Later I saw the Principal, of whom I had strangely ceased to be in awe. She was so much less terrifying than most hospital Matrons, so I told her finally that I should not return to college until after the War.
Back at Camberwell, I found a notice pinned to the board in the dining-hall asking for volunteers for foreign service. Now that Roland was irretrievably gone and my decision about Oxford had finally been made, there seemed to be no reason for withholding my name. It was the logical conclusion, I thought, of service in England, though quite a number of V.A.D.s refused to sign because their parents wouldn’t like it, or they were too inexperienced, or had had pneumonia when they were five years old.
Their calm readiness to admit their fears amazed me. Not being composed in even the smallest measure of the stuff of which heroines are made, I was terrified of going abroad - so much publicity was now given to the German submarine campaign that the possibility of being torpedoed was a nightmare to me - but I was even more afraid of acknowledging my cowardice to myself, let alone to others. A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with the persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage; throughout the War I was warding off panic, but so long as I was able to do that, I could put up a fair show of self-control. If once I allowed myself to recognise my fear of foreign service, and especially of submarines, all kinds of alarming things that I had survived quite tolerably - such as Zeppelin raids, and pitch-black slum streets, and being alone in a large hut on night-duty - would become impossible.
So I put down my name on the active service list, and never permitted my conscious self to hear the dastardly prayer of my unconscious that when my orders came they might be for anywhere but a hospital ship or the Mediterranean.
7
The final and worst stage of my refusal to be reconciled to my world after the loss of Roland was precipitated by quite a trivial event.
When the bitter Christmas weeks were over, my parents, for the sake of economy, had moved from the Grand Hotel to a smaller one, where the service was indifferent and the wartime cooking atrocious. As the result of its cold draughtiness, its bad food, and her anxiety over Edward, my mother, in the middle of March, was overcome by an acute species of chill. Believing herself, in sudden panic, to be worse than she was, she wrote begging me to get leave and come down to Brighton and nurse her.
After much difficulty and two or three interviews, I managed to obtain the grudging and sceptical leave of absence granted to V.A.D.s who had sick relatives - always regarded as a form of shirking, since the Army was supposed to be above all but the most vital domestic obligations. When I arrived at the hotel to find that my mother, in more stoical mood, had already struggled out of bed and was in no urgent need of me, I felt that I was perpetrating exactly the deceit of which I had been suspected. Forgetting that parents who had been brought up by their own forbears to regard young women as perpetually at the disposal of husbands or fathers, could hardly be expected to realise that Army discipline - so demonstrably implacable in the case of men - now operated with the same stern rigidity for daughters as for sons, I gave way to an outburst of inconsiderate fury that plunged me back into the depths of despondency from which I had been struggling to climb.
Wretched, remorseful, and still feeling horribly guilty of obtaining leave on false pretences, I stayed in Brighton for the two days that I had demanded. But the episode had pushed my misery to the point of mental crisis, and the first time that I was off duty after returning to Camberwell, I went up to Denmark Hill to try to think out in solitude all the implications of my spasmodic angers, my furious, uncontrolled resentments.
It was a bitter, grey afternoon, and an icy wind drove flurries of snow into my face as I got off the tram and hastened into the hostel. Huddling into a coat in my cheerless cubicle, I watched the snowflakes falling, and wondered how ever I was going to get through the weary remainder of life. I was only at the beginning of my twenties; I might have another forty, perhaps even fifty, years to live. The prospect seemed appalling, and I shuddered with cold and desolation as my numbed fingers wrote in my diary an abject, incoherent confession of self-hatred and despair.
‘I really am becoming quite an impossible person nowadays. I never could have dreamed of the effect Roland’s death would have on me . . . Maybe one day I shall be better for having suffered, when I can get far enough away from his life and death to remember the sweetness of possessing him without the anguish of losing him, to remember the grandeur of his death when the sense of its appalling waste and pitifulness will have grown less acute . . . But at present I really am an abominable person . . . I have a bad character everywhere . . . Perhaps any place I had been in, anything I had been doing, would have had the same effect on me under the circumstances. And I begin to feel that perhaps after all I must accept defeat, and must do something to change my present conditions of life if I am going to have any personality left that is worth having. And yet all the time I know that I am not a horrid person at all inside . . . Will the Recording Angel, I wonder, put down a little to one’s credit for all one meant, and yet failed, to do? . . . The last three months have been dark, confused, nightmare-like - I can barely remember what has happened in them, any more than one can properly remember a terrible illness after it is over. Everything I loved and love, everything I lived for, worked for, prayed for, seems to be slipping away . . . Oh, God ! How unhappy I am!’
In April, with the first termination of my contract, I knew that I should have to decide either to leave the 1st London or to sign on again, and for the next few weeks I worked myself into a nervous frenzy because I could not make up my mind whether to stay at the hospital, or to abandon nursing and take up work at the War Office - where I imagined, quite erroneously, that such intelligence as I possessed would be more appropriately employed. I even went so far as to interview a War Office official, and to take a tiny bedroom in the Bayswater apartment occupied by Clare’s ex-governess.
