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

by Vera Brittain

  ‘Afterwards did a little shopping; bought a cigarette-case and some handkerchiefs. Returned to hotel for dinner and went to station for train about 10.0. Mrs M. very trying, espec. when the only seats we could get turned out to be a second-class carriage and we had to have 8 in it. However we didn’t mind much as we learnt we were crossing from Boulogne instead of Havre, and this was the last night. Night somewhat uncomfortable but slept a little.

  ‘May 27th. - Woke up at 5.0 when train stopped at Amiens. Seething crowd of British and French officers and soldiers, most of them in a trench-state. Thought of Roland, Edward and Geoffrey as having been here; don’t think Victor ever was. Felt very near the War. Left Amiens at last and went through Abbeville and Etaples. Étaples seemed one enormous and very dirty camp; we were much cheered by Tommies in a troop train that we passed, and cheered and waved to by the soldiers in the camps along both sides of the railway. Made me very glad I had elected to be a nurse and remain one, instead of doing something else. Sat outside Boulogne for about 2 hours. Could see it just in front; could easily have got out and walked to it. Got very bored; however we moved at last, got out and had breakfast - a good and pleasant breakfast - at the Hôtel de Louvre (familiar of course to Edward).

  ‘Boat left at 1.0; we were on deck at 12.0 and all had to wear lifebelts. Boat was a leave-boat - mostly officers and nurses but some Tommies; another boat crammed with Tommies followed in our wake. Were escorted by 6 destroyers. Met another transport going towards Boulogne; men all waved to us and cheered. Crossing very good and smooth; seemed a very little way after the many hours I had spent on the sea. Found a pleasant 8th Sherwood Foresters officer to talk to. The white cliffs seemed to appear very quickly; it seemed like a dream to be seeing them again, or else a dream that I had ever left them.

  ‘Soon luggage had to be collected and we were hastened across the gangways. It was Whit-Sunday, the day after the big air-raid at Folkestone, but I saw no traces of it. Great crush at Folkestone Station; only three trains for two boat-loads. Should never have found a seat and my luggage had not two very charming officers, a staff lieutenant and a R.F.A. colonel, helped K. and me. They talked to us hard all the way to London. It seemed very strange to be at Victoria again; same old crowd round barriers, same old tea-rooms, same old everything. One began to believe one hadn’t really been away.’

  Twenty minutes after leaving the two officers - K. and I had tea with them at Victoria, I remember, and we all sentimentally wondered whether we should meet again, which of course we never did - I was standing, a little bewildered, outside my parents’ flat in Kensington. I had never seen the flat before, and because I knew that my mother ran it - incredible thought! - with only one maid, I had expected to find it small and compact. So much overawed was I by the imposing block of buildings, the numerous entrances, the red-carpeted staircase and the lift, and so conscious did I suddenly become of my battered straw hat and dirty, sea-stained uniform, that I quite forgot to impress the elderly porter who took me up to the top floor with the information that I had just returned from service overseas.

  The inside of the flat was as spotlessly immaculate as any dwelling-place that my parents have inhabited, and my mother, though indubitably relieved that I had not been stranded in the Alps or torpedoed in the Channel, was most immediately concerned to dispossess me of the accumulated grime of Malta, Sicily, Italy and France. Supper was not yet ready, so, pausing only to learn that Victor was still alive and still progressing, I threw off my dilapidated garments and jumped into a hot bath, while my mother hurried my holdall and my much-travelled uniform out of the newly decorated flat.

  ‘I thought the best thing was to take them up to the roof - because of fleas,’ she explained.

  I laughed at her, and did not tell her that she had guessed right about the fleas. Two or three had been wandering pertinaciously under my vest ever since the night in Syracuse harbour, and a peculiarly big brown one had walked in circles round my hat all the way from Paris. It was delicious after the bath to slip into clean underclothes, and to appear before my family gorgeously wrapped in the scarlet silk kimono that I had made so perseveringly on night-duty. In spite of six days of dirt and heat, of interrupted uncomfortable nights and two crowded afternoons of sight-seeing of which the mere memory now fills me with exhaustion, I did not really feel tired.

  After supper I settled down luxuriously to smoke - a new habit originally acquired as a means of defence against the insect life in Malta - and to talk to my father about the hazards and adventures of my journey home. My parents took a gratifying pleasure in my assumption of worldly wisdom and the sophistication of the lighted cigarette; after twenty continuous months of Army service I was almost a stranger to them. Sitting before the open French windows of the big drawing-room, I looked out upon the peaceful, darkening square with a sense of unbelievable repose. Between the flats and the turmoil of London lay a long unspoilt area of wooded parkland; the great trees stretched eastwards as far as I could see. Hidden by the cool green of their new spring foliage, innumerable birds twittered softly on their topmost branches. The War with its guns and submarines, its death and grief and cruel mutilations, might have been as innocuous and unreal as time and the smooth, patriotic selections of school history-books had made the Napoleonic campaigns of a century ago.

