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

by Vera Brittain

  ‘Do you know if my old white satin frock is about anywhere?’ I inquired anxiously of my mother. ‘I have got to try and look like Cathleen Nesbitt as Cleopatra in the scene where she wore white and a feather sticking up on her head.’

  Whenever we felt too tired even to manufacture the ribald witticisms of the Going-Down play, we took it in turns to read Professor A. F. Pollard’s ironic History of England or Lytton Strachey’s newly published Queen Victoria aloud to each other, while the sun sank splendidly behind the willows. These two books still bring back to me the strange, half-waking dream of that summer term, in which I always felt so sleepy and yet could never sleep.

  Some weeks afterwards my young tutor, once optimistic but now regretfully kind, remarked to me of my Schools papers: ‘They represent, I take it, the best you can do when your energy and intellect are at their nadir. I feel sure that for some reason or other the edge of your mind was blunted’ - and perhaps the excuse was as true as any that our compassionate friends make for us when we fail to come up to their expectations. Certainly, as my Finals approached, I began to feel more and more ill and apprehensive; the enormous cumulative tiredness of the past seven years seemed to gather itself up into a crushing weight which lay like a clod upon my brain. The week of the examination itself was a feverish torment, and two of the papers completely annihilated such flickering powers as I still possessed. One of the subjects, Early English History, had always bored me to the limit of impatience. Are Vinagradoff on The Growth of the Manor and J. H. Round on Scutage still the authorities for this remote and difficult period, I wonder, or has some incisive and lucid writer at last let in light on its tangled obscurity? The other subject, Political Science, I was supposed to have studied during the hectic term of my ludicrous little engagement; the ‘γ+’ - a very poor mark - that I received for it was the price of that unbalanced excursion into spurious romance.

  Waiting with Winifred in the Examination Schools for our Viva Voce a month later, after recapitulating the papers in my head for nights on end and dwelling lugubriously upon tutorial expectations, I doubtless looked unduly pale and extinguished, for a benevolent fellow-student who had brought a flask insisted upon fortifying me with a large dose of brandy. I was not accustomed to spirits, and as my name, amongst the women, came first in alphabetical order, I went almost immediately before the examiners feeling very cheerful but completely intoxicated.

  To the benevolent and helpful questions on the Political Science Schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by means of which one of them, Mr G. W. Wakeling, endeavoured to make me redeem my deplorable paper, I replied with confident equanimity that I had never heard of any political scientist later than Hobbes - although I had spent several afternoons with J.-J. Rousseau, and had studied Treitschke and the Testament Politique of Frederick the Great as part of my Special Subject. I saw the faces of the examiners only as an agreeable blur, though I remember the amused smile that spread over the large pale countenance of Professor C. K. Webster as I gave my ridiculous answers, and the saturnine expression of the chairman, Professor H. W. C. Davis, whose alleged conviction that women students were second-rate simpletons who should never have been given Degrees on the same terms as men must certainly have been confirmed by my self-possessed idiocy. I often wondered afterwards if the young university don who had admired my articles in the Oxford Outlook would have maintained his respect for me and my writings had he listened in to that rag-time performance.

  Immediately after the Viva, Winifred and I returned together to Yorkshire, where her parents had taken a house after retiring from their farm. There, a few days later, we learnt that we had both got Seconds - a catastrophe for which I personally ought to have been thankful, since a Third would more accurately have represented the amount of history that I knew. I was never, I think, even within jumping distance of the First of which Somerville had hopefully believed me to be capable, but Winifred came so near to that desirable goal that, under a different chairman of examiners, and in any other but that crowded year in which five hundred undergraduates took History and the usual number of examiners was doubled, she would certainly have reached it. As it was, she was viva-ed for a First for forty-five minutes; and for days the ten examiners carried her papers about with them, unable to make up their minds. After the Viva the anti-feminist chairman gave his casting vote against her, and she still maintains that she lost her First by a facetious remark about the domestic idiosyncrasies of Henry VIII.

