On the evening of 7 May 1945, Lancashire housewife Nella Last and her husband, Will, gathered around the radio with their neighbours. They agreed that if the announcer said the king was to speak, they knew that the big day had come at last.
When, instead, the announcer, “said so unemotionally that tomorrow was to be VE Day, and that Churchill was to speak at three o’clock”, the group just gazed at each other. They felt, recalled Last in her diary, “no pulse quicken, no sense of thankfulness or uplift, of any kind”. But despite the sense of an anti-climax, Last still felt that she had to find a way to mark the occasion – no matter how small. “I rose placidly and put on the kettle and went through to prepare the salad. I looked on my shelf and said: ‘Well, dash it, we must celebrate somehow – I’ll open this tin of pears’, and I did.”
The end of the Second World War, and the way it was celebrated, is widely documented. But Nella Last’s vivid description shows what a gift we have in women’s diaries: their immediacy, their sense of what it was like being there, and their insight into what the diarist was , rather than what the weight of hindsight would, bringing together more than 1,200 diary entries written by women all over the world.
