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

by Vera Brittain

  At the wind’s desire.

  Dark sombre woodlands, rain-drenched by the scattering shower,

  Spindle that quivers and drops its dim berries to earth—

  Mourning, perhaps, as I mourn here alone for the dearth

  Of a happier hour.

  Can you still see them, who always delighted to roam

  Over the Hill where so often together we trod,

  When winds of wild autumn strewed summer’s dead leaves on

  the sod,

  Ere your steps turned home?

  Only occasionally was I driven by loneliness to seek the companionship of students in one of the numerous ‘Years’ to which I did not belong; even less frequently it was thrust upon me, but in neither event did the experiment appear particularly successful. It seemed, indeed, doomed with unusual certainty to failure in the case of the girl with whom I had to share my coachings in modern European history with the Dean of Hertford College. Miss Holtby, my tutor told me, was anxious, like myself, to study the nineteenth century; she had also been down from college for a year serving in the W.A.A.C., so perhaps that too would form a link between us. Quite sure that it would not, and wishing that I could have had the Dean to myself, I sauntered lugubriously down to Hertford, where I was to meet both him and this stranger towards whom I felt so unaccountably antagonistic.

  At Hertford I found the Dean waiting for me; I had some confidence in the prospect of his teaching, for I had attended his lectures the previous term on ‘Nationality and Self-Determination’, and though I had hardly understood a word of them, their dynamic picturesqueness had lighted one or two minute candles of interest in the dark chaos of ignorance and confusion that called itself my mind. The unknown ex-W.A.A.C. had not arrived, so we sat on either side of the Dean’s hearth and waited for her, he puffing at a pipe and wearing carpet slippers. I had a bad cold, caught the previous week while seeing Hope Milroy off to India; my last friend, my final contact with the War, and all that it meant, had vanished into space, I reflected, and my much-enduring nose was indubitably turning red from the heat of the fire. I certainly did not feel as though I were awaiting so much of my destiny.

  I was staring gloomily at the Oxford engravings and photographs of the Dolomites which clustered together so companionably upon the Dean’s study wall, when Winifred Holtby burst suddenly in upon this morose atmosphere of ruminant lethargy. Superbly tall, and vigorous as the young Diana with her long straight limbs and her golden hair, her vitality smote with the effect of a blow upon my jaded nerves. Only too well aware that I had lost that youth and energy for ever, I found myself furiously resenting its possessor. Obstinately disregarding the strong-featured, sensitive face and the eager, shining blue eyes, I felt quite triumphant because - having returned from France less than a month before - she didn’t appear to have read any of the books which the Dean had suggested as indispensable introductions to our Period.

  He ‘put her off’, she told me long afterwards, for he had been in the War and looked like a colonel, and she expected him to treat her as all colonels treated all W.A.A.C.s, who weren’t supposed to be ladies. Not, she explained, that she pretended to be a lady; she was accustomed good-humouredly to boast that, as a prospective journalist, she had a great advantage over me because she was a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter, whereas I, a descendant of the Staffordshire bourgeoisie, was merely ‘genteel’.

  In the autumn of 1919, however, the social and intellectual differences between agriculture and industry contributed less towards thrusting Winifred and myself apart than the sanguinary drama of the French Revolution. For some obscure reason, the Dean approved of my essays, and at our joint coachings I sat, doubtless with an exasperatingly superior air, and listened while he, with no more intuitive vision of Winifred’s distinguished future as novelist and journalist than I had insight into the essential nobility of her generous spirit, proclaimed her style laborious, her sentences involved, her subject-matter confused and her spelling abominable. When the end of the term came, I was able to write triumphantly home of a really stimulating report from the Dean - and took care to add, with patronising blindness, that ‘he didn’t give a bit of a good report to the girl I coach with, and yet she always strikes me as being quite good.’

