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

by Vera Brittain

  In blessings on your head.

  Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

  But trust Him for His grace;

  Behind a frowning providence

  He hides a smiling face.

  Blind unbelief is sure to err,

  And scan His work in vain;

  God is His own interpreter,

  And He will make it plain.

  For the first time, too, I began to realise that love, in addition to its heights and depths, had also its inconveniences. Thoughts of Roland were certainly not conducive to solid work for Pass Mods.; ‘I may write the better novels some day for a little passionate experience,’ I observed ruefully, ‘but I do not think the inspiration will run in the direction of Latin proses.’

  The prospects of the proses were not improved when there came, in almost his next letter, the exciting suggestion that if I could go back to Oxford for the Easter term via London or Leicester, he would invent an excuse to get a day’s leave from Peterborough and meet me. Instead of giving my mind to Pliny and Plato, I spent the best part of a week in carefully arranging to carry out this plan without arousing suspicion at home.

  Sophisticated present-day girls, free immediately after leaving school to come and go as they wish, or living, as independent professional women, in their own rooms or flats, have no conception of the difficulties under which courtships were conducted by provincial young ladies in 1915. There was no privacy for a boy and girl whose mutual feelings had reached their most delicate and bewildering stage; the whole series of complicated relationships leading from acquaintance to engagement had to be conducted in public or not at all.

  Before the War, the occupations, interests and most private emotions of a young woman living in a small town were supervised from each day’s beginning to its end, and openly discussed in the family circle. Letters were observed and commented on with a lack of compunction only to be prevented by lying in wait for the postman with an assiduity that could not be permanently maintained under a system of four posts a day. The parental habit - then almost universally accepted as ‘correct’ where daughters were concerned - of inquisition into each day’s proceedings made private encounters, even with young men in the same town, almost impossible without a whole series of intrigues and subterfuges which robbed love of all its dignity.

  With men living in other places, unobserved meetings were hardly feasible at all. The shortest railway journey to an unspecified destination for an unrevealed purpose was outside the bounds of possibility. Before I went up to Oxford I had never even spent a day in Manchester without being accompanied by my mother or a reliable Buxton resident. On all my longer journeys I was seen off at the station, had my ticket purchased for me, and was expected to send a telegram home immediately on arrival, the time of which was carefully looked up beforehand. In these requirements my parents were not exceptional; they merely subscribed to a universal middle-class tradition.

  At the beginning of 1915 I was more deeply and ardently in love than I have ever been or am ever likely to be, yet at that time Roland and I had hardly been alone together, and never at all without the constant possibility of observation and interruption. In Buxton our occasional walks had always been taken either through the town in full view of my family’s inquisitive acquaintances, or as one half of a quartette whose other members kept us continually in sight. At Uppingham every conversation that we had was exposed to inspection and facetious remark by schoolmasters or relatives. In London we could only meet under the benevolent but embarrassingly interested eyes of an aunt. Consequently, by the middle of that January, our desire to see one another alone had passed beyond the bounds of toleration.

  In my closely supervised life, a secret visit to London was impossible even en route for Oxford; I knew that I should be seen off by a train which had been discussed for days and, as usual, have my ticket taken for me. But Leicester was a conceivable rendez-vous, for I had been that way before, even though from Buxton the obvious route was via Birmingham. So for my family’s benefit, I invented some objectionable students, likely to travel by Birmingham, whom I wanted to avoid. Roland, in similar mood, wrote that if he could not get leave he would come without it.

  When the morning arrived, my mother decided that I seemed what she called ‘nervy’, and insisted upon accompanying me to Miller’s Dale, the junction at which travellers from Buxton change to the main line. I began in despair to wonder whether she would elect to come with me all the way to Oxford, but I finally escaped without her suspecting that I had any intention other than that of catching the first available train from Leicester. The usual telegram was demanded, but I protested that at Oxford station there was always such a rush for a cab that I couldn’t possibly find time to telegraph until after tea.

  At Leicester, Roland, who had started from Peterborough soon after dawn, was waiting for me with another sheaf of pale pink roses. He looked tired, and said he had had a cold; actually, it was incipient influenza and he ought to have been in bed, but I did not discover this till afterwards.

  To be alone with one another after so much observation was quite overwhelming, and for a time conversation in the Grand Hotel lounge moved somewhat spasmodically. But constraint disappeared when he told me with obvious pride that he had asked his own colonel for permission to interview the colonel of the 5th Norfolks, who were stationed some distance away and were shortly going to the front, with a view to getting a transfer.

  ‘Next time I see the C.O.,’ he announced, ‘I shall tell him the colonel of the 5th was away. I shall say I spent the whole day looking for him - so after lunch I’m coming with you to Oxford.’

  I tried to subdue my leaping joy by a protest about his cold, but as we both knew this to be insincere it was quite ineffective. I only stipulated that when we arrived he must lose me at the station; ‘chap. rules’, even more Victorian than the social code of Buxton, made it inexpedient for a woman student to be seen in Oxford with a young man who was not her brother.