  That night I slept without thinking or dreaming, but the next day the glamour of scarlet kimonos and idle cigarettes had firmly to be put aside. I had come home for a purpose and must now face up to it.

  14

  The 2nd London General Hospital opened out of a short street in the Chelsea half of the monotonous and dreary buildings which run almost continuously from the public house appropriately known as World’s End to Fulham and Hammersmith. Two schools formed part of the building, and their joint play-grounds made a large open space which held quite comfortably the collection of huts and tents that sprang up wherever a few hundred mangled heroes were gathered together. It was not nearly so big as the 1st London General, and had several wards exclusively devoted to head wounds and eye cases.

  I found Victor in bed in the garden, his pale fingers lethargically exploring a big book of braille. His head was still copiously bandaged, and one brown eye, impotently open, stared glassily into fathomless blackness. If I had not been looking for him I should not have known him; his face seemed to have emptied and diminished until what was visible of it was almost devoid of expression. ‘Hallo, Tah!’ I said, as casually as I could, self-consciously anxious to keep the shock of his appearance out of my voice.

  He did not answer, but stiffened all over like a dog suddenly hearing its master’s call in the distance; the drooping lethargy disappeared, and his mouth curved into the old listening look of half-cynical intelligence. ‘Do you know who it is, Tah?’ I asked him, putting my hand on his.

  ‘Tah!’ he repeated, hesitating, expectant - and then all at once, with a ring of unmistakable joy in his voice, ‘Why - it’s Vera!’

  All that afternoon we sat and talked. The world had closed in around him; he definitely discouraged the description of loveliness that he could no longer see, of activities that he could never again share, and at first seemed interested only in discussing the visits of his friends and the hospital detail of every day. But of his complete rationality there could be no question, and with time and the miraculous adaptability of the blind, the wider outlook would certainly return.

  I saw no trace on that day, nor any of the successive afternoons on which I visited him, of the bitterness that Edward had mentioned; he seemed to have accepted his fate, to have embarked upon the conquest of braille, and to have compared, with a slight bias in favour of the former, the merits of an East End curacy with schoolmastering as a career for a blinded man. Captain Ian Fraser of St Dunstan’s - then also recently blinded - came several times to visit him, and told him of the work that had already been done in making other sightless officers independent and self-supporting. The news of these experiments gradually sti
mulated his own determination, and he was ready, as soon as his curiously obstinate head wound had healed, to divert the energy with which he had made himself into a soldier to the reconstruction of his future.

  I did not see Edward until he appeared on June 1st for a week-end leave. When he did come he was an unfamiliar, frightening Edward, who never smiled nor spoke except about trivial things, who seemed to have nothing to say to me and indeed hardly appeared to notice my return. More than his first weeks in the trenches, more even than the Battle of the Somme, the death of Geoffrey and the blinding of Victor had changed him. Silent, uncommunicative, thrust in upon himself, he sat all day at the piano, improvising plaintive melodies, and playing Elgar’s ‘Lament for the Fallen’.

  Only a week later - the day after a strange early morning shock like an earthquake had shaken southern England with its sinister intimation of the terrific mine-explosion at Messines Ridge - my mother and I went to Chelsea to find the usually cheerful, encouraging Matron with a face grown suddenly grave and personal. There was an unexpected change, she said, in Victor that morning. He had told his nurse that during the night something had ‘clicked’ in his head, like a miniature explosion; since then he had gradually grown vaguer and stranger, and had begun to wander a little . . . She thought that perhaps it would be wise to send for his people.

  We sent for them at once; and later that afternoon, when his father and aunt had come up from Brighton, we returned with them to the hospital. Physically, Victor was there as usual, but the real Victor, no longer restrained by rational probabilities, had meandered off through the grotesque bypaths of delirium. He was quite oblivious of our presence, and when for a moment we turned away from him to talk to his nurse, he plucked the clothes one by one from his bed with gentle deliberation.

  We were sent away while he was tidied up and his bed was remade, and when we came back he seemed once more himself, courteous as ever and apologetic for having been so ‘queer’. Left alone with him for a few moments while the others went to see the Matron and the doctor, I looked down at his quiet, passive paleness with a sense of heavy finality. So much human wreckage had passed through my hands, but this . . . well, this was different.

  ‘Tah - dear Tah!’ I whispered, in sudden pitying anguish, and I took his fingers in mine and caressed and kissed them as though he had been a child. Suddenly strong, he gripped my hand, pressed it against his mouth and kissed it convulsively in return. His fingers, I noticed, were damp, and his lips very cold.

  That night Victor’s relatives stayed with us in Kensington; the doctor had advised them not to risk returning to Sussex. Next day, just before breakfast, his father was summoned to the public telephone on the ground floor of the flats; my parents had not yet had a private telephone installed. The message was from the hospital, to say that Victor had died in the early hours of the morning. The Matron had tried to call us during the night, but could get no reply; apparently the night-porter’s attitude towards his duty was similar to that of my orderly in Malta.

