Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  Another, more personal, reason for my interest was that two of my close friends, one from school, the other from university, were Vera Brittain’s grandson and granddaughter. Some time later, after I’d been appointed as Brittain’s biographer, I read Penelope Lively’s fine novel, According To Mark, and relished the parallels in the plot to my own position in real life. Mark Lamming is writing the biography of Gilbert Strong, a literary figure between the wars, described as on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. In the course of his researches, Mark meets his subject’s granddaughter, Carrie, and although he initially suffers from ‘chronological irritation’, because his version of events does not always accord with Carrie’s memories of her grandfather, he soon falls in love with her, leading to momentous consequences for the writing of his book. I hadn’t fallen in love with my subject’s granddaughter, nor she with me, but I had experienced something of the same flicker of recognition that is present in the novel, when the biographer notices certain of Gilbert Strong’s personality traits replicated in a later generation.

  One of the bonuses of working for Shirley Williams was the chance, in odd moments free from all the frantic politicking, to talk to her about her mother, to look at old family photographs and at the William Rothenstein portrait of Brittain, painted at the height of the Second World War, at a time when her courageously defiant pacifist views were jeopardising her literary standing and isolating her from her friends. There were other, more poignant relics from the past lying around the flat. On the bookshelves, a first edition of Testament of Youth seemed to encapsulate the book’s elegiac qualities. The Gollancz jacket was still bright mustard yellow, emblazoned with deep magenta lettering. Inside, affixed to the front flap, was a faded house photograph from Uppingham School, which included Vera Brittain’s brother, her eventual fiancé, Roland Leighton, and another friend, Victor Richardson, among the ranks of the stiff-collared, dark-suited pupils. It had been taken in July 1914, and a note indicated that the book had once belonged to an Uppingham schoolmaster. His inscription was touching and pathetic: ‘I knew these boys’.

  There was also the inky school copy of the Liddell and Scott, the Greek-English lexicon that had once belonged to Vera’s adored younger brother Edward. Edward had left Uppingham in that fateful summer of 1914 and had responded eagerly to the call of King and Country, serving with distinction on the Western Front, before being posted to Italy where he was killed on the Asiago Plateau in the final months of the war.

  Shirley was very supportive of my idea for a brief study of Vera Brittain that would set her life and writing in a proper historical context. At Oxford I had been awarded the history prize that, some 60 years earlier, Shirley’s father, the political scientist George Catlin, had also won. Although she isn’t a superstitious person, I think that this coincidence provided enough of an encouragement to her to believe that I was in some way meant to write about her mother. When she learned of my plan, Shirley immediately wrote to Carmen Callil, recommending both my prospective book and me. As one of the founders of Virago, Carmen had republished Testament of Youth in the late seventies with enormous flair and success, establishing the book, after a long period of neglect, as part of the canon of writing about the First World War, and pushing it once again to the top of the bestseller lists.

  Carmen replied from her office at Chatto & Windus, where she had recently been appointed managing director. She wasn’t keen on a short book, but she had another suggestion to put to Shirley: as the authorised biography of Vera Brittain by Brittain’s friend and literary executor Paul Berry was some years overdue, why didn’t I step in as co-author to help him finish it?

  I knew something about Paul Berry, and had met him briefly the previous summer. Born in 1919, the eighth of ten children of a Midlands farming family, he was a remote cousin on his mother’s side of Vera Brittain’s great friend, the Yorkshire novelist and reformer Winifred Holtby. Paul had introduced himself to Brittain at a Food Relief Rally in Trafalgar Square at which she was speaking in the summer of 1942. ‘Charming young man’, she noted in her diary, ‘with a distant look of Winifred. He is in a bomb-disposal squad at Acton – [a] compromise bet.[ween] being a C.O. [conscientious objector] & being in the army’. On an impulse she invited him back to supper with her, and he stayed until after ten.