  5

  That Michaelmas saw the birth of a new Somerville debating society, which organised periodic discussions on topical subjects, and about the middle of the term, Winifred, as its secretary, invited me to propose the motion ‘That four years’ travel are a better education than four years at a university’. It was a subject upon which, in my hostile isolation, I felt able to express myself with vehemence; university life, it now seemed to me, conduced neither to adult manners nor mature values, and I agreed to do as she asked.

  I revive this incident, of which I have already given a substantially correct version in my novel The Dark Tide, only because it illustrates so clearly the many possibilities of acute misunderstanding which embittered the relations of the War generation and its immediate juniors - a type of misunderstanding that is perhaps inevitable whenever one group has been through some profound experience which another has missed. That Winifred and I, for example, could have been so completely at cross purposes as we were that evening seems to me now quite incredible, yet even though its ultimate consequences were to prove my redemption from the lethargy of post-war despair, the memory of that debate is still able to reawaken the bitter sense of having outlived my day which possessed me when it was over. For years I believed that it had been deliberately planned with a view to my humiliation; to-day it seems to me far more probable that the whole situation developed spontaneously and unintentionally, though it was of course rooted in the fundamental antagonism which persists to this day between those who suffered deeply from the War, and the others who escaped its most violent impacts.

  When the evening came I made what I had already described to my mother as ‘a most revolutionary speech, ardently supporting travel and . . . attacking the university’. Undoubtedly it turned into a sharper criticism of academic limitations than I had really intended, coupled with a recommendation - which I was far from feeling - of ‘experience’ as worth more than anything else, including its own heavy cost. In dialectical retaliation, Winifred’s speech, which was one of the first on the opposition side, eagerly defended her young comrades against that ‘superiority’ in myself which led me, she believed, to disdain their society; many of them, she knew, envied me for ‘adventures’ of which they felt themselves deprived, while I, on the other hand, had long ceased to imagine that anyone in their senses could really covet war-work and war-experience. Her witty indictment provided a trenchant foretaste of those qualities for which, in after years, her addresses were to be so much in demand at public meetings, and concluded with a quotation from As You Like It which appropriately indicated the depressing effect of my superfluous presence upon my fellow-students: ‘I had rather have a fool to make me merry, than experience to make me sad; and to travel for it, too!’

  This speech was followed by several others which, because they lacked Winifred’s poise and wit, made the numerous claims to imaginary war-work which were put forward in a very fair imitation of my own manner less amusing - at any rate to myself - than their makers intended, for though my youthful critics were perhaps a little crude and unimaginative, they were certainly not sadistic by nature. I didn’t really care what they said or thought, my pride insisted, as the voting went unanimously against me and I watched the crowd of my opposers go triumphantly from the hall, but afterwards, alone in my cheerless lodging, I realised that I had minded dreadfully. Too miserable to light the fire or even to get into bed, I lay on the cold floor and wept with childish abandonment.

  ‘Why couldn’t I have died in the War with the others?’ I lamented, uncertain whom I detested most, myself, or the exultant debaters. ‘Why couldn’t a torpedo have finished me, or an aerial bomb, or one of those annoying illnesses? I’m nothing but a piece of wartime wreckage,
living on ingloriously in a world that doesn’t want me!’

  Obviously it wasn’t a popular thing to have been close to the War; patriots, especially of the female variety, were as much discredited in 1919 as in 1914 they had been honoured, I reflected, making no effort to shut out the series of pictures that passed insistently through my mind - the dark, blurred spire of a Camberwell church at midnight - the Britannic lurching drunkenly through the golden, treacherous Archipelago - sun-drenched rocks and a telegram on a gorgeous May morning - Syracuse harbour and the plaintive notes of the ‘Last Post’ testifying to heaven of the ravage of a storm - the German ward and the sharp grey features of a harmless little ‘enemy’ dying in the sticky morass of his own blood - the Great Push and a gassed procession of burned, gruesome faces - the long stone corridor of St Jude’s where walked a ghost too dazed to feel the full fury of her own resentment - Millbank and the shattering guns announcing the Armistice. On the whole the ‘experience’ of those four years didn’t seem exactly conducive to the development of a sense of humour - but perhaps I was prejudiced. No doubt the post-war generation was wise in its assumption that patriotism had ‘nothing to it’, and we pre-war lot were just poor boobs for letting ourselves be kidded into thinking that it had. The smashing-up of one’s youth seemed rather a heavy price to pay for making the mistake, but fools always did come in for a worse punishment than knaves; we knew that now.