I had notified the Matron of my intention to leave and had even begun to pack, when I was suddenly overwhelmed by a passionate conviction that to give up the work and the place I hated would be defeat, and that Roland, and whatever in the world stood for Right and Goodness, wanted me to remain at the hospital and go on active service. I was far too deeply immersed in my obsession to speculate even for a second whether Right and Goodness, if personified, were likely to turn from the terrific task of assessing war-guilt to interest themselves in my little difficulty about the hospital and the War Office. Overcome with shame and remorse, I begged the Matron to allow me to withdraw my notice. Tolerant and understanding as always, she permitted me to sign on again, and I dropped limply back into the hospital routine, too much exhausted by the irrational conflict to resent my family’s resigned conclusion that anyone so madly erratic was beyond even protest.
On April 23rd - it was Easter Sunday, and exactly four months after Roland’s death - I went to St Paul’s Cathedral for the morning service, and sat in a side aisle beneath G. F. Watts’s picture of Hagar in the Desert. Her Gethsemane, I thought, had been even darker than that of the Man of Sorrows, who after all knew - or believed - that He was God; she was merely a human being without omnipotence, and a woman too, at the mercy, as were all women to-day, of an agonising, ruthless fate which it seemed she could do nothing to restrain. ‘Watchman, will the night soon pass?’ ran the inscription under the painting, and I wondered how many women in the Cathedral that morning, numbed and bewildered by blow after blow, were asking the self-same question.
‘Will the night soon pass? Will it ever pass? How much longer can I endure it? What will help me to endure it, if endured it must be?’
In a Regent Street tea-shop after the service had ended, I sat over one of the innumerable cups of coffee that we drank during the War in order to get a few moments of privacy, and endeavoured, as earnestly as though humanity itself had entrusted me with the solution of its problems, to discover what was left that
would help. In the small notebook that I always carried with me, I scribbled down some of the conclusions at which, in those weeks of wrestling with unseen enemies, I seemed to have arrived.
‘I know that, come what may, our love will henceforth always be the ruling factor in my life. He is to me the embodiment of that ideal of heroism - that “Heroism in the Abstract” - for which he lived and died, and for which I will strive to live, and if need be, die also.
‘If people say to me, “Why do you do this? It is not necessary, your duty need not take you thus far,” I can only answer that in one way heroism is always unnecessary, in so far as it always lies outside the scope of one’s limited, stereotyped duty. I do not know with how much or how little courage I should face dangers and perils if they came to me - I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.
‘But perhaps - and this is my anchor in the present deep waters - self-knowledge is a surer foundation than self-exaltation, and having reached down to it, the ground which nothing can cut away from under my feet, I may achieve more than in the old days. Perhaps one can never rise to the heights until one has gone right down into the depths - such depths as I have known of late.
‘Perhaps now I shall one day rise, and be worthy of him who in his life both in peace and in war and in his death on the fields of France has shown me “the way more plain”. At any rate, if ever I do face danger and suffering with some measure of his heroism, it will be because I have learnt through him that love is supreme, that love is stronger than death and the fear of death.’
8
Fortunately for the mental balance of average mankind, exalted emotions of this type do not as a rule last very long, but before mine relapsed once more into despondency, respite came from an undignified but not altogether unwelcome source.
So preoccupied had I been with my griefs and problems that I had barely noticed a mild epidemic of German measles which was distributing members of the Camberwell nursing staff round various London fever hospitals. But when Betty went down with it, and a day or two later I awoke to find my arms speckled with red from wrist to elbow, I reported sick at once, and was sent off to a fever hospital in south-west London.
In this elegant institution, thankful for a few days of rest for an aching body and of release from introspective torment for a tired mind, I shared with one other V.A.D. a small ground-floor ward looking out upon a coal-heap. The ‘rest’ was psychological rather than physical, for the loud and continuous noises in the Fever Hospital ran to even greater variety than its infectious diseases. When I had listened for two or three days to the children crying in the next ward, the maids yelling and screaming in the kitchen opposite, coal being carted in the yard outside the window, a piano in a near-by house being execrably thumped from early morning till close upon midnight, the roaring and whistling of trains from the railway a hundred yards distant, an apparatus in an adjacent shed making an incessant sound like a hoarse threshing-machine, and the continual dropping of plates and trays with resounding crashes all over the ground floor, I began to feel acutely sorry for any patients who were seriously ill.
