Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  Towhidi came to understand Testament of Youth in certain respects as an intensified version of what we will all go through in the course of our lives: the devastating loss of people close to us and the need for us to rebuild our lives without them. ‘Vera walks through the valley of the shadow of death,’ Towhidi says, ‘and one of the book’s themes is the process she goes through to remake herself in the face of such terrible catastrophe’.

  ‘You distil the story into something quintessential’, Rosie Alison agrees. ‘The book has its golden afternoon, climaxing in that final summer idyll before the war at the Uppingham Speech Day, in July 1914. Then it has the passing of a long shadow during the war years themselves; and finally, in the last act, the rebirth.’

  ‘Making a film is a bit like childbirth’, Rosie Alison observes. ‘While you’re going through it you feel as if you’ll never want to do it again.’ There are so many ‘ifs and buts’: finding the right cast, ‘wooing’ directors, avoiding scheduling conflicts and juggling availability to ensure that everyone is available at the same time; and then there is the incredible uphill struggle of securing the budget.

  By the middle of 2013, four years into development, some of these elements were in place. The Irish actress Saiorse Ronan was attached to the project to play Vera. A British director, James Kent, was also on board. Kent is a seasoned, award-winning television director, and Testament of Youth would be his first feature film. Tentative plans were made to begin filming that autumn.

  However, hopes for the planned starting date faded away as finance for the film began to look uncertain. Rosie Alison was working hard on Heyday’s big budget, live action film, Paddington, based on Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear books, but at the same time she and BBC Films were trying desperately to keep the prospects for Testament of Youth alive. ‘In the end,’ she says, ‘despite all the uncertainty, the only thing to do was to say “we’re making it” and move ahead.’

  Using her own money to fund some of the pre-production costs, Alison hired the casting director, Lucy Bevan, and the designer, Jon Henson. She and James Kent started to research locations. One major find, straddling the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, was the Welbeck Estate. Welbeck remains a working estate, but it also offers film-makers spectacular landscapes and a range of domestic and larger-scale buildings, many of them built by an eccentric Duke of Portland in the nineteenth century. Here the production designers of Testament of Youth would recreate the exteriors of Uppingham School, while Cuckney House, an attractive early eighteenth-century house, rebuilt and altered over the course of the next hundred years, would stand in for Melrose, the Brittain family’s Buxton home. Woodlands on the estate provided ideal locations for the muddy landscapes of the Western Front, including Vera’s hospital at Etaples. Other locations would include Brodsworth Hall, near Doncaster in South Yorkshire (as the Grand Hotel, Brighton); the Leeds City Varieties music hall (where Vera and Roland go to the theatre under the watchful eye of Aunt Belle); and the interior of the former Terry’s chocolate factory in York (as the First London General Hospital). Merton, Trinity, Exeter and Balliol Colleges, as well as the city’s glorious Radcliffe Square – brought to early twentieth-century life with horse-drawn carriages and vintage cars – would be among the sites filmed in Oxford.

  Settling on March 2014 for the start of principal photography meant the unfortunate loss of Saiorse Ronan, the actress cast as Vera, because of her commitment to the film of Colm Tóibin’s Brooklyn, scheduled to film at the same time. But Testament of Youth’s producers came up with an inspired replacement. The young Swedish actress, Alicia Vikander, had garnered rave notices for her English princess married to an insane Danish king in A Royal Affair, and for her troubled Katarina in Pure, and she was widely touted as a major new star with a line-up of future roles that included The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Tulip Fever. She read Juliette Towhidi’s script and immediately wanted to play Vera, encouraged by her father’s conviction that she should take the role.

  Kit Harington, whose outstanding performance as Albert in War Horse I had seen and admired at the National Theatre in 2008, was cast as Roland. He seemed able to convey just the right mixture of brooding pride and poetic feeling for the character. Colin Morgan, who later visited Blind Veterans UK (formerly St Dunstan’s) in the course of his research, was to be Victor. The parts of Edward and Geoffrey went to Taron Egerton and Jonathan Bailey. A magnificent ensemble cast was assembled around them, including Dominic West, Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson, Anna Chancellor, Hayley Atwell and Joanna Scanlan.

  BBC Films formally announced Testament of Youth on 4 February 2014. Seven weeks of filming would begin on 16 March. The week before filming started, Alicia Vikander was taken by Rosie Alison and myself to be introduced to Shirley Williams.

  We sat in the tea room of the House of Lords, looking out across the Thames at St Thomas’ Hospital, on the opposite side of the river, where Vera Brittain had nursed as a VAD briefly (and unhappily) towards the end of the war. Shirley Williams talked to Alicia about her impressions of her mother, her single-mindedness, her love of nature, her essential earnestness and complete absence of humour, and as she did so I could see that she was studying Alicia closely.