  Some time or other during the next few days, I wrote the poem entitled ‘The Lament of the Demobilised’ which Louis Golding, in his Oxford Chronicle review of Oxford Poetry, 1920, afterwards remarked might have been produced ‘by Godfrey Elton out of Siegfried Sassoon’. But even those angry lines did not eradicate the resentment from my system, and on the Sunday evening after the debate I went to see Winifred, whom, as secretary of the Debating Society, I regarded as technically, if not actually, responsible for the bitter episode. I even took the precaution of making an appointment, for she was so popular that, although she was only just twenty-one, her room was always thronged with impetuous young creatures demanding sympathy and advice for their hopes and problems. Finding her alone, puzzled and a little perturbed by my visit, I reminded her of the debate, and then gave her a résumé of those ‘experiences’ which, all unknowing, my fellow-students seemed to me to have derided with so little compunction.

  ‘If you’re going to make the proposer’s chair a stool of repentance for people whose histories you know nothing about,’ I concluded, with harsh intolerance, ‘you’d much better abolish your debating society before it does any more harm.’

  It never occurred to me that I was being either severe or ridiculous; not until weeks later did I learn that Winifred, like myself, had known that via dolorosa, the road to Camiers, and had lived beside the same historic railway-line, and heard the same rattling engines go shrieking through the night. The War had not been for her, as for most of the others, a calamity as impersonal as a storm rumbling in the distance; within her memory lived the authentic recollection of the Base in the last and most anxious year of the fighting - a recollection which took shape only in 1931, when after a night journey back to London from the Riviera she published in Time and Tide her poem ‘Trains in France’:

  All through the night among the unseen hills

  The trains,

  The fire-eyed trains,

  Call to each other their wild seeking cry,

  And I,

  Who thought I had forgotten all the War

  Remember now a night in Camiers,

  When, through the darkness, as I wakeful lay,

  I heard the trains,

  The savage, shrieking trains,

  Call to each other their fierce hunting-cry,

  Ruthless, inevitable, as the beasts

  After their prey.

  Made for this end by their creators, they,

  Whose business was to capture and devour

  Flesh of our flesh, bone of our very bone.

  Hour after hour,

  Angry and impotent I lay alone

  Hearing them hunt you down, my dear, and you,

  Hearing them carry you away to die,

  Trying to warn you of the beasts, the beasts!

  Then, no, thought I;

  So foul a dream as this cannot be true,

  And calmed myself, hearing their cry no more.

  Till, from the silence, broke a trembling roar,

  And I heard, far away,

  The growling thunder of their joyless feasts—

  The beasts had got you then, the beasts, the beasts—

  And knew

  The nightmare true.

  That Sunday evening, however, trains in France were merely, for Winifred, a distant echo, while the wrathful presence of their self-constituted representative was all too verbally apparent. I have often amusedly thought how profoundly, that evening, she must have disliked me, with my absurd conviction of her malicious intentions, but she received my complaint with determined charity, murmured a few words of bewildered regret, and afterwards made the Debating Society president send me an ‘official’ apology. To the president, a serious, preoccupied Greats student, the attacks of the opposers had represented nothing more than ‘a little mild chaff ’; my insistent memories would not allow me to think of them as that, but I eventually accepted her assurance that my hurt had been ‘unintentional’.

