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

by Vera Brittain

  It would have been, perhaps, more remarkable than I was then able to perceive if I had been welcome. The few other female rebels from Somerville had nearly all conveniently failed to come back; they had married, or found jobs, or merely become bored at the thought of re-curling themselves into the chrysalis stage of development. Except, the following term, for Winifred Holtby, who had only been down for a year and had not come into direct contact with the War until it was almost over, I was the only woman returning, bringing with me, no doubt - terrifying thought! - the psychological fruit of my embarrassing experiences. During the War the tales of immorality among V.A.D.s, as among W.A.A.C.s, had been consumed with voracious horror by readers at home; who knew in what cesspools of iniquity I had not wallowed? Who could calculate the awful extent to which I might corrupt the morals of my innocent juniors?

  Undoubtedly the Senior Common Room, like other Senior Common Rooms, was nervous. All over Oxford, university and college authorities were quaking in their carpet slippers at the prospective invasion of war-hardened, cynical, sophisticated youth; their attitude vacillated between elaborate preparations against ruthless presumption, and an ostentatious unawareness that there had been a war at all. One undergraduate, an ex-officer with three years’ service and a wound stripe, who returned the same term as myself, told me later that at his first interview the President of his college had addressed him thus: ‘Let me see, Mr X., you’ve been away a long time, I think; a very long time? It’s a pity - a great pity; you’ll have to work very hard to catch up with the others!’

  Those first eight weeks of renewed contact with a once familiar world proved, in many minor ways, to be curiously disconcerting. I found that I had completely forgotten the daily detail of a student’s life; I innocently disregarded - until surprisedly called to order - most of the regulations involved in being in statu pupillari, and could not even recollect the trivial procedure for getting books out of the library. Each person whom I asked for information on these points appeared astonished and almost affronted. ‘Whatever’s come over her, she’s as bad as a fresher!’ their looks seemed to imply. But on the whole I marked time that term, feeling like a ship waiting in harbour before starting out on a new and strenuous voyage to an unknown port.

  3

  Once again, as in 1915, Oxford from Carfax to Summertown was warm and sweet with lilac and wallflowers and may; it seemed unbearable that everything should be exactly the same when all my life was so much changed. Living quietly among the six seniors in the rooms in King Edward Street, I found it easy - and preferable - to avoid contact with the other students, whose very names I hardly knew. Occasionally at lectures I met a girl who was then in her last term, waiting to take her History Finals; I never spoke to her, but I carried away a definite impression of a green scarf, and dark felt hat negligently shading a narrow, brooding face with arrogant nose and stormily reserved blue eyes; it was Margaret Kennedy. One of the seniors in my rooms, Nina Ruffer, an anthropology student with a hard, good mind and an incongruously pale, diffident exterior, was the daughter of Sir Armand Ruffer, the medical chief of the British Red Cross Society in Egypt; he had been drowned in the Mediterranean on the torpedoed Arcadian in the spring of 1917, when I was in Malta, and this link with the War drew Nina and myself together. As the term went on I came to depend more and more upon her eager, intelligent society, for it quickly became clear that some of the more obvious alleviations to memory and nervous fatigue on which I had counted were not to materialise.

  One of the pleasantest recollections of my previous Oxford summer had been, for my athletic disposition, the vigorous games of tennis and the closely fought matches on the green, sunny lawns; I had hoped to take part in them again, but these expectations were hardly of a type to commend themselves warmly to the second-year tennis captain. As I had played for Somerville in 1915 and thus interfered rather inconveniently with the calculations of more recent candidates, I had to be tried for the six although I had never handled a racket since the stolen games in Malta on night-duty. Testing me early in the term before I had had much opportunity to practise, the young captain must have been greatly relieved when I fell far below team standard, and felt - and indeed had - no compulsion to test me a second time at a later stage. In consequence I never again had a first-class game; only the second-rate were prepared to play with the universal stranger whose sudden appearance out of a remote and unknown world was a little embarrassing for everyone, and from that time onwards my tennis steadily descended from bad to execrable.

  Nor, to begin with, did my prospects in the Honours School of Modern History appear much more promising. Fully conscious of my limitations in this unfamiliar field, I had hoped to be allowed, that extra term, to work alone, studying world history in outline, and afterwards fitting modern European history into its place in the story of the world, and English history into the story of Europe. But the rest of the second-year History School were in process of studying Tudors and Stuarts, and for Tudors and Stuarts, detached from their past and their future and completely unrelated to anything whatever in time or space, I had to whip up some kind of enthusiasm. With my conjectural essays on the vicissitudes of these momentous monarchs, I combined a few miscellaneous lectures which were intended to prepare me for the carefully selected period of European history - 1789 to 1878 - that I was to begin the next term. At one of these lectures - the second or third of a course by Mr J. A. R. Marriott on the Eastern Question, to which I had asked to go as much for the sake of old memories as for the purpose of studying nineteenth-century Europe - an incident occurred which I related to my mother in one of the few animated letters of that term:

  ‘Yesterday when at Mr Marriott’s lecture I was sitting near the front, and after it was over and I was putting up my books he came up to me and said: “Don’t I know you? Weren’t you up here before?” So then I explained who I was and what I had been doing away so long. He remembered me perfectly, also that I had been doing English; shook hands, said he was very pleased to see me again and was so glad I was doing History as he was sure it would interest me more. He certainly has a wonderful memory; do you remember him saying he never forgot a face? It was nice of him to come and speak to me too; he is a very great person in Oxford now he is M.P.’

