Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  What, though, is additionally fascinating about Gloria is the way in which Testament of Youth allowed Kenneth MacMillan to achieve his own personal catharsis. MacMillan’s father, William, enlisted as a gunner with the Highland Fifth Garrison Artillery in 1915, and was caught in a mustard gas attack, a year later, at the Battle of the Somme, which left him with lifelong pulmonary problems and sores on his face and neck. William MacMillan died from pneumonia in 1946, when Kenneth was 16. Like so many veterans of the First World War, he had never spoken to his family about his experiences. Nor had he supported his son’s desire to dance, and never saw him perform. Kenneth’s first professional contract came at the same time as his father’s death, and left him with overwhelming feelings of guilt that he had been ‘unable to give my father the warmth he craved.’

  Through Testament of Youth, Kenneth MacMillan discovered a way of expressing his anger at the horror of war and its devastation of his father’s life, in addition to unlocking the guilt he had felt about his relationship with William MacMillan.

  One of Gloria’s most memorable scenes comes at the moment during the pas de trois when the three soloists point accusingly at the audience in a gesture that clearly imitates Alfred Leete’s famous enlistment poster from September 1914, depicting Lord Kitchener with his level-eyed frown and pointing finger. However, the gesture may also be interpreted in another way. Most of us, it may suggest, are guilty by implication in acquiescing in acts of war – out of ignorance, moral lethargy, or actual participation.

  Flash forward to March 2014. It is the second week of filming on the Heyday-BBC Films production of the feature film version of Testament of Youth and I am standing stamping my feet in the freezing cold on a station platform at the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire. This heritage railway’s fleet of steam locomotives and other rolling stock are being prepared for their first big entrance: a scene at Leicester station, almost exactly a hundred years earlier in the autumn of 1914, during which Vera learns from Roland that he will not after all be going up to Oxford for the new term, having chosen instead to enlist as a second lieutenant in the 4th Norfolks. As Vera receives the news in horrified disbelief – accompanied by recognition of Roland’s excitement at the prospect of doing his duty in a great cause – they exchange their first, long-awaited kiss.

  The railway carriages, normally kept in pristine condition, have been artificially weathered to remove their museum finish with a combination of black water-based paint mixed with wallpaper paste and vegetable oil. The station itself has been given new period signs and all the modern fittings have been removed; a cosy buffet has been created on the over-bridge between platforms three and four; and a newsstand bearing papers proclaiming ominous war headlines has appeared, although it will be in shot for no more than a couple of seconds. Later in the week, Keighley station – the location for the famous 1970 film adaptation of E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children – will graduate to a bigger role, playing a major mainline city interchange, London’s Charing Cross station, an illusion created with the help of architectural visual effects that will be superimposed during post-production.

  Nominally, I’m present as Vera Brittain’s biographer (my book has been optioned for the film), as one of her literary executors and as consultant on the production – although in practice being a consultant while filming is taking place means standing around on set hoping someone will ask you a question. To observe a feature film being made, even a film with a relatively small budget like this one, is to marvel at the extent and smooth operation of the collaborative enterprise: of everyone – from camera operators to set dressers to the woman credited as ‘Vera’s hand double’ – working together like a small, well-drilled army.

  (From left to right) Juliette Towhidi, James Kent, and Rosie Alison on the set of Testament of Youth, 2014.

  Only the extras, of whom there are around 50 today, seem somehow a breed apart. They talk familiarly among themselves, but appear to be overlooked by everyone else until the moment when the assistant director shouts instructions to position them. Wardrobe has costumed them, with minute attention to detail, as station guards and porters, as young Tommies carrying heavy packs, trying to look at ease in their puttees, or simply as members of the travelling public. A man wearing a neat trilby and a loo brush moustache brings the only animal extra, his dog, in tow.

  The two principals appear unobtrusively on the platform: Alicia Vikander, 25 and from Gothenburg, Sweden, with her extraordinary command of English, as Vera; and Kit Harington, 27, as Roland Leighton. Widespread attention is fixed on Kit Harington’s physical transformation. Contractually forbidden from cutting his long, tightly curled hair, essential for his role as Jon Snow in the long-running HBO series, Game of Thrones, Harington has been fitted with a £3,000 wig that miraculously hides his bushy locks and gives him a short, stylish cut with just the hint of a widow’s peak at the hairline.