  The only writer I’ve known whom I’ve seen portrayed on the screen is the novelist Iris Murdoch, in the 2001 film based on her husband John Bayley’s memoir of her. (Actually I once met Philip Larkin and subsequently saw him portrayed on television in the guise of Hugh Bonneville, but my acquaintance with Larkin was so fleeting – and disastrous, as I accidentally knocked a glass of champagne over him, much to his fury – that it hardly counts.) For all her considerable gifts as an actress, though, Judi Dench bore little physical or temperamental resemblance to the Iris Murdoch I had met on several occasions in her final years. But for other filmgoers, who had never encountered the real Iris, Dench evidently succeeded in creating an illusion of the writer.

  And that is what counts for most of us: that a film portrayal of a famous or well-known figure should create a convincing illusion. In the case of Vera Brittain, the actor’s job is a lot easier. Few people are alive now who remember her. There are photographs, of course, but no movie footage (as far as we are aware). Sound recordings of her in middle age demonstrate that she had a fairly high-pitched, well-elocuted voice, not unlike Celia Johnson’s in Brief Encounter. Any attempt to imitate this would produce a state of uncontrolled hilarity in a modern audience. So what one is asking of the actress chosen to play Vera Brittain is that she possess a passing resemblance to her, as Alicia Vikander does, and that nothing about her performance should jar with the information that readers have gained about her from her books. Everything else is about what sets great acting apart from mere imitation.

  After tea, as we walked back along the corridors through the Lords, I could hear Shirley Williams wondering out loud about whether Alicia Vikander’s nose looked much like her mother’s. For a crazy split-second I imagined being in prosthetic nose territory, and a vision of Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf in The Hours, with her award-winning rhinoplasty, arose before my eyes. But, in fact, Shirley Williams pronounced herself altogether happy with the actress selected to play her mother, and gave her her seal of approval.

  The director, James Kent, was frequently impressed during filming by Alicia Vikander’s ability to sustain extreme emotion during long set-ups. At high points in the drama – Vera’s reaction to the return of Roland’s kit from the Front after his death, for instance, or to the death of a German prisoner of war in her ward at Etaples – a compelling flood of different, sometimes conflicting, emotions plays out across Vikander’s face.

  The idea of giving the film what James Kent calls ‘an extremely first-person singular viewpoint’, reflecting the autobiographical voice, was his strongest creative decision as director. The movement and positioning of the camera often represents Vera’s point of view; while the journey from classically paced and measured camera work to something more chaotic i
n the film’s latter half – hand-held camera, faster cuts and generally more movement – mirrors the dramatic and tragic twists and turns in the story, and sometimes Vera’s own energy and forthright personality.

  Kent was keen to strengthen the contrast between the ‘idyllic pre-war story’ and the horrifying conditions in the hospitals on the Western Front, which he believes were downplayed in the 1979 television version, where the depiction of Etaples was much more anodyne. The big-screen version of these scenes is like something out of Dante’s Inferno. It has to be, Kent says, because the cinema audience won’t be able to understand what motivates Vera to work for peace without first seeing the horrors of war that she witnessed at first hand. It is also inescapably true that members of the public today, in comparison with their forebears from the seventies, are much more conditioned by 24-hour news and documentary footage to extremes of wartime violence and bloodlust.

  3 May 2014: the final day of filming, outside the Old Naval College in Greenwich, standing in for Whitehall on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918. As so often with film, it seems, the opening scene is being shot on the very last day.

  It is a day of long and complicated set-ups, involving crane shots, crowds of extras, horse-drawn carriages, vintage cars and buses. The first minutes of the story, showing Vera isolated against a background of men, women and children celebrating the end of the war, are being photographed on film – as opposed to the high definition digital process used elsewhere – in order to give a dreamy, slow-motion effect to the images of the celebrations and Vera’s response to them.

  Listening on headphones to the soundtrack, while observing the action on a playback monitor, I suddenly hear the sound of a solitary mouth organ being played by one of the revellers on the street. It strikes me with a peculiar resonance. This, I realise later, is because it has reminded me of the ending of Lewis Milestone’s film version of All Quiet on the Western Front, released in 1930, the first great anti-war film of the sound era. In its final scene, the young German soldier, Paul Bäumer, is sitting in a trench in a quiet period of no fighting when he sees a butterfly just ahead. A mouth organ plays in the background as Bäumer stretches out to the butterfly. He fails to reach it and then stands up to get closer. At that moment, a French sniper shoots and kills him. Bäumer’s end, invented for the film and not present in Remarque’s novel, is not dissimilar, though in a highly dramatic, romanticised way, to Roland Leighton’s death by sniper fire in December 1915.

  More than 80 years after its first publication, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth forms an integral part of the way we view the British experience of the First World War. For Shirley Williams, hardly a day passes without someone mentioning her mother and how much the book has meant to them. In a way, the story of Vera Brittain, and her loss of the four men she loved, stands as proxy for all those of us, a century on, whose families lost loved ones in the First World War, and who want to derive some understanding of what they endured and suffered – as Kenneth MacMillan did when he choreographed his ballet Gloria to come to terms with his father’s experiences on the Western Front. ‘Others have born witness to the wastage, the pity and the heroism of modern war,’ Winifred Holtby observed of Testament of Youth in 1933, ‘none has yet so convincingly conveyed its grief.’ It is a description that remains just as true today as it was when Winifred wrote it.