  This was the beginning of a friendship that would last almost 28 years, right up to Brittain’s death in March 1970. For Paul, it was undoubtedly the single most important relationship of his life. He was drawn to her, partly out of respect for his own mother whose ‘sanctity and strong matriarchal influence’ had, he claimed, made him a feminist; and also because he saw the vulnerability in Vera Brittain’s character, perceiving under the rather flinty surface a sweeter and softer side to her personality that rarely emerged in public. This made him protective of her – in death as well as in life – and led him to imbue their relationship with an almost romantic aura. One of the first gifts he sent her was a box of violets, in direct imitation of those she had once received from her fiancé, Roland Leighton, fatally wounded at the front at Christmas 1915.

  But it was far from being a one-sided friendship. Shy and withdrawn, Vera Brittain found intimacy difficult. At the time of first meeting Paul Berry, she was suffering from the devastating blow of being prevented by a government ban from visiting her son and daughter who had been evacuated to the United States. In Paul she discovered a young man who shared many of her views – he remained a lifelong pacifist – and who in some ways fulfilled the role of surrogate son. In 1944, when she was writing her novel Born 1925, she drew closely on his experiences as a bomb-disposal soldier for the character of the hero Adrian, who became a composite of Paul and Brittain’s son, John.

  For many years Paul had worked as a teacher of secretarial skills, eventually becoming a Senior Lecturer at Kingsway Princeton College for Further Education, from which he had retired in 1981. His major ambition, though, had always been to be a writer, and he had published two short books, one in collaboration with another author. But the book he most wanted to write had come close to defeating him. Originally intending, at Brittain’s request, to complete her third volume of autobiography, left unfinished at her death, he subsequently conceived the idea of a memoir, and then, as Vera Brittain’s reputation revived, of a fully-fledged biography. He had always experienced difficulty writing – though he was an accomplished and indefatigable correspondent – and found himself, understandably, floundering in the morass of material which Brittain had left behind, much of it preserved at McMaster University in Ontario, which had purchased the vast Brittain archive in 1971. ‘It’s the one thing I want to do before I go on my way – and do really well’, he wrote to Carmen Callil, ‘and it’s soul-destroying finding it so terribly difficult.’

  In the years to come, I often reflected on what seemed to me an extraordinary (though entirely characteristic) loyalty on Shirley’s part towards Paul’s overriding desire to be her mother’s authorised biographer, often against a chorus of hostile voices from feminist academics in North America who resented the ban on the use of unpublished material while Paul was writing his book. Yet, as one of Shirley’s oldest friends put it to me, a more complicated mixture of motives was probably involved. While she clearly felt a sense of obligation towards him, she may also have believed that she could rely on Paul to produce a respectful biography of her mother that wouldn’t dwell on the more controversial aspects of Vera Brittain’s private life: her ‘semi-detached’ marriage, ultimately a happy one, but for many years a source of conflict and estrangement; her great friendship with Winifred Holtby, for so long a subject of innuendo and rumour that portrayed it as a lesbian love affair; and, in her final years, Brittain’s sadly deteriorating relationship with her son John. As I was soon to learn, another of Paul’s problems was that he was constantly torn between his desire on the one hand to protect Brittain’s reputation and on the other to be as honest as he could about her faults as well as her virtues.

 
Our first professional encounter at Chatto’s offices in William IV Street was hardly auspicious. Having negotiated the tricky metal grille of the old-fashioned lift, I arrived in Carmen’s room, its walls a virulent shade of yellow, to find her enquiring after Paul’s cat, Bobbitt, and complaining about the state of the office lavatories. She was smoking furiously, and, as she turned her head, shafts of sunlight sent off rays of iridescent colour from her hair, Titian red, then rich aubergine. Paul regarded me with watery blue eyes, peeping over the folds of a large white handkerchief, a study in suspicion.

  Carmen requested that he invite me to his home in West Sussex to look at the material he’d collected. When he demurred, citing the excuse of his large family and a sick friend, she suddenly transformed from benign autocrat to belligerent dictator: he would cooperate and make everything available to me or else the book that meant so much to him might never appear.