  So we found an empty first-class carriage and travelled together from Leicester to Oxford. It was a queer journey; the memory of its profound unsatisfactoriness remains with me still. I had not realised before that to be alone together would bring, all too quickly, the knowledge that being alone together was not enough. It was an intolerable realisation, for I knew too that death might so easily overtake us before there could be anything more. I was dependent, he had only his pay, and we were both so distressingly young.

  Thus a new constraint arose between us which again made it difficult to talk. We tried to discuss impersonally the places that we wanted to see when it was possible to travel once more; we’d go to Florence together, he said, directly the War was over.

  ‘But,’ I objected - my age-perspective being somewhat different from that of to-day - ‘it wouldn’t be proper until I’m at least thirty.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied persuasively. ‘I’m sure I can arrange for it to be “proper” before you get to that age!’

  And then, somehow, we found ourselves suddenly admitting that each had kept the other’s letters right from the beginning. We were now only a few miles from Oxford, and it was the first real thing that we had said. As we sat together silently watching the crimson sun set over the flooded land, some quality in his nearness became so unbearable that, all unsophisticated as I was, I felt afraid. I tried to explain it to myself afterwards by a familiar quotation: ‘There is no beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’

  When the grey towers slid into view, unsuitably accompanied by the gas-works and the cemetery, I put out my hand to say good-bye. With sudden vehemence he pressed it against his lips, and kept it there until the train stopped. I could not speak any more, but at the station I looked back at him walking forlornly down the platform; as a final irony I had allowed him to send off the telegram saying that I had arrived safely. Later he told me that he had followed me in a hansom to Somerville and had walked up and down outside the circumspect red wal
ls until it was time for his train to leave. He did not say how he had retraced the tedious journey to Peterborough, but he admitted that the prolonged travelling had cost him three days in bed. ‘“Do I still think it was all worth while?” Can you ask?’

  9

  To be once again at college, hearing the Principal congratulate me with unwonted cordiality upon my ‘brilliant performance’ in getting through Responsions Greek in record time, brought me back with a jerk out of my dream to the realisation that examinations still existed and some people still thought they mattered. So I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the Cyropædia and Livy’s Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin. My real life was lived in my letters to Roland, which I began to write the next day as soon as I had unpacked.

  ‘One of the chief joys of college is that the sun sets behind a tall tree opposite my window. I am watching it now and feeling less inclined to make the inevitable plunge into proses and unseens than ever. I feel that with dead yesterday I left reality behind and that unborn to-morrow will only bring concerns of superficial importance. To-day is the aimless intermediate when I cannot think of anything I want to do that is not impossible. I do wonder how I am going to get through this eight weeks.’

  In the end it turned out to be a happier term than the one before. I was no longer working alone, and Roland’s letters came even more frequently, in beautiful handwriting on extremely expensive notepaper, which after eighteen years has neither curled nor yellowed. How curious it seems that letters are so much less vulnerable than their writers! His, even at that stage, were invariably punctilious, and the enforced use of two halfpenny stamps instead of a penny one always perturbed him.

  One day in the early spring, he and Edward simultaneously wrote in great distress to tell me that Victor, who had become a second-lieutenant in a Royal Sussex regiment, was ill - they feared fatally - with cerebro-spinal meningitis. They both got leave and met in Hove, but they were not allowed to see him. Ultimately he recovered, but with much diminished chances of ever going to the front. For some days I shared their suspense. The love between these three was a genuine emotion which the War had deepened, and I tried to drown my grief for their anxiety in a long discussion into which Norah H. and ‘E. F.’ and Theresa and I, labelling ourselves ‘Young Oxford’, plunged one evening on twentieth-century poetry and the spirit of the age.

  We were very much in earnest, and our conclusions, which I wrote down afterwards, may be interesting, for reasons of comparison, to our successors who discuss similar topics, and congratulate themselves on their vast differences from ‘the pre-war girl’:

  ‘(1) The age is intensely introspective, and the younger generation is beginning to protest that supreme interest in one’s self is not sin or self-conscious weakness or to be overcome, but is the essence of progress.

  ‘(2) The trend of the age is towards an abandonment of specialisation and the attainment of versatility - a second Renaissance in fact.

  ‘(3) The age is in great doubt as to what it really wants, but it is abandoning props and using self as the medium of development.

  ‘(4) The poetry of this age lies in its prose - and in much else that I have no time to put down since it is nearly 2 a.m.’

  When my perturbations over Victor were ended, a fresh series arose from the renewal of Roland’s efforts to go to the front. Because of his eyesight, I did not believe that he would succeed, but my cold fear that he might do so made something twist cruelly inside me every time I found a letter from him in my pigeon-hole. He was now stationed at Lowestoft, but seemed to spend more time in the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club writing letters, than in visiting his family.

