Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925

by Vera Brittain

  To attribute, however, to Sir John Marriott the brusquer characteristics of academic Oxford seems to me to argue precisely that lack of perspicacity that Party opponents so often encourage in themselves. (I write this without rancour, since I belong myself to that Party whose programme is anathema to Sir John and his colleagues. To-day I can agree with few of his political opinions, but if he believed every clause of the Versailles Treaty to be divinely inspired I think I should forgive him, so deep still is my thankfulness for his breezy and uncalculating intervention in my obscure affairs.) No man could have had less contempt for unfamiliar ways of living, or more interest in the by-paths of experience. On the only occasion that they met I remember how skilfully he persuaded my father - with whom he can have had next to nothing in common - to discourse with lively enthusiasm on the technique of paper-making, and to relate the modest history of our mill.

  For me Sir John remains and always will remain the kindly, stimulating teacher in whose genial presence obstacles hitherto insuperable melted away like snow in April. He represents the deus ex machina of my unsophisticated youth, the Olympian who listened without a hint of patronage or amusement to the halting account of a callow girl’s vaunting, ingenuous ambitions. To him I owe my final victory over family opposition, my escape from the alien atmosphere of Buxton, and the university education which for all its omissions did at long last equip me for the kind of life that I wanted to lead. It is a debt that I acknowledge with humble gratitude, and can never hope to repay.

  The most optimistic enthusiast for adult education could hardly have described that Buxton course of Extension Lectures on the Problems of Wealth and Poverty as a conspicuous success. I stayed away from the first to go to a dance (this far had I already fallen from grace!) but I attended and wrote - the sole regular essayist out of the whole town - for all the five others.

  Sir John gave of his vigorous and popular best, but a prophet from heaven could not have impressed his listless and dwindling audience, of which the older and somnolent half had come out of consideration for the feelings of the local secretary, and the younger and fidgety half under compulsion from its parents. It was, I think, at the fourth or fifth lecture that he was moved to tell his yawning listeners that Buxton did not strike him as particularly inquisitive - a remark which led to a good deal of adverse criticism of the lectures at subsequent tea-parties. I even heard one voluminous lady (whose husband had launched out upon an essay answering all three alternative questions, instead of selecting one as he had been told to do) remark to sympathetic acquaintances that she never had liked ‘the man’s’ manner, and that she had heard he only came to Buxton because they wouldn’t have him in Oxford!

  My own persevering essays on the Industrial Revolution, the Problem of Distribution, the History of Trade Unionism and the Rise of the Socialist Movement must have been crude and superficial in the extreme, since neither the local Free Library nor the little collection of schoolbooks on my bedroom shelves contained any relevant works on either history or economics, but the reports that they received from Sir John were sufficiently encouraging to be described by my father as ‘a great honour from an Oxford man’.

  No doubt - as indeed I have since discovered when lecturing myself - one wheat-ear of enthusiasm was worth a good many tares of indifference. I signed my first tentative effort with initials only, and when I nervously went up to claim it Sir John showed considerable surprise - as well indeed he might have done, for no one could have looked more immature, or less capable of formulating a coherent idea, than I did in those days. For all my long skirts and elaborate Empire curls, I never succeeded up to the time that the War broke out in appearing older than an unfledged fifteen.

  At the request of the local secretary - a cultured woman who was, needless to say, only on the fringe of ‘the set’ - my family agreed to put Sir John up for his last Buxton lecture. On this occasion he returned my weekly essay at home after we came back from the now almost empty Town Hall. His praise moved me to speak, in my parents’ presence, of my longing to go to Oxford, and I asked his advice with regard to the first steps to be taken. The genial matter-of-factness with which he gave it seemed to dispel all doubts, and made the customary objections look so trivial that they were hardly ever mentioned again.

  The next morning he departed, leaving a singular feeling of emptiness where his stimulating presence, his tweed coat and his golf clubs had been. I do not suppose that he ever thought again of our household, or realised in the least how completely his flying visit had altered the atmosphere.

  4

  After Sir John had gone changes seemed, in comparison with the utter stagnation of the previous year, to happen very quickly. I went in for, and won, an essay competition which he had advised me to attempt in connection with that year’s Oxford Summer Meeting; I also received, and accepted, an invitation to stay at St Hilda’s Hall for the meeting itself with my aunt and Miss Heath Jones.

  The result of the essay competition further gratified the dawning pride in my modest achievements which Sir John’s encouragement had aroused in my father. Before I went to the Summer School he told me that he had decided to send me to Oxford for a year, and did not seem unduly disconcerted when I returned home with the information - then as much news to me as to him - that if I wanted a Degree I must remain at college not merely for one year but for three.