  I still remember that silent, self-imposed breakfast, and the dull stoicism with which we all tried to eat fried bread and bacon. Immediately afterwards we went down to Chelsea; on the way there the aunt and I bought a sheaf of lilies and white roses, for our minds were still too numbed to operate in any but the conventional grooves.

  Victor’s body had already been taken to the mortuary chapel; although the June sunshine outside shone brilliant and cheerful, the tiny place was ice-cold, and grey as a tomb. Indifferently, but with the mechanical decorum of habit, the orderly lifted the sheet from the motionless figure, so familiar, but in its silent unfamiliarity so terrible an indictment of the inept humanity which condemned its own noblest types to such a fate. I had seen death so often . . . and yet I felt that I had never seen it before, for I appeared to be looking at the petrified defencelessness of a child, to whose carven features suffering and experience had once lent the strange illusion of adulthood. With an overwhelming impulse to soften that alien rigidity, I laid my fragrant tribute of roses on the bier, and went quickly away.

  Back at home, the aunt, kind, controlled, too sensitive to the sorrows of others to remember her own, turned to me with an affectionate warmth of intimacy which had not been possible before and would never, we both knew, be possible again.

  ‘My dear, I understand what you meant to do for Victor. I know you’d have married him. I do wish you could have . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I wish I could have,’ but I did not tell her that the husband of my imagination was always Roland, and could never now be Victor. The psychological combats and defeats of the past two years, I thought, no longer mattered to anyone but myself, for death had made them all unsubstantial, as if they had never been. But though speech could be stifled, thought was less easy to tame; I could not cease from dwelling upon the superfluous torture of Victor’s long agony, the cruel waste of his brave efforts at vital readjustment.

  As for myself, I felt that I had been malevolently frustrated in the one serious attempt I had ever made to serve a fellow-creature. Only long afterwards, when time had taught me the limits of my own magnanimity, did I realise that his death had probably saved us both from a relationship of which the serenity might have proved increasingly difficult to maintain, and that I had always been too egotistical, too ambitious, too impatient, to carry through any experiment which depended for its success upon the complete abnegation of individual claims.

  When Victor’s young brother had been sent for from school and the family had gone back to Sussex, I wandered about the flat like a desolate ghost, unable to decide where to go or what to do next. Only when twilight came could I summon sufficient resolution to write to Edward in the dim drawing-room, and to copy into my quotation-book Rupert Brooke’s sonnet ‘Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research’:

  Not with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun,

  We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread

  Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead,

  Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run

  Down some close-covered by-way of the air,

  Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,

  Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find

  Some whispering, ghost-forgotten nook, and there

  Spend in pure converse our eternal day;

  Think each in each, immediately wise;

  Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say

  What this tumultuous body now denies;

  And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;

  And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.

  15

  Five days afterwards Victor was buried at Hove. No place on earth could have been more ironically inappropriate for a military funeral than that secure, residential town, I reflected, as I listened with rebellious anger to the calm voice of the local clergyman intoning the prayers:

  ‘Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thine Eternal Rest to all those who have died for their country, as this our brother hath; and grant that we may so follow his good example that we may be united with him in Thine Everlasting Kingdom.’

  Eternal Rest, I reflected, had been the last thing that Victor wanted; he had told me so himself. But if, thus prematurely, he had to take it, how much I wished that fate had allowed him to lie, with other winners of the Military Cross, in one of the simple graveyards of France. I felt relieved, as I listened to the plaintive sobbing of the ‘Last Post’ rising incongruously from amid the conventional civilian tombstones, that Edward had not been able to come to the funeral. The uncomprehending remoteness of England from the tragic, profound freemasonry of those who accepted death together overseas would have intensified beyond endurance the incommunicable grief which had thrust us apart.

  But when, back in Kensington, I re-read the letter that he had written in reply to mine telling him of Victor’s death, I knew that he had never really changed towards me, and that each of
us represented to the other such consolation as the future still held:

  ‘I suppose it is better to have had such splendid friends as those three were rather than not to have had any particular friends at all, but yet, now that all are gone, it seems that whatever was of value in life has all tumbled down like a house of cards. Yet in Tah’s case I will not, I cannot say that I wished from the bottom of my heart that he should live; I have a horror of blindness, and if I were blinded myself I think I should wish to die . . . I am so very glad that you were near him and saw him so nearly at the end; in a way too I am glad not to have been there; it is good to remember the cheerfulness with which he faced the living of a new life fettered by the greatest misfortune known to man.

  ‘Yes, I do say “Thank God he didn’t have to live it.” We started alone, dear child, and here we are alone again; you find me changed, I expect, more than I find you; that is perhaps the way of Life. But we share a memory which is worth all the rest of the world, and the sun of that memory never sets. And you know that I love you, that I would do anything in the world in my power if you should ask it, and that I am your servant as well as your brother.