  What a coincidence it seemed, I thought, that he, the person mainly responsible for getting me to college, should be almost the only one to take the slightest interest in my return! The small, human act of recognition warmed my chill stagnation for several days.

  Apart from lectures, and walks with Nina, the suspended existence of that summer was enlivened chiefly by what was, for the university, a most daring innovation, in the form of inter-collegiate debates between the men and the women. Somerville’s programme included debates with New College, Oriel and Queen’s - ‘so we are coming on!’ I told my mother triumphantly - and at each of these I plunged recklessly into speeches as halting and unpractised as my tennis. To the New College debate - on the economic consequences, so far as I remember, of the peace then raging on the Franco-German frontier - came the young rifleman who had spent the previous winter at Mons; he was back in Oxford now, taking up the New College exhibition that he had won in 1914, but I never spoke to him there nor even consciously saw him. If the War had not happened, he and Edward would have been college contemporaries, but the cataclysm of Europe, as I learnt long afterwards, caused each to remain unknown to the other. Even the New College Roll of Honour did not, and does not, contain Edward’s name - presumably because he was never in residence as an undergraduate, though he gave up his university ‘years to be’ as deliberately as any first-year student.

  The ex-rifleman had more time now for writing in the unwieldy manuscript volume that had once weighed down his pack, and a little group of intelligent friends, chosen with unerring judgment, gave him innumerable opportunities of discussing the foundation of a Science of Politics and the future elimination of war, but though he was destined to achieve academic reputation and to
occupy a distinguished position in an American university, limited parental resources and a temperament naturally mystical and religious caused him to live quietly and without notoriety amongst his Oxford contemporaries. Occasionally, in the intervals of endeavouring to maintain himself upon his exhibition, reinforced by scholarships from St Paul’s School and the London County Council, he permitted himself ambitions both more worldly and more romantic than his contemplated plan of becoming a Dominican friar. These led him to read, and become unduly interested in, the poems and controversial articles contributed to the Oxford Chronicle and the Oxford Outlook by a Somerville student who signed herself Vera Brittain. In the hope of meeting her he attended the inter-collegiate debates, but he was too shy to ask her fellow-students to introduce him, and it was not until four years afterwards that she first heard his name.

  The Oxford Outlook was a new undergraduate production of that summer term; it provided self-expression for a group of remarkable young men who believed themselves to be the creators of a post-war university Renaissance, and had begun, amongst numerous other literary activities, the passionate reviewing of each other’s early works. Their names included those of P. H. B. Lyon, the present Headmaster of Rugby; Leslie Hore-Belisha, now Liberal M.P. for Devonport; V. de S. Pinto; P. P. S. Sastri, and Charles Morgan, the author of The Fountain. To the second number of this magazine Charles Morgan contributed a romantic poem, which represented the spirit of the surviving soldier-undergraduate at its most idealistic; it described the miracle of life, the wonder of love and the enhanced value of common possessions for those to whom death no longer beckoned with the urgent insistence of the past four years.

  The founders and editors of the Oxford Outlook were two young Balliol men, N. A. Beechman and Beverley Nichols, the latter a nineteen-year-old Marlburian, who had just returned from serving as secretary to the British Universities Mission to the United States. The presence of so many mature undergraduates provided him with a first-rate background for the professional youth that, with the help of his chubby cheeks and his curly hair, he had already begun to cultivate; I used to think it odd that his rising reputation should be one of the results of the War for Democracy, though it seems less odd to-day. ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War ?’ I would mentally inquire in the words of the familiar poster; and always the experimental answer would come: ‘I made the world safe for Beverley Nichols, my son.’ And then I would reflect, rather remorsefully: ‘That’s too bitter! That’s unfair! It isn’t his fault that he was too young for the War.’