  ‘You are always very correctly dressed when I find you, and usually somewhere near a railway station’, Roland wrote to Vera in December 1915, shortly before the much-anticipated Christmas leave that tragically failed to materialise. Vera Brittain’s lifelong love of clothes is illustrated, not only in the many references to what she is wearing in Testament of Youth – a favoured dark blue silk dress, the black moiré and velvet hat trimmed with red roses, a dove-coloured coat-frock and terracotta hat, to single out just a few – but also by a letter she wrote to The Times in 1955, taking exception, at the age of 62, to an article on clothes for the older woman. ‘I am not in the least interested in long sleeves, “sensible” shoes and “substantial” underwear,’ she wrote testily, ‘and do not expect to be for quite 15 years.’

  Vera Brittain’s interest in fashion is a godsend for the film’s costume designer Consolata Boyle, though the character’s appearance in almost every one of the film’s two hundred-odd scenes has created a heavy workload for her, and for her team. In spite of this, Boyle, whose recent work includes costuming Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher for The Iron Lady, exudes an incredible calm, always dressed in black and moving about noiselessly, as if on castors. She says that whether she is designing for a period or a contemporary film she treats every story in the same way: ‘creating a complete world that has to be visually coherent’. Vera’s costumes include the fussy provincial apparel that strikes such a contrast with the dowdy clothes worn by the other Somerville students; the fitted coats and berets, like the brown coat and crimson hat that Alicia Vikander wears at Keighley today; and, of course, the heavily starched cotton apron and Red Cross badge of her VAD uniform.

  On the second day of the Keighley shoot, I stand on the station platform with Rosie Alison from Heyday Films, one of the producers and the individual most responsible for bringing Testament of Youth to the screen. As we watch the director James Kent, with his director of photography Rob Hardy, preparing for the next scene, she explains the influence of David Lean’s 1945 classic Brief Encounter on the new film. It is not just the backdrop of the railway station that is common in different ways to both films, and the love stories that are central to them, but also the way in which the Lean film slowly builds the mounting intensity of Laura’s and Alec’s romance through chance meetings and the couple’s brief interactions. ‘In a way it’s not unlike Vera and Roland’, Alison remarks. ‘All those poignant station farewells, enforced separations and snatched meetings.’

  At that moment there is a shout of ‘Action!’ House music is being played over the loudspeakers to enliven the crowd of extras, as departing soldiers wave from train windows and couples kiss good-bye, clinging desperately to one another. As the train disappears from view with a hiss of steam, only women are left on the platform – mothers, sisters, wives, fiancées – ‘frozen like statues in their emotion’ in the haunting words of Juliette Towhidi’s script.

  At the end of the filming day, I cross over to a twenty-first-century platform to catch a modern diesel train back to Leeds en route for London, taking with me
an unexpected residue of the steam age, dirt in the nostrils and under the nails.

  The ultimate goal of Vera Brittain’s literary estate had always been to see a feature film made of Testament of Youth. By the late nineties, I was one of Brittain’s literary executors – ‘like being the author’s representative on earth’, as someone not inaccurately put it – but, although TV companies expressed vague interest in the book from time to time, the film world seemed generally more wary of embarking on a potentially expensive period drama with what one executive termed ‘a pretty depressing story’. Shirley Williams, a trustee of her mother’s estate, felt strongly that the high benchmark set by the 1979 television series made another TV adaptation of the book unnecessary, even undesirable; and the notion that BBC television drama – certainly classic drama – had somehow lost its way was later confirmed for us by the BBC’s adaptation of Winifred Holtby’s novel South Riding, in 2011, where, despite an outstanding cast, the plot was unhappily truncated and the overarching theme of the workings of local government hopelessly lost.