  Shirley Williams is thankful for the ‘precious kind of immortality’ that her mother has achieved because of Testament of Youth, and she has high hopes for the new film version of the book, which will bring the story to a new generation, and to a wider audience than ever before, throughout the world.

  In the summer of 2014, Williams visited Hamburg, in Germany, to see a section of the embankment in the Hammerbrook quarter of the city named in her mother’s honour. Hammerbrook was a district that was almost totally destroyed in 1943 during the Allied bombing campaign that devastated Hamburg and killed more than forty thousand people.

  Nearly a century after Vera Brittain nursed German prisoners of war in France, setting her on a path towards internationalism and eventually pacifism, and 70 years after she raised her voice in protest against the bombing of German civilians in the Second World War, this recognition from German citizens seems a very special one to Shirley Williams. ‘It shows an understanding of my mother’s contribution towards reconciliation and peace. And, ultimately, in a sense, it reveals the continuing power of Testament of Youth’.

  [i] The film of Noel Coward’s play Cavalcade, which focused on the lives of a quintessential British family and their servants, beginning in 1900 and ending in 1933 (in the film version), had recently won the American Academy Award for Best Picture.

  [ii] Gollancz, Testament of Youth’s original publisher, simultaneously republished the book in hardback.

  Williams’s preface made the claim, later corrected, that Testament of Youth was ‘the only book about the First World War written by a woman’, a prime indication of how forgotten and buried other women’s accounts of the war were by the late seventies.

  [iii] He did subsequently relent and appeared with Shirley Williams in an item about Testament of Youth on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour. Sir George Catlin died, not long afterwards, in February 1979.

  [iv] A gazetteer of places associated with Vera Brittain and Testament of Youth can be found on page 222.

  Afterword

  Ipplepen 269: The Tragic Fate of Edward Brittain

  This short piece deals with the terrible circumstances of Edward Brittain’s death in action in June 1918, on the Asiago Plateau in northern Italy. In addition to explaining how I came to write Vera Brittain’s authorised biography – and all the difficulties and sensitivities associated with that task – it also describes how my research, together with a lucky coincidence, uncovered something of the truth about Edward’s final days.

  Despite this discovery, many questions concerning Edward’s death remain unanswered. Vera Brittain, who learned about the mystery surrounding her brother’s last hours in the immediate aftermath of Testament of Youth’s publication, inclined increasingly to the view that Edward might have placed himself deliberately in the line of fire in the battle in which he was killed, in order to avoid the disgrace of a court martial, while continuing to question the veracity of aspects of what his commanding officer had told her.

  Even at this distance in time, almost a century on from the events described, it should be possible to work out from sources like the battalion diary of the 11th Sherwood Foresters the identity of the other officer whose correspondence was intercepted. But I have never had the heart to do it.

  Meanwhile, the story of Edward Brittain’s sad end has recently entered fiction for a second time (the first was Vera Brittain’s own use of the story in her 1936 novel Honourable Estate). In Pat Barker’s First World War novel Toby’s Room, published in 2012, the death of the eponymous hero, serving on the Western Front, who kills himself in No Man’s Land after being discovered having sex with a man, mirrors in its outline and many of its details the tragic fate of Edward Brittain in 1918.

  In the summer of 1986 I was almost broke and in desperate need of gainful employment. The previous year I had worked as a research assistant to the politician Shirley Williams, then President of the SDP. My main task had been gathering material for a book she was writing about the terrifying levels of rising unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain. While Shirley dashed around the country addressing the party faithful, I sat in front of an early-model Macintosh in her London flat, unravelling, and typing, chapters from the handwritten scripts on long yellow notepads that she occasionally flung at me in her rush to the station. I also found myself inveigled into a fair amount of hoovering, and fetching-and-carrying of dry cleaning, though I rather appreciated the feminist role-reversal implicit in these activities. What I dreaded were my days at party headquarters in Cowley Street, avoiding the brooding Heathcliffian figure of Dr David Owen, the SDP’s man of destiny, who was said to be more than a l
ittle concerned about the inefficiencies of Shirley’s office.

  Edward Brittain’s grave at the British military cemetery at Granezza, on the Asiago Plateau in northern Italy. A photograph taken by Vera Brittain in 1921.

  But all this had come to an end with the publication of her book. It was called A Job To Live – an appropriate title in view of the situation in which I now found myself. For a while I drifted through an unsatisfactory series of temporary jobs. Then I hit on an idea that had been lodged in the back of my mind for some time: I would write a short book about Shirley’s mother, Vera Brittain, feminist and pacifist, and author of the classic woman’s memoir of the First World War, Testament of Youth.

  I had read Testament of Youth several years earlier as an undergraduate at Oxford, and had immediately become obsessed with it. It opened my eyes to the suffering of the combatants and non-combatants of the Great War in a way that nothing else had, and made me understand the cataclysmic impact of the war on a young woman from an ordinary middle-class background not dissimilar to my own. It is also a book that is suffused, at least in its early sections, with the romance of Oxford, together with an excitement about the intellectual opportunities offered by the university, which at that time I certainly shared.