  The day after the results came out, my name - the only one beginning with ‘B’ amongst the women - was accidentally omitted from the official list published by The Times, and my mother, who was staying with one of her sisters, had some perturbing speculations to go through before an exchange of telegrams cleared up the mistake. Too disgusted by my failure to get a First to send in a correction to The Times, I had the bitter amusement during the next few days of replying to several letters tactfully condoling with me on having ‘ploughed’. The men and women tutors who had hoped that I might achieve the highest academic honours did not seriously believe that I had not even ‘satisfied the examiners’, but many of them, away on vacation, depended for their information upon The Times, and a good deal of agitated correspondence ensued before everyone interested realised that I was not the heroine of a dramatic débâcle.

  ‘Miss P.,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘sent Miss F. post-haste down to the Schools to see what had happened to me. So I managed to be conspicuous by my absence, at any rate! . . . I specialised too much on European history and diplomacy to be able to be good all round,’ I went on to explain, hoping to mitigate her disappointment. ‘However, I am glad I did specialise as the European history interested me much more and it is what is going to be useful to me in the future and it is after all the future that counts. Firsts are sometimes dangerous because they make you rest on your oars and we shan’t do that now at any rate . . . After all, one’s general reputation and the opinion of half a dozen different people is a better guide than the production of one week’s highly strung nerves! You’ll see!’

  But actually it was a bitter blow, and when I was not writing letters home, I didn’t even pretend to be philosophical.

  12

  Fortunately for Winifred and myself, it did not take us many months to drift into the retrospective, amused detachment with which the average ex-student comes later to regard the results of Schools - so desperately tragic at the time, so completely forgotten within a year by everyone concerned. Our ambitions were not academic, and our Seconds released us from the temptation to make them so which was occassionally offered to us by wellintentioned dons.

  Winifred, for a short time, suffered from a feeling of moral obligation to become a school-teacher which she had inherited from the example-setting traditions of her hostel-forewoman days in the W.A.A.C., but the project soon collapsed before the more congenial notion of sharing a tiny flat with me in London and trying to write, while my own intentions were too long established to be shaken by the most flattering tutorial encouragements to take up research. We succumbed to academic pressure only to the extent of contemplating, for a short time, a joint history-book dealing with the relations between Alexander I of Russia and Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor - a scheme much encouraged by Somerville, which we thankfully abandoned as soon as Professor C. K. Webster, to whom we had naïvely written for advice, reminded us, very gently and kindly, that this was his field and it would hardly be profitable for us to enter into competition.

  Throughout the vacations from Easter, 1920, onwards, the two of us had corresponded regularly on literary projects, planned articles and short stories, and exchanged fragments of dialogue and descriptions intended for Anderby Wold and The Dark Tide. At that time Roland’s father, who took a benevolent interest in the future of us both, helped us considerably with criticism and advice. During my two post-war years at college, he and his family had moved from Keymer and now occupied a small Noah’s Ark of a house in St John’s Wood,
where the undaunted Clare succeeded in combining a good deal of domestic activity with studying at the Slade and teaching drawing and painting at a school in Southwark.

  From time to time Winifred sent me short stories and articles to submit to Roland’s father; humbly and resolutely she struggled with the style which the Dean of Hertford had criticised so adversely, until at last she made of it an instrument of simplicity and beauty seldom forged by those born with a natural facility of expression. One of the first stories that she wrote shocked Roland’s father into a revised conception of the modern realistic young woman; it was called The Amateur, and described the adventures of a vicar’s daughter who took to prostitution in the hope of making £50, but actually received only 2s. 6d.

  ‘Why does one write beastly things?’ she inquired of me with regard to this unvarnished story. ‘I want to write happy, jolly songs and I write “The Dead Man”. I want to write clean, spacious stories like Anderby Wold, and I’ve just finished The Amateur.’