  I went to St Hilda’s in a state of ecstatic entrancement which I do not now know whether to regard as funny or pathetic or incredible; I only wish that I were still capable of feeling it about anything. ‘Oh, when I think of it all,’ I had written in my diary with ingenuous rapture after accepting my aunt’s invitation, ‘I feel as though I were in a dream from which I am afraid to awaken. Oxford! What doesn’t it call up to the mind! The greatest romance of England - the mellowed beauty of time and association, the finest lectures the world can produce, wonderful libraries and fascinating old bookshops, the society of Miss H. J. and Miss B. the best I could desire on earth and the meeting all the interesting intellectual people Miss H. J. knows - oh God, have pity on my fierce excitement and grant that it may come to pass and be even better than I dream!’

  When I did arrive at this Earthly Paradise I was not, strangely enough, in the least disappointed. Even the lectures ‘the finest the world can produce’, came up to my expectations - a fact which seems to indicate that few of the usual term-time lecturers can have been included in the Summer School programme. There was a light on my path and a dizzy intoxication in the air; the old buildings in the August sunshine seemed crowned with a golden glory, and I tripped up and down the High Street between St Hilda’s and the Examination Schools on gay feet as airy as my soaring aspirations.

  My fellow ‘thirsters’ were the usual Summer Meeting collection of unoccupied spinsters, schoolmistresses on holiday, fatherly chapel-goers and earnest young men in sweaters and soft collars, but I thought them all extremely talented and enormously important. Had anyone told me that less than a decade afterwards I should myself be lecturing to similar gatherings, I should blankly have refused to believe him, for if I was in awe of the audiences, the lecturers seemed to me to be at least on a level with Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven. And perhaps, since they included not only Sir John Marriott on the Monarchy of France, but Dean Inge, grave, scholarly and a little alarming on Old Testament Eschatology, I had some excuse for thinking that I had strayed by accident into the most exclusive circle of a celestial hierarchy.

  The fact that Sir John had asked me to dine with him one evening while I was attending the School added the final drop to my cup of excitement. Palpitating with awe and amazement, I presented myself at his house in Northmoor Road, where I met his beautiful wife and elegant, clever daughter, who afterwards became, rather surprisingly, absorbed in the Girls’ Diocesan Association. So remarkably had my prospects changed since the spring, that we talked of my university future as a foregone conclusion. Sir John, no doubt bearing in mind the sheltered li
fe of a Buxton young lady, took for granted that I should try to enter Lady Margaret Hall, for this has always been the politest of the four Oxford women’s colleges, and in those days it invariably wore, like my Buxton academy, ‘a school for the daughters of gentlemen’ air. (Strictly Anglican gentlemen, of course.)

  Trembling but determined, in spite of the gratitude and admiration which almost unnerved me, I contradicted his assumption. I had already talked over the four colleges with a business associate of my father’s, Mr Horace Hart, then Controller of the Oxford University Press, who told me that Somerville was undenominational and that it had become, owing to its high examination standards, by far the most difficult of the women’s colleges to enter.

  From the University Press windows Mr Hart and I had looked across Walton Street at the terra-cotta walls of Somerville drowsing in the afternoon sun. I had found irresistibly fascinating both its closed garden and the idea of its arrogant, intellectual impregnability, but perhaps what chiefly attracted me - still theologically dominated by Robert Elsmere and the rationalistic Buxton curate - was its religious toleration. So I told Sir John that it was not the socially safe Head of Lady Margaret Hall whom I had arranged to see, but the scholarly and intimidating Principal of Somerville.

  My appointment with her was fixed for eight o’clock one evening after dinner. I felt indescribably elated, yet definitely insecure about the legs, when I found myself for the first time within the walled garden, and saw the wide lawn and the heavy, drooping elms and sycamores in the fast-vanishing light. I came upon the Principal - ‘who is just like a tiger-cat’, I noted afterwards in my diary - before I expected to see her, sitting over her after-dinner coffee with the History tutor on the narrow stretch of grass outside the Senior Common Room.

  As I followed the scout across the garden, the Principal got up to greet me. Her immensely tall, angular figure seemed to go on unfolding for several minutes before my apprehensive eyes, and the vast gulf of lawn between us made me even more conscious than usual of my insignificant stature. Being quite ignorant of the plain-Jane-and-no-nonsense conventions of Oxford women dons, I had carefully changed, in accordance with the sartorial habits of Buxton, into evening dress, and was wearing a flimsy lace frock under a pale blue and grey reversible satin cloak, and an unsubstantial little pair of high-heeled white sue‘de shoes. So unlike the customary felt hat and mackintosh of the average 1913 woman student was this provincially modish attire, that the Principal actually referred to it when she interviewed me during the Scholarship examinations in the following March. ‘I remember you,’ she said immediately, ‘you’re the girl who came across the lawn in a blue evening cloak.’

  But on this first occasion my frivolous appearance, combined with my complete lack of examination certificates and my deplorable ignorance of even the Greek alphabet, obviously convinced her that I was a singularly unpromising candidate. Nevertheless she patiently described to my appalled ears the barbed-wire fence of examinations that had to be scaled before an ambitious but totally unqualified young woman could hope to enter Somerville, and, incredible as it must have appeared to her that I did not know it, endeavoured to make me understand the difference between University Responsions and the College Entrance Examination.