  Nevertheless, I did not forget the debate, for it had taught me a salutary lesson. In the eyes of these realistic ex-High-School girls, who had sat out the War in classrooms, I was now aware that I represented neither a respect-worthy volunteer in a national cause nor a surviving victim of history’s cruellest catastrophe; I was merely a figure of fun, ludicrously boasting of her experiences in an already démodé conflict. I had been, I suspected, largely to blame for my own isolation. I could not throw off the War, nor the pride and the grief of it; rooted and immersed in memory, I had appeared self-absorbed, contemptuous and ‘stand-offish’ to my ruthless and critical juniors.

  ‘That’s the worst of sorrow,’ I decided, with less surprise than I had accepted the same conclusion after Roland’s death. ‘It’s always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one - and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.’

  After that, until I left college, I never publicly mentioned the War again.

  6

  Except at coachings I saw no more of Winifred Holtby that term, and during the vacation I completely forgot her, for my father nearly died from an operation suddenly rendered necessary by the unsuccessful experiments of the Staffordshire surgeons with his appendix a quarter of a century before. This new disaster not only effectually prevented me from noticing either the fresh epidemic of outrages in Ireland or the introduction of Prohibition into the United States, but rendered almost impossible the requisite concentration upon the Congress of Vienna or J. H. Round’s exacting volume on the economics of the reign of Stephen, Geoffrey de Mandeville.

  Thus sadly unprepared either mentally or physically for the icy rigours of the Easter term, I succumbed almost immediately to a chill, and was lying mournfully in bed one afternoon in my desolate room when Winifred appeared quite suddenly, laid a bunch of grapes beside me, and immediately vanished. But she came back the next day, and to our mutual astonishment we found ourselves discussing her camps at Abbeville and Camiers, and the plot of her projected story of a Yorkshire farm which afterwards became her first novel, Anderby Wold. As soon as I was better she took me over to tea in her room, and introduced me to her friend Hilda Reid, the pale, whimsical second-year student who has since become, as H. S. Reid, the author of exquisite historical novels, delicately etched with the fine pen of a literary drypoint artist.

  After the interminable loneliness of the previous months, I felt like an icicle beginning to melt in the gathering warmth of the pale spring sunshine. My work, too, suddenly seemed more promising; encouraging
whispers began to circulate that, even in History, I was a possible First, and though, as I admitted to my father, ‘Sometimes I get a great desire to go on the bust - one has to be so terribly respectable and economical as a woman student!’, I was also able to inform him proudly that, after my change of ‘coaches’ at the end of the term, ‘I am going to all the best people . . . The Master of Balliol is one; it is supposed to be a great privilege even for a man to go to him. One would never think so either, as he is a funny-looking old ruffian of about seventy with wild tufts of grey hair and a sense of humour.’ Winifred and I actually had a coaching from the Master - then Dr A. L. Smith - on his seventieth birthday the following Michaelmas term. Twirling round and round on a swivel chair, he shook contemptuously the first of our long, earnest essays, and muttering, ‘I don’t want pamphlets!’ forbade us to waste any more of his time with our literary efforts.

  During the remainder of the Easter term, I found Winifred’s large first-floor room in the West Building at Somerville a pleasant alternative to Keble Road. Accompanied by Hilda Reid, we went to see the O.U.D.S. performance of Hardy’s The Dynasts, and decided to spend part of the vacation together at rooms in Holywell, reading at the Radcliffe Camera. With this arrangement, though I realised it only dimly at the time, my personal life was renewed.

  The friendship into which, from such ironically inauspicious beginnings, I had drifted with Winifred Holtby began an association that in thirteen years has never been broken and never spoilt, and to-day remains as intimate as ever. Although I am still, comparatively speaking, a young woman, I feel, looking back upon the past, that it has been immeasurably long, for in the twenty years that have vanished since I left school, I have had - like many, I suspect, of my War generation contemporaries - two quite separate lives, two sets of circumstances and of personal relationships.