‘I forget if I told you about morning visits here - which are the greatest trial of the day,’ runs a letter written on April 30th to my mother, who by then was in Macclesfield, where she and my father, tired of the tedium of Brighton hotels, had taken a pleasant furnished house before deciding upon a final move. ‘First the Matron comes round, then the house-doctor and then the visiting doctor. They all address you with fatuous, condescending remarks, to which you are expected to make a bright reply. The Matron . . . calls the smell of a rose “a delightful perfume”. The doctors have a very pronounced bedside manner, and talk to you in a half-teasing way as if you were a child - the “Well, how are we to-day?” kind of attitude. To crown everything, on Friday afternoon we were visited by the C. of E. chaplain, a very shy, nervous young man. When he entered, I happened to be sitting up in a chair in my dressing-gown, showing a good deal of mauve-striped pyjama leg. I suppose this frightened him, for he relapsed at once into an embarrassed silence, and the whole of the conversation devolved upon me, while he wriggled in his chair and played with his cassock.’
I had not been allowed to bring my own clothes to the hospital, so as soon as I became convalescent I was presented with a selection of institution garments, and sent to take the air with the other municipal paupers. After getting into a pair of unbleached calico knickers, thick woollen socks, a bulky grey and white striped petticoat, a sage-green flannel blouse, and a huge pleated navy-blue skirt made for an old charlady six times my size, which I had to attach to my voluminous underclothes with half a dozen large safety-pins, I successfully accomplished several perambulations round the scrubby square of hospital grass without my costume disintegrating in the process. I was also permitted to take a bath, with unlocked door, in a bathroom used by patients recovering from various diseases. A dank, stuffy odour prevailed there, and enormous black beetles slithered perpetually in and out of the pipes.
During my three weeks’ captivity, Victor and Geoffrey wrote to me constantly, and sent flowers and fruit which caused some of my fellow-sufferers to christen me ‘the plutocrat of the workhouse table’. Edward, whose experience in the trenches had so far been uneventful, wrote also from Albert, describing the Golden Virgin of the Basilica, which had just been knocked horizontal - still holding the Child with its tiny arms outspread in benediction - by the first enemy bombardment. The French, he told me afterwards, believed that so long as the statue remained on the steeple they would never lose Albert. It actually fell in 1918 as the Germans entered the town.
When they first went to France, wrote Edward, the 11th Sherwood Foresters had been in trenches some distance from Louvencourt, but now they were not far from Roland’s grave. ‘The sun set last night in a red glow over him as I looked from here, giving a sense of the most perfect and enduring peace.’
Three weeks later he wrote to tell me that he had been to Louvencourt. Very carefully he described his journey, knowing how much each detail would mean to me, and drew a little diagram showing the arrangement of the graves in the cemetery.
‘I walked up along the path,’ he concluded, ‘and stood in front of the grave . . . And I took off my cap and prayed to whatever God there may be that I might live to be worthy of the friendship of the man whose grave was before me . . . But I did not stay there long because it was so very clear that he could not come back, and though it may be that he could see me looking at his grave, yet I did not feel that he was there . . . So I went away, and first I went on into the little town; it was crowded with troops and I did not go far and did not find the hospital. There were some Worcesters about but they were not the 7th or 8th; and so I went back the way I had come.’
After the first few days at the Fever Hospital I felt perfectly well, and was kept there only by the length of the infection period. Although, during those noisy, monotonous weeks, I had at last time to read the newspapers, with their perturbing accounts of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, and Townshend’s surrender at Kut, and the first stages of Roger Casement’s progress towards his execution in August, there was still more than enough opportunity for thoughts about the past. At the beginning of May a Times paragraph describing the ceremony on Magdalen Bridge brought back to me the cool, sweet ride through Marston just after dawn a year ago, and all at once the impulse to put what I felt into verse - a new impulse which had recently begun both to fascinate and torment me - sprang up with overwhelming compulsion. Seizing my notebook and a pencil, I retired to the beetle-infested bathroom, which, owing to the persistent loquacity of the V.A.D. who shared my room, was the only place in the building where I could be certain of peace.
Later I polished up the poem, ‘May Morning’, and sent it t
o the Oxford Magazine. It appeared in the next number, and was afterwards included in Verses of a V.A.D.:
The rising sun shone warmly on the tower;
Into the clear pure heaven the hymn aspired,
Piercingly sweet. This was the morning hour
When life awoke with spring’s creative power,
And the old city’s grey to gold was fired.
Silently reverent stood the noisy throng;
Under the bridge the boats in long array
Lay motionless. The choristers’ far song
Faded upon the breeze in echoes long.
Swiftly I left the bridge and rode away.
Straight to a little wood’s green heart I sped,
Where cowslips grew, beneath whose gold withdrawn
The fragrant earth peeped warm and richly red;
All trace of winter’s chilling touch had fled,
And song-birds ushered in the year’s bright morn.
I had met Love not many days before,
And as in blissful mood I listening lay,
None ever had of joy so full a store.
I thought that spring must last for evermore,
For I was young and loved, and it was May.
Now it is May again, and sweetly clear
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 29