  ‘Everything here is always the same,’ he told me on February 25th. ‘The same khaki-clad civilians do the same uninspiring things as complacently as ever. They are still surprised that anyone should be mad enough to want to go from this comfort to an unknown discomfort - to a place where men are and do not merely play at being soldiers. I am writing this in front of an open casement window overlooking the sea. The sky is cloudless, and the russet sails of the fishing smacks flame in the sun. It is summer - but it is not war; and I dare not look at it. It only makes me angry with myself for being here - and with the others for being content to be here. When men whom I have once despised as effeminate are being sent back wounded from the front, when nearly everyone I know is either going or has gone, can I think of this with anything but rage and shame?’

  The warm beauty of that early spring, which in France was hastening the preparations for Neuve Chapelle, made me less ready than ever to accept the possibility of his going. I felt, too, vaguely disturbed and irritated by the tranquillity with which elderly Oxford appeared to view the prospect of spring-time death for its young men. The city, like the rest of England, was now plastered with recruiting posters and dons and clerics were still doing their best to justify the War and turn it into England’s Holy Crusade. A pamphlet by Professor Gilbert Murray, called ‘How Can War Ever Be Right?’, had a good sale and was discussed with approval, but the pacifist bias which modified its conclusion that war is occasionally justified was far from appearing in the belligerent utterances of some of his colleagues.

  ‘I think it is harder now the spring days are beginning to come,’ I wrote in reply to Roland’s letter, ‘to keep the thought of war before one’s mind - especially here, where there is always a kind of dreamy spell which makes one feel that nothing poignant and terrible can ever come near. Winter departs so early here’ (I was comparing Oxford with Buxton, where it lasts until May) ‘and during the calm and beautiful days we have had lately it seems so much more appropriate to imagine that you and Edward are actually here enjoying the spring than to think that before long you may be in the trenches fighting men you do not really hate. In the churches in Oxford, where so many of the congregation are soldiers, we are always having it impressed upon us that “the call of our country is the call of God”. Is it? I wish I could feel sure that it was. At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die.’

  At the end of the term, just when I was least expecting it, the blow descended abruptly. During the last week, I had been really ill with a sharp attack of influenza, which the amenities then obtainable at college were not calculated to cure with exceptional speed. At that time, illness among women students was regarded with surprise, and the provisions made for nursing were somewhat elementary. (It was partly owing to the suggestions of Winifred Holtby and myself at a college meeting after the War that a visiting nurse came to be attached to the Somerville staff.) Except in serious cases, the patient was usually isolated from her friends - who could at least have contributed to her comfort - and left to the care of the domestic staff.

  After several days of existing for meal after meal upon the monotonous slops which constituted ‘invalid diet’, and of getting up to wash in a chilly room with a temperature of 103 degrees, I began to feel very weak, and my mother, who was in Folkestone with my father visiting Edward, hurried up to Oxford in alarm. I was thankful to see her, and to be carried off home, three days before the official date for going down, after acting with immense effort the part of the child Victoria in the First Year Play, Stanley Houghton’s The Dear Departed.

  As my temperature was now normal, and I needed only rest and home amenities to compensate for the depressing after-effects of my illness, my mother left me in Buxton and returned to London to join my father. Lying luxuriously in my comfortable bed after a pleasant breakfast, with a sense of agreeable indifference to Press descriptions of the Allied Fleet in the Dardanelles and the more recent incidents of the new submarine blockade, I lazily opened a letter from Roland which had been forwarded from Somerville. Ten minutes after reading it I was dressed and staggering dizzily but frantically about the room, for it told me that he had successfully manœuvred a tran
sfer to the 7th Worcestershire Regiment and was off to the front in ten days’ time. Assuming that I was going down from Oxford at the official end of term, he had asked me to meet him in London, where he was staying for his final leave, to say good-bye.

  As the letter had taken three days to reach me, I fell into a panic of fear that I should miss him altogether. After spending the whole day in writing, telephoning, and tottering down to the town through a sudden spell of bitter cold to send off telegrams, I did endeavour in the few lines that I wrote him that evening to restrain my desperation.

  ‘I was expecting something like it of course but it is none the less of a shock for all that. It is still difficult to realise that the moment has actually come at last when I shall have no peace of mind any more until the War is over. I cannot pretend any longer that I am glad even for your sake, but I suppose I must try to write as calmly as you do - though if it were my own life that were going to be in danger I think I could face the future with more equanimity.’

  My parents returned the next day to find me still feverish and excited. As it would have been ‘incorrect’ for me to go alone to London, and as I was, in any case, still hardly fit to do so, they agreed that Roland, who had telephoned that he could manage it, should come to Buxton for the night. My father, however, did inquire from my mother with well-assumed indignation ‘why on earth Vera was making all this fuss of that youth without a farthing to his name?’