  In spite of his scandalised objection to the theme of Winifred’s story, Roland’s father conscientiously reported to me that ‘she writes well, with pleasantly unexpected little turns of phrase . . . and her psychology is unusually good.’ In my own case both he and Roland’s mother seemed to fear the influence of university traditions and standards. ‘He’s terribly afraid,’ I told Winifred, ‘that I am going to forsake fiction for Academe. Why is it that all my university mentors want me to do research-work at the expense of fiction, and my literary mentors fiction at the expense of history? I wish I hadn’t both tendencies; it makes things so complicated . . . He says I mustn’t forget that fiction is always greater than scholarship because it is entirely creative, whereas scholarship is synthetic. On the other hand one has people like M. [our tutor] urging one on to the ideal of historical truth and the world’s need of more and more enlightenment. How is one to reconcile the two ideals?’

  But as the summer moved on from the Viva Voce into August, the problem appeared less a question of philosophical reconciliation than one of physical and psychological recuperation. Staying for a fortnight with Miss Heath Jones in Cornwall - where I read aloud to her a large selection of the works of Bernard Shaw, including the newly published Back to Methuselah, but otherwise had plenty of time for reminiscent meditation - I realised that the past two years at Oxford were going to take a good deal of getting over; they had meant an effort so great that I had not calculated its cost until it was finished. Not overwork, nor sleepless nights, nor undergraduate journalism, nor Degrees for women, nor domestic crises, nor getting engaged to the wrong person, nor even the prolonged battle with nervous delusions, accounted, in themselves, for that sense of stupendous fatigue; I only knew that at the time of the Armistice I had touched the bottom of a spiritual gulf, and that everything in me that mattered had had to climb out of it or die. Somehow or other I had climbed out of it, and at the age, already, of twenty-seven, having at last ceased to be either a ‘nurse’ or a ‘student’, I was now free - supposing I had sufficient energy left - to begin my career. But had I the energy? After a day’s tortured and unsuccessful endeavour to plan to my own satisfaction a new chapter of The Dark Tide - the theme of which was, appropriately enough, the conquest of ‘that despair which lies waiting to storm the defences of every human soul’ - I wrote to Winifred expressing my doubts.

  She replied at once, urging me not to give up the struggle at the last fence; she had been discussing, she said, examples of my work with her mother, who, regarding herself as ‘the average reader’, had always been one of her own keenest critics.

  ‘Mother thinks you are going to write . . . Any suffering that you have borne, from the really big things down to a Second in Schools . . . is only the penalty to be paid . . . And you don’t pay just in the way of compensation. You pay because you can’t write until you’ve paid. Mother quoted Frances Ridley Havergal, who said to the child trying to write poetry:

  ’Tis not stringing rhymes together—

  With your heart’s blood you must write it,

  Though your cheek grows pale, none knowing.

  So the song becomes worth singing.

  She said . . . you have already paid a high price, and in the end, in life as well as in business, we get our “money’s worth”. It may not lie in a transitory or even a lasting fame; but it will lie in a power that only suffering can give - a courage and understanding and inspiration, that is a greater gift to the world than anything - even greater than joy.’

  Well, I supposed, Winifred might be right; perhaps ‘experience’, hampering as it seemed at present, would count for something in the end, even though its value to one’s work didn’t become apparent for years and years. At any rate, there was nothing left but to make the experiment. Feeling old and tired, as though my life were half done before it was well begun, I must now fight my way into the sceptical, indifferent world of London journalism.

  But before this new battle began in earnest, there came a blessed interval of invigoration and peace.

  13

  At the beginning of September, Winifred and I found ourselves in Milan on the way to Venice. It was the first stage of a six weeks’ holiday together which still remains in my mind as a treasured memory of warmth and beauty and perfect companionship, deepened and intensified by two days of poignant sorrow.