  In conclusion, she advised me to take English (then, as now, the ‘woman’s subject’ at Oxford), to exempt myself from Responsions (since I knew no Greek) by means of the Oxford Senior Local, and on no account to try for a scholarship. Finally she left me at the gate with a sheaf of printed regulations in my hands and returned to her companion, probably calculating with some satisfaction that she was never likely to see me again.

  For the greater part of an anguished night, I sat up in my little room at St Hilda’s and puzzled over those documents. My aunt and Miss Heath Jones had already departed; the maiden ladies in whose charge I had been left were, I knew, even more ignorant than myself about women’s colleges, while I was only too well aware that no one either at home or in Buxton would regard those lists of bewildering alternatives with any sentiment more helpful than mystified impatience. More than once I dissolved into angry tears of baffled despair. No one familiar with examination rules has any idea what Arabic and Sanscrit they can appear to an anxious, unsophisticated young candidate whose very chance of success may depend upon her correct interpretation of their complex intricacies.

  As it was, I never grasped from the Somerville data the fact that if I wanted a Degree in some distant and improbable future when Degrees for women were attained, the Oxford Senior would not exempt me from Responsions Greek, and that I would still have to take the subject after I went up. So instead of tackling the easy rudiments of Greek grammar, I set myself the unnecessarily difficult task of reaching a high standard in mathematics - always a weak point - and in Latin, with which I had the merest nodding acquaintance, since it was not included in the regular curriculum at St Monica’s before 1914.

  When at last I went to bed with the dawn, sleep was effectually banished by a return of the black despair that had so often overwhelmed me in Buxton. Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalise so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth - that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every set-back insuperable?

  During that miserable night I fully believed that I had overcome the psychological objections to the life that I so much desired, only to be frustrated by inexperience and academic shortcomings. My slowly relenting father, I felt, must not be asked to finance two sets of coaching for two separate examinations, and even if he could be persuaded to do so, who was there in Buxton capable of preparing me for College Entrance papers?

  These difficulties, and my weakness in Latin and mathematics, meant that it was the dreary Oxford Senior for which I must be coached. Somehow or other I should have to do my best with the Somerville English unaided, although I had no books, no notion of the standard that I ought to reach, no knowledge - since public and High School girls were quite outside the range of my experience - of the probable attainments of my competitors, and no one - for I feared to trouble the magnificent Sir John any further - to whom to turn for advice. Apprehensively I quailed at the prospect of simultaneously preparing, in the Bridge-and-dance dominated atmosphere of Buxton, for two examinations, the Somerville Entrance to be taken in March, and the Oxford Senior in the following July.

  Not until I returned to Buxton, and encountered the cheerful equanimity of Edward, home for the holidays, did I finally resolve, not only to take my chance of success despite unfavourable appearances, but to adopt an even bolder policy than I really thought feasible.

  ‘Why not take the Somerville Schol.?’ demanded Edward, as we were practising tennis strokes against a brick wall in our circumscribed back yard one afternoon. ‘Why stick at the Entrance? You’ve got far more brains than most girls.’

  ‘How do I know I have?’ I inquired, with some reason.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you have! Most of the chaps’ sisters are such idiots . . . Besides, old Marriott wouldn’t have made all that up about your essays. I’d try for the Schol. if I were you, I would really. You won’t get one, of course, but you’ll have a much better chance of getting in than if you take the potty Entrance papers.’

  So at length I decided, in the teeth of the Principal’s sagacious advice, to shoulder the additional burden of the Scholarship examination, partly to spite her obvious and pardonable assumption that I was a complete fool, partly in order to keep Edward’s respect, which I valued, and partly because in those days the difficult thing had a will-o’-the-wisp fascination, luring me, in spite of a great deal of natural timidity, down unfamiliar and alarming roads of experience. I had been rash enough to select the college with the highest standard of scholarship; I might as well be a little more foolish, and attempt to enter it by the most resistant of doors.

  5

  The next few months were an uphill grind enou
gh, but I thoroughly enjoyed them. No longer did my conscience prick me because I omitted to read about gun-running in Ulster, or to study those tentative treaties in the too-inflammable Balkans which so nearly coincided with that curiously ironic ceremony, the opening of the Palace of Peace at the Hague. Even the suffragette movement in which I was so deeply interested became for the time being a mere far-away fable of window-smashings and bomb explosions and damaged pictures in public galleries. To have some real work to do after more than a year of purposeless pottering was like a bracing visit to a cliff-bound coast after lethargic existence on a marshy lowland.

  The mornings I gave to the Scholarship examination, getting up every day at six o’clock and working steadily till lunch-time in a chilly little north-west room, known as ‘the sewing room’, at the back of the house. It was on the ground floor and dark as well as cold, but I was not allowed a fire out of consideration for the maids, though we then kept three and a garden-boy. But I gladly endured my frozen hands and feet in order to obtain the privacy and quiet which none of the living-rooms in ordinary use would have given me.