  Meanwhile, the publication and republication of books by and about Vera Brittain had started to proliferate. Biographies appeared, including the authorised life, based on the vast archive of her papers, extending to over 150 linear feet, sold to McMaster University in Ontario in 1971. Brittain’s First World War diary was finally published in 1981, in an edition by Alan Bishop, while the letters between Vera, Roland, Edward, Victor and Geoffrey, from which Vera had been unable to quote freely in Testament of Youth, appeared in 1998 as Letters from a Lost Generation.

  Both diary and letters highlighted the complexity and ambivalence underlying Vera’s contemporary responses to the war. They revealed that, while at times she could rail against the war in anger and distress, at others she took refuge in a consolatory rhetoric rooted in traditional values of patriotism, sacrifice and idealism of a kind espoused by the wartime propaganda of Church and State, or the sonnets of Rupert Brooke. I adapted the letters for 15 quarter-hour, episodes on BBC Radio Four in October and November 1998, as part of the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the Armistice. Amanda Root took the part of Vera, Rupert Graves was Roland and Jonathan Firth, Edward.

  Ten years later, a BBC drama-documentary entitled Vera Brittain: A Woman in Love and War, based on the letters, and broadcast on BBC One on Remembrance Sunday, 90 years after the signing of the Armistice, brought Testament of Youth to the attention of BBC Films, the feature film-making arm of the BBC. Joe Oppenheimer, BBC Films’ commissioning editor, was keen to press ahead with a big-screen version of the book. From the outset he stipulated that the story had to be made accessible for a new generation. ‘It mustn’t feel as though someone is blowing the dust off something from the past.’

  I knew enough about the unpredictable ways of film to realise that there was still a strong possibility that Testament of Youth might never be made. I had read John Fowles’s diary account of his 12-year wait for the film version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which you get a palpable sense of his steadily collapsing optimism and its replacement with an unmistakable form of writer’s ennui. And then there was the dispiriting tale, which became common knowledge, of the attempts to turn Sebastian Faulks’s World War One blockbuster Birdsong into a film. That enterprise seemed to have entered a special circle of development hell (the book was later adapted for stage and television, and may yet make it to cinema screens). ‘The actress who will play Vera is probably still at drama school’, we were warned as we signed the option contract. Other, more Cassandra-like voices cautioned, only half-jokingly, that she might not yet be born.

  Nevertheless, searching for a co-producer, BBC Films met with an immediate stroke of luck. In the summer of 2009, Heyday Films, makers of the Harry Potter franchise, approached the BBC to express their enthusiasm for joining them in developing the film. Rosie Alison, who had worked as a director in television, including stints at the BBC’s Music and Arts department and on the South Bank Show, before joining Heyday as Head of Development in 2001, had been ‘spellbound’ by the TV series of Testament of Youth, which she saw while at boarding school. Reading the book, she was especially struck by the ‘psychological intimacy’ of the author’s voice, and the way in which Vera Brittain’s ‘fierce intelligence keeps digging away at the truth’.

  At a lunch at the House of Lords, where Shirley Williams is a Liberal Democrat working peer, to celebrate Heyday’s involvement, we debated the shape of the story, where it would start and where it would end, while Shirley Williams regaled the assembled company with anecdotes about her mother.

  I sat next to David Heyman, the founder of Heyday, who, as producer of all eight instalments of Harry Potter, has become one of the most powerful and influential figures in the film world. We happened to have been at school together in London in the seventies. Heyman seemed very affable and charming (one prerequisite, I suppose, of being a good producer) and so I told him the only recollection I had of him from his schooldays. Our school buildings were situated around a large yard, and, as the teenage Heyman used to walk across it, other boys would push up the sash windows, lean out, and shout ‘Hey! Man!’

  This, I assured David Heyman, was because he had had the reputation of being one of the coolest boys in the school. He looked very pleased – as well he might.

  The major problems involved in compressing such a long book to fit the confines of a two-hour film were obvious from the start. One casualty of this need to find a tighter focus was Vera Brittain’s Malta experience, excised from the plot line even before the ink was dry on the contract. Everyone regretted that Malta had to go. Scenes of the sunlit island offered such a contrast of visual repose from those set on the Western Front. But in narrative terms Malta is little more than a diversion from the main path, and it had to be dispensed with.

