Women Only War Zone

Victoria Wood in Housewife 49.

My husband did something thoughtful for me. He saw Housewife 49 was playing on the KNOW network (out of BC) and saved it to our TV exterior hard drive.

I have the CD, but I like to have my favourite movies at the ready on the TV. Our old Blue-ray player took forever to load and I don’t know how to use the new Play Station 3 my kids gave my husband for Christmas, which was bought specifically to play CD’s.

I have recently watched Housewife 49, again, when my sister in law returned it to me in October.

It’s not a happy or funny film, like many of the others I keep stored on the backup harddrive as ‘pick me ups’ and ‘snowy afternoon comfort eye-candy”.. B J’s Diary, Mamma Mia, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Doris Day films, etc. (I don’t find much to watch on our satellite stations.)

Hmm. I’ve been reading about Oprah’s new OWN network, the debut, on salon.com and in the New York Times. Apparently, it’s feel-good TV, all the time, a cynicism-free zone. The two reviewers liked what they saw – up to a point. “But it’s not for people who like Oscar Wilde,” wrote the reviewer in the NYT. Hmm. Well, I like Oscar Wilde, although he can get repetitive.

I normally despise American afternoon TV, the fast fixes it promotes; the magical thinking, the narcissism, the consumerism; the way it mocks, even degrades, ordinary, uneducated, often plain, over-weight people who don’t seem to know they are being mocked…so, I have to say, I am intrigued (a little) about this new OWN network.

I never ever liked daytime TV. Raising babies decades ago, at home, I watched the burgeoning all news networks. As a person steeped in communications theory, I realized right away that this new format would change how things were done, (and how people thought) big time, but these stations have become more NUTSY CUCKOO than even I imagined, so I haven’t tuned in for years.

That being said, I like my BBC Radio Four (much much saner) with Oscar Wilde and Shaw and all those other cynical British writers, and my edgy British Films many of which are coming up on Turner Classics.

Anyway, back to Nella. Nella was born in the North of England (Lancashire) in 1889. My grandmother, Dorothy Nixon, was born in the North of England (Yorkshire) in 1895.

What a difference those six years meant.

Nella Last was married and a mother during WWI and my grandmother was a ‘maiden’ who worked as a land girl, in forestry.

When the war was over my grandmother went to Malaya to marry my grandfather, Robert, a Yorkshireman, and lived a rather extraordinary life there: the life of a British Expat, but not a typical one, by any means.

I researched and then wrote about her life in Looking For Mrs. Peel at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html.

British Expats, and especially the women, were looked down upon by ordinary Britishers. (My story explains.)

This is because they seemed to live the HIGH LIFE, with those big bungalows and servants and gin-soaked garden-parties at “The Club.” AND THEY WERE MIDDLE-CLASS.

They turned the British Class system on its head and this caused resentment.

Giles Playfair writes in 1942, during the Fall of Singapore, that many of these Expat women don’t have any sense of ‘duty’ and, were they back in Britain, they’d be sweeping out a modest two bedroom bungalow.

True. My grandmother, but for the six year gap in their births, might have been Nella Last, living a claustraphobic, confined existence in a small industrial town, except in her own clever head.

Instead my grandmother got to hobnob with Sultans and high ranking British 0fficals (making sure they were surrounded by the prettiest young women) and score cricket matches at the Royal Selangor Club.

But a sense of duty, she had. She was a war heroine.

She experienced confinement during the WWII, when she was interned by the Japanese at Changi and then put in solitary for 7 months.

Nella Last, like may British women, was “liberated” during the War. She applied her many homely skills as seamstress and economist and cook to the war effort.

What my grandmother didn’t get to do, is raise her own kids. Like most colonials, she sent them away to England at 5 years old. Nella Last, the loving mom she was, wouldn’t have changed places with her, not for all the tea in China – or all the rubber in Malaya. Of that I am sure.

Nella Last’s 1950′s and Home and Hearth

My Edwardian living room. Nella Last`s War and Peace have a place of honour on a little secretary I recently inherited. I have a few Edwardian pieces, which I will soon tire of, they are so lugubrious. But I had Ikea most of my married life. Mr. Darcy, my hound, decided to pose for me. That`s a framed picture of Marion Nicholson above, the first picture on this blog, the one where she is taking tea in her white dress.

