problem though is her husband and much of the book is about her attempts to cope with and help him. He was obviously suffering from severe depression: having ‘attacks of nerves’, not wanting to socialise, ratting at Nella and offending the neighbours. He saw a psychiatrist, who could offer no help. As we know from the previous books, Nella herself suffered from ‘nerves’, to the extent of being physically sick when she was upset, so the effort to keep ‘bright’ for her husband’s sake was tiring.

Luckily, Nella still finds pleasure in writing, reading and sewing, and in the beauties of nature. One of her husband’s few pleasures was driving, so in spite of the expense they are still able to have little jaunts ‘over Walney’ or up to Coniston. When she’s in reminiscent mood, Nella reminds us that although she’s lived so long in Barrow, she had a country childhood. She remembers the charcoal burners of Lakeland, her granny’s recipes and medicines, the fun of harvest home, the enthusiasm during elections, when all the children would sport rosettes. She is suspicious of the welfare state, fears an atomic war, misses Churchill, is surprised to see people buying televisions and to her mind wasting money in other ways. In spite of all this and her own problems, she doesn’t live in the past but looks forward, maintaining her zest for life.

I really enjoyed sharing Nella’s life again for a while and wished there were more of the same.

20th April

Night temperatures of -4º, bitter winds and wintry showers. Impossible really to do anything outside with frosty nights.

From my garden journal 1995. I found it in a cupboard while I was looking for something else. Back to 2007 and today's picture is a form of Iris germanica called 'Berkeley Gold'. I spotted it flowering yesterday.