On this day 80 years ago, Nella Last — rather appropriately for a woman later portrayed by Victoria Wood — had had it up to here with men:
1943
I suddenly thought tonight, ‘I know why a lot of women have gone into pants — it’s a sign that they are asserting themselves in some way.’ I feel pants are more of a sign of the times than I realised. A growing contempt for man in general creeps over me. For a craftsman, whether a sweep or Prime Minister — ‘hats off’. But why this ‘Lords of Creation’ attitude on men’s part? I’m beginning to see I’m a really clever woman in my own line, and not the ‘odd’ or ‘uneducated’ woman that I’ve had dinned into me. Not that in-laws have bothered me for some time now. I got on my top note, and swept all clean, after one sticky bit of interference and bother. I feel that, in the world of tomorrow, marriage will be — will have to be — more of a partnership, less of this ‘I have spoken’ attitude. They will talk things over — talking does do good, if only to clear the air. I run my house like a business: I have had to, to get all done properly, everything fitted in. Why, then, should women not be looked on as partners, as ‘business women’? I feel thoroughly out of time, I’m not as patient as I used to be, and when one gets to fifty-three, and after thirty-two years of married life, there are few illusions to cloud issues.
Nella Last
(From an anthology of diary entries, ‘The Assassin’s Cloak’)
I’ve Had It Up To Here was a song Victoria Wood did at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball in 1981, and was originally part of her 1980 play Good Fun.
Victoria Wood played Nella Last in 2006’s Housewife, 49, which she dramatised from Last’s wartime diaries, winning British Academy awards for best single drama and best actress.
It’s also the 73rd anniversary of Sylvia Plath writing this in her diary:
…and may be the 87th anniversary of a load of pigeons shitting on Hitler’s Olympics.