  By the summer of 1921, the fund for going to Italy, which I had begun to save directly after the War, had swollen to satisfactory proportions. I had always meant to spend it, first of all, upon finding and climbing to the mountain-top where Edward was buried; afterwards, I thought, I would look at some of the lovely, vivid towns that he had occasionally mentioned in his letters, and on the way home I could stop at Amiens and visit that other grave in Louvencourt, beside which he had prayed for courage to acquit himself worthily of his friend in the coming battle on the Somme. I knew of no one with whom I would rather share this pilgrimage than Winifred, who had identified herself so closely in imagination with Edward and Roland that they almost seemed to be her dead as well as my own; and as her parents - more enlightened and reasonable than many high-brows for all their agricultural history - felt that six weeks abroad would renew her vitality after the strain and disappointment of our Final Schools, we set out together on the first of many journeys into post-war Europe.

  We did not stay long in Milan, where we wanted only to see Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ on the refectory wall in the Convent of Santa Marie delle Gracie.

  ‘If you really were as Leonardo saw you,’ I thought, looking at the faded, tragic face of the Redeemer with its background of remote blue hills, ‘You’d be able to tell me why Edward died on the Asiago Plateau and yet I’m still left alive to look for his grave.’ But if any answer existed to this question, it was not to be found even in the sad, pictured eyes which looked as though they had seen so far into the depths of human grief and disappointment; and the next day we pushed on to Venice.

  My determination to find the Plateau had been keyed up to ultimate decision by a curious coincidence that had happened just before the Viva.

  ‘What do you think?’ I had written to Winifred on July 12th. ‘Here, in this flat, we have the cross that’s been standing on Edward’s grave in Italy for the last three years. When they wrote to us . . . to ask permission to remove the wooden cross his battalion put up to him, and put the regulation stone one, Mother said of course, but as we couldn’t bear the idea of the battalion’s cross being thrown on some Italian scrap-heap we asked that it should be sent to us. Mother would like to have it put in a church some day . . . or possibly in his old school chapel . . . It’s such a queer feeling to have it here, when it’s been above him all that time . . . I am sorry in a way that they have removed it, but . . . glad I shall see the grave as it is to remain . . . It’s a strange world - where the symbols of people count so much because they’re all one has left.’

  The ultimate destination of the cross was the chapel of Mark XIV., a Toc H hostel
in Manchester, where a Lancashire relative interested in the movement asked our permission to have it erected. But when it came, wrapped up in canvas, to Kensington, it seemed like a message urging me to go at once to Edward’s grave, and the very fact that work had recently been in progress in the Italian cemeteries suggested that those distant battlefields would not, perhaps, be so difficult to locate as I had supposed. So, full of confidence, I went with Winifred to the offices of Thomas Cook & Son in Venice, believing that they would have arranged similar expeditions and be quite familiar with the route to Asiago. To our dismay, they told us that no such request had ever been made to them; they had never heard of the little cemetery called Granezza in the pine-woods, and their vagueness with regard to the exact position of the Plateau seemed almost to equal our own.

  We had only planned to spend four days in Venice; there was no time to get into touch with the Imperial Graves Commission or with ex-officers from the Sherwood Foresters, so we had perforce to accept Cooks’ suggestion that they should wire for information to the proprietor of a small touring club hotel in the village of Bassano, on the edge of the mountains. The proprietor telegraphed back that he knew the way to the battlefields and could supply a car. With only this guarantee, we set off for the day to Bassano upon one of the strangest, saddest and most memorable of all my adventures.

  Sitting side by side in a gondola at five o’clock in the morning, we glided smoothly to the station over the rippling grey silk of the Grand Canal. With melancholy possessiveness I looked upon those enchanted waters, those carven palaces, those fairy lagoons, incredible as a gorgeous mirage in the muffled silence. Edward had died in saving this beauty from the fate of Ypres, yet its luscious magnificence seemed very far removed from the austere integrity of himself and his violin. But remembering the descriptions in his letters, I thought perhaps I should find that in the mountains.