  Paul had accumulated a massive Brittain archive of his own, housed in a cobwebby study at the top of one of the five tiny cottages that had been knocked together in a higgledy-piggledy fashion to construct a home. Here were hundreds of photocopies from McMaster, countless pages of Brittain manuscripts and news cuttings retrieved from her London flat after her death or subsequently donated to him, letters of reminiscence from people who had known Vera Brittain, and both sides of more than a quarter-of-a-century’s correspondence between Paul and Brittain herself. Although I was to make trips to McMaster and to the Winifred Holtby Archive at Hull, as well as to many other collections, the discoveries that surprised me most were often those that I found under a pile of decaying newsprint on Paul’s study floor.

  It quickly became apparent that there was no book to finish, and that little of what Paul had written was usable. He possessed a striking turn of phrase, which I often adopted; but he was unable to see the wood for the trees, or to organise the material in a way that would produce a coherent narrative. Initially, his argument that we shouldn’t write about Brittain’s First World War experiences because they were so well known drove me to distraction. I would return from my visits to Sussex, my briefcase full to overflowing with files of fascinating material to work on, but with a sinking feeling about the prospect of ever being able to weld together our widely differing approaches to our subject.

  With Paul himself I began to enjoy a real friendship, even though we were separated in age by more than 40 years. Our relationship was still tempered by his natural suspicion and stubbornness, and, on my part, by over-eagerness to probe deeply into every aspect of Vera Brittain’s life and career. But I appreciated his inexhaustible generosity (‘there are no pockets in the shrouds’, he would say as he slipped me a £20 note) and recognised the quiet integrity that struck everyone who knew him. My visits to the picturesque little cottages with their lush surrounding garden, nestling by a river, became more frequent; but, as the years passed, our roles reversed. I was writing more and more, while he increasingly assumed an editorial responsibility, poring over my typescripts and scrutinising them for grammatical error, infelicities of expression and factual mistakes. I knew how desperate he was that the book should appear, but my progress was interrupted by my spells of employment at the BBC, when I barely had time to write at all. Today, reading the letters I wrote to Paul during this period, I am filled with shame at their constant note of prevarication and delay. Year after year I promise him that the completion of the book is imminent. By the beginning of 1994, he was seriously ill and had begun to put real pressure on me: he might not live to see its publication. That summer I finally finished it, but working with a sympathetic copy editor persuaded me that it could be improved still further, and in the last four months of that year I drastically rewrote it. Paul couldn’t disguise his anger. Although we were reconciled long before his death in 1999, there was always the unspoken accusation between us, that I had taken his book away from him. What he can’t have failed to recognise is that he had given the biography something infinitely precious: that stamp of authenticity that can only come from close personal knowledge of the biographer’s subject.

  For more than 30 years Paul had shared his life with the distinguished potter Ray Marshall, and, after Marshall’s death in 1986, he had spent his final decade in a happy companionship with the artist Eric Leazell. Paul wasn’t tortured or defensive about his homosexuality, though he was secretive about it, understandably, given that he had grown to maturity in pre-Wolfenden days. And his sexuality had perhaps led him to examine in some detail the character of Vera Brittain’s brother Edward, and the circumstances surrounding his death in 1918. On one of my first visits to see him, Paul had shown me the letters relating to this episode that he had uncovered at McMaster.

  Edward is a tragic subsidiary character in Vera Brittain’s story. He – along with his Uppingham friends, Roland Leighton and Victor Richardson – exemplified the volunteer spirit of the public schoolboys who rushed to enlist on the declaration of war in 1914. When Edward was gazetted to a battalion of the Sherwood Foresters, he proudly sent a photograph of himself in ‘the King’s uniform’ to his old governess. ‘What greater honour’, she replied, ‘could any man have at such a time as this in our history!’

  Edward became a family hero, awarded the Military Cross ‘for conspicuous gallantry and leadership during an attack’ on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. However, the experience of crawling back in great pain to the safety of the British trenches through the dead and wounded, with corpses already turning yellow and green, had eroded his youthful idealism. ‘You have no idea how bitter life is at times’, he wrote to Vera when he was back in the mud and cold of the Ypres Salient.