  I knew the story so well, and had sometimes dreamily imagined myself as an auteur, directing, writing and producing my own film of Testament of Youth, in which the predominant colour in my photographic palette would be a shade of red approximating to the colour of a faded poppy or of dried blood. Early on I wrote a treatment for BBC Films, utterly failing to recognise that screenwriting is a special art, not to be undertaken by any species of unqualified writer.

  My treatment, I thought, started off rather well:

  ‘The world was mad and we were all victims …’

  An intelligent young woman from a sheltered background confronts the cataclysm of the First World War, as a nurse in military hospitals in London and abroad, and through the loss of the four young men she loves. The only survivor of her intimate circle of friends, she emerges into the post-war world determined to work for peace, and to ensure that the sacrifice of her generation has not been in vain.

  September 1921. Northern France. A small car pitches its way uncertainly through churned up ground. As the shot widens, a shattered, shell-wracked landscape comes into view. The remains of trees, with bare, skeletal branches, assume grotesque shapes, while the humped ruins of houses line the roadsides. Here and there in the piles of debris are small groups of wooden crosses. Men and women, Army Officers and Women’s Auxiliary Corps members, work amongst the smouldering wreckage, attempting to bring some order to the chaos.

  The car’s passengers are VERA BRITTAIN and WINIFRED HOLTBY. The two friends present a marked physical and temperamental contrast to each another. VERA is 27, small, dark and intense, dressed in high fashion in black, with her hat pulled down over her eyes. WINIFRED, at 23, is tall, blonde and gangling, with an exuberant personality and a more eccentric and colourful dress sense. Observing VERA’S pent-up state, she leans over and squeezes her gloved hand.

  The car reaches the tiny village of Louvencourt, driving past a grey château, which immediately seizes VERA’S attention. At the intersection of two roads on the outskirts of the village, the car drives up to a small military cemetery. It is one of the first of three cemeteries to have been completed in the immediate aftermath of the Great W
ar. VERA walks along the paved path, and stands transfixed in front of one of the gravestones. She feels the incongruity of the cemetery’s smooth velvet lawn when set against the desolation and disorder of the battlefields. WINIFRED stands a few paces behind her. She has no war dead, but has reverently adopted VERA’S as her own.

  With a mixture of incomprehension and distress, VERA turns suddenly to WINIFRED, and exclaims, ‘I can’t feel that he’s really here.’

  And then a flashback to pre-war Buxton, spring of 1914, and Vera’s meeting with Roland Leighton.

  But as my outline proceeded, I became increasingly immersed in the trees and completely unable to see the wood. My knowledge of the minutiae of real events in Vera Brittain’s life made me resentful of the need to abbreviate, or, worse still, radically alter anything. Consequently, my film of Testament of Youth would have run in its uncut version for about seven hours. As Joe Oppenheimer says, it is a bit like the story of the director who insists on cutting his own trailer and ends up with a 20-minute promo for his film.

  Juliette Towhidi, chosen as the screenwriter for Testament of Youth, points out that one of the main pitfalls of the conventional biopic is to try to include too detailed a narrative of the life, which will end up making the finished film feel far too episodic. Towhidi, who had a major success in 2003 with Calendar Girls, completed her first draft of the script of Testament of Youth in the summer of 2010, after six months of thorough research and writing. Three further drafts followed, with more minor revisions and polishes. Towhidi was drawn to the ‘very strong female voice’ of the book, but saw that it was essential, because of its length, to identify the essence of the story and ‘the emotional crest of the waves’. All the same, she adds, ‘you have a moral responsibility to the characters to be faithful to them, even at points where, owing to the limitations of the time available, some streamlining is necessary’. In the 2015 Testament of Youth, for example, Edward arrives not at his sister’s First London General in Camberwell, but at the hospital where Vera is nursing at Etaples. Purists who raise objections to this alteration might like to note that Vera herself moved the hospitalisation of the character of the wounded brother from London to Malta in one of her early fictional versions of her war experiences.