An 1910 tenement room in New York from Technical World Magazine.

I received my pre-ordered copy of Nella Last in the 1950′s (edited by Canadian historians Patricia and Robert Malcolmson)and was happy to get it. I’ve written here how MUCH I have enjoyed Nella Last’s War and Nella Last’s Peace. I first heard “Peace” serialized on BBC Radio Four, was blown away, bought the book and then bought War and I have lent the books to everyone I know.

I assumed Nella Last in the 1950′s would be weaker than the first two, but I have read the first bit and I am pleasantly surprised. No, there’s no war going on, but there is a marriage going on, and, well, it’s hard not to identify with Nella, even if she is an (extraordinary!) Edwardian woman and her husband, a very typical Edwardian middle class man. Nella tells how her husband literally got sick one time when she and her sons re-decorated the house while he was away , although they were careful to replace everything as before. But at least she had a home. I guess that’s the point. Hmm. My husband hates when I re-decorate. The difference, I consider it my right and I do it without guilt. I’d change the decor every day, if I could. And after 25 years, he’s starting to get into it.

Fact is, I know many Boomers whose marriages are like Nella’s, so there’s something universal in her experience.(And she is so wise.) Nella Last, in this latest volume, is an empty nester, who has devoted her life to her kids and now has to spend the rest of her life in a small house with her ill and brooding husband (when in other circumstances, say, had she been born among the Bloomsbury set, she very likely would have become a famous writer, a famous writer earlier, while alive, that is.)

Nella, who was born in the North of England, 1889, (just five years before my own grandmother, who was born in Teesdale, County Durham and just 3 years before Flora Nicholson of Flo in the City, my novel in progress based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/) describes family life in the country in her childhood as being very difficult: “There was poverty, wife-beating, misery, drunkeness, lads running off to sea, more sickness.”

No doubt, there was the same in Richmond, Quebec in the 1890`s. But not in Tighsolas. Norman and Margaret were happily married, devoted to their family, and well off – for a while.

And in the cities in North America life was very hard for many. New York had well-known housing issues. The picture above is from the 1910 Technical World. It is of a ‘windowless room’ There are over 100,000 dwellings with no light or airflow in New York in that era.

Well, Montreal had by-laws against such rooms, but I found a 1908 Gazette article that said NEW housing for the working class was being built, where bedrooms had no windows and, consequently, no light or fresh air.

The blurb from the pamphlet of the child welfare exhibit in 1912 had this bit in it: The exhibit on housing shows photographs of some of the bad spots in Montreal. As one of the pictures was being taken, the woman who lived in the house, remarked “every spring when the thaw begins our rooms are flooded with several inches of water. How are people, who are forced through poverty to live in places of this sort, bring up healthy children?” One of the worst features of Montreal housing is the inner court and the rear tenement. One lot is often occupied by two houses, the one at the rear being approached through a dark alley. There is little light and less air in those places. They are breeding spots for tuberculosis. Places like this sort also furnish a large proportion of juvenile delinquents. Poverty, lack of privacy in the home, lack of a place for children to play, these are all causes for misery and delinquency..

A few days ago, on Thanksgiving the local CTV news ran a story about the Old Brewery Mission, claiming (I think I recall correctly) that there are 12,000 homeless people in Montreal. Can it be? The Mission regularly feeds homeless men. I know there are many soup kitchens in Montreal, but they do not only feed homeless people. People on social assistance or people on low incomes, part time etc, also must eat there. The welfare cheque hardly pays the rent. And with the cost of food SKYROCKETING in Montreal lately, it must only be getting worse.

I found another article in the 1908 Gazette that said Dr. Louis Laberge wanted the homeless missions of that era closed, for sanitation purposes. One of the owners of these establishments, who charged 10 cents to those who could afford it, said there were 500 homeless men in Montreal, with 350 of them too poor to pay the 10 cents a night for shelter. (I’m not sure if they got food too.)