  By the autumn of 1917, when he was posted to Italy, he had suffered the deaths of his old friends, Roland and Victor, and of another close friend from his former battalion, Geoffrey Thurlow, all fatally wounded or killed on the Western Front, and these had intensified Edward’s long-held premonition that he, too, would be killed. His family’s hopes, though, that he would survive the war were boosted now that Edward was in the relatively quiescent Italian Front high in the Alps above Vicenza.

  But those hopes were shattered on 22 June 1918 by the arrival of a telegram informing the Brittains that Edward had been killed on the Asiago Plateau while leading a counter-offensive against an Austrian attack. The absence of any firm details about Edward’s death led Vera Brittain to contact his commanding officer, who was in hospital in London recovering from the injuries he had sustained in the same battle. For several months she pursued him relentlessly, convinced that he knew far more about Edward’s part in the action than he was prepared to tell. However, it was all to no avail, and Edward’s final hours remained cloaked in mystery.

  This much was recounted in Testament of Youth and confirmed by the contemporary documents. But the McMaster material added an intriguing new twist to the plot. In 1934, 15 years after Edward’s death, and following the publication of Testament of Youth, the commanding officer had written to Vera, out of the blue, to confess that, as she had intuitively believed in 1918, he had withheld certain facts of a personal nature about Edward’s death. Even at that distance in time he could not bring himself to write about it, but he suggested that if she still wished to have the information they could meet for a talk.

  But what were these facts of a personal nature that the commanding officer couldn’t write down? Here, tantalisingly, the written sources went blank. From subsequent letters among the Brittain papers, it was clear that a meeting had taken place, but of their conversation, no record appeared to survive.

  Paul pointed to the evidence of Vera Brittain’s third novel, an ambitious feminist epic, Honourable Estate, which Brittain had written after Testament of Youth, but which had failed to repeat the runaway success of her autobiography. The book had been published in 1936, a couple of years after the commanding officer had met for his conversation with Brittain. Each of Vera Brittain’s five novels is a roman à clef in which identifiable persons from real life are pres
ented as thinly disguised fictional characters; even so, the plotline of Honourable Estate seemed almost too dramatic to be true. In the novel, Richard Alleyndene, the brother of the heroine Ruth, goes into the Gallipoli campaign seeking to be killed in order to avoid a court martial for homosexuality. ‘I can’t confront Father and Mother with the fact that their son is what they would call vicious and immoral’, he tells her in a farewell letter, ‘instead of a virtuous patriotic hero’.

  Staying at about this time with George Catlin’s second wife, Delinda, who, since his death in 1979, had lived in Vera Brittain’s cottage in the New Forest, I made a small but satisfying find. At the bottom of the bathroom cupboard, covered in thick dust, was a head and shoulders portrait of Edward, wearing his M.C. The canvas had holes in it and the paint was peeling, but I could make out his sad smile and dignified bearing. I took it downstairs to show Delinda, who was nursing her lunchtime gin and tonic.

  Delinda was the consummate hostess, having in the distant past been the manager of several upmarket hotels. In every way imaginable I was the polar opposite of her distinguished predecessor, Vera Brittain, who had wasted no time on culinary matters, being barely able to boil an egg. Among other things, Delinda rejected books, feminism, the Labour Party, or anything else that smacked of intellectualism. She verbalised her thoughts in a down-to-earth, call-a-spade-a-spade fashion that emanated from her Newcastle-upon-Tyne roots. ‘Dahling,’ she drawled after taking one look at the painting, ‘of course, everyone knows he was a pansy.’

  Like Chinese whispers, other unsubstantiated rumours swirled around Edward’s name. An academic researching the novelist Joyce Cary reported that Cary’s brother-in-law, Heneage Ogilvy, who had been a surgeon at Asiago in 1918, had known something about a court martial in connection with Edward. But having been unable to gain access to the official records held by the Ministry of Defence, which at the time were embargoed, I tried to think of other leads to follow.