  At any rate, he had manœuvred himself into an influential position in the new Oxford - which seemed more than I, for all the battering of the years, was ever likely to do - so I sent him an article for his Outlook. It was accepted with flattering promptitude, and published in the same number as Charles Morgan’s poem and a characteristic dissertation by the ex-Somervillian, Dorothy L. Sayers, called ‘Eros in Academe’. Isolated, as none of the men were isolated, from contemporaries who had shared the common experiences of wartime, I could not achieve the philosophical appreciations of Charles Morgan; instead I contributed, less loftily and more critically, an analysis of Oxford as seen after four years by a returning woman student, who found in her own colleagues little of the ‘Renaissance’ attitude so noticeable among the men released from death. Nevertheless, I concluded, the ex-war-worker had her special function to perform in the life of the post-war Oxford woman (a reflection with which the rest of Somerville was not, apparently, then inclined to agree):

  ‘The woman student is now in a stage of transition, and this is the conclusion of the whole matter. With the signing of the Armistice she passed from the all-important to the negligible. She has been the slender bridge over which university life has crept from the brilliant superficiality of the years immediately preceding 1914 to the sober but splendid revival of the present. This in itself has led her, if not to exaggerate the value of her own position, at any rate to see it in the wrong perspective. Her sudden relegation to her old corner in the university has shaken her into confusion, but time will prove that she can survive the shock of peace as surely as she has weathered the storms of war.

  ‘Finally, she will both claim and deserve the right to grow out of her corner till, side by side with Oxford’s new manhood, she will inherit that wider future which the university owes both to its living and its dead. And in this gradual renaissance the woman student who felt the claims of war upon her, and departed thence, and after many days came back again, will find her place at last. Because she is the connecting link between the women who remained and the men who have returned, she too will play her own momentous part.’

  Just then, however, the part that I personally was playing seemed anything but momentous, for I was about to complete those inquiries into the excursions of St Paul which had begun in Malta by doing Divinity Moderations (more commonly known as ‘Divvers’, and now abolished). At the end of the term, when the Germans were sinking their fleet in Scapa Flow and Convocation at Oxford was wrangling hotly on the subject of compulsory Greek, I took this belated examination - a feat which had to be accomplished, since my own ‘compulsory Greek’ was now completely forgotten, by learning the translation by heart with the assistance of a ‘crib’ and hoping to recognise the first line of the text on the question-paper. Being more fortunate than the undergraduate who translated ‘δ γέγραϕα, γέγραϕα’ (‘What I have written, I have written’) as ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!’ and ran completely off the rails in consequence, I did not have to take the tedious papers again.

  I went down quite cheerfully, for I had arranged to join Nina at Girton, where a vacation Summer School was being held on ‘Italian History and Art’. During my Malta adventure I had only spent a few hours in Naples and Rome, and I wanted to know more about the country for which - perhaps not untruly - I thought of Edward as having died; already I had begun to save up for a few weeks’ pilgrimage some day to that lovely and sorrowful land which had swallowed up my earliest memories and my last surviving hopes. Meanwhile Girton, incongruously enough, might supply some of the deficiencies of my experience; but when I arrived there a vague message greeted me, to the effect that Nina was ill and could not come. No longer tolerant of the shabby teachers and the gawky youths who had once so much impressed me - was it six years ago or six hundred ? - at a similar Summer School, I fled in shuddering distaste from the shrill, garrulous crowd, and took spontaneous refuge with Mary and Norah, my hospitable friends from 24 General, who lived in a village some twenty miles from Cambridge.

  A day or two later a letter came to say that Nina, who had a weak heart, had died quite suddenly from pneumonia, the result of a chill presumably caught from sitting on damp grass. I pushed the thought of her away and flung myself furiously into Mary’s tennis-parties, for I was sick beyond description of death and loss. But before I left the village to go home, I looked one evening into my bedroom glass and thought, with a sense of incommunicable horror, that I detected in my face the signs of some sinister and peculiar change. A dark shadow seemed to lie across my chin; was I beginning to grow a beard, like a witch? Thereafter my hand began, at regular intervals, to steal towards my face; and it had quite definitely acquired this habit when I went down to Cornwall in the middle of July to spend a fortnight with Hope Milroy and escape the Peace Celebrations.

  4

  My real return to Oxford seemed to come the next term, when I found myself, lost and bewildered, amid a crowd of unfamiliar ex-schoolgirls in a semi-familiar Somerville, which had now been restored, considerably the worse for wear, to its original owners. Nobody knew or appeared to want to know me; one or two stared with half-insolent curiosity at my alien face, and my Classical tutor, though she was no longer responsible for my work, invited me occasionally to tea in her study, but the majority disregarded me completely, and I thanked my seniority and the Principal for the fact that I was living out of college. But now there was no Nina to share the solitude of my cold little room
in Keble Road, and though the term had its humours (it was, I think, this autumn that the Bishop of London, at a special service for women students, told us that we were all destined to become the wives of ‘some good man’ - a polygamous suggestion which delighted Somerville), I spent many hours of it in lonely walks and in ‘cutting’ college dinner.

  On Boar’s Hill, where I wandered alone very often, the cherry-trees were turning to flame against the lowering greyness of the stormy October clouds. Had I actually walked there with Edward when for a few weeks we had both been in Oxford during that first autumn term so long ago, or had he accompanied me only in spirit? With Roland, I knew, I had never been on the Hill, and yet it was as vivid with memories of him as though we had often seen it together. The two of them seemed to fuse in my mind into a kind of composite lost companion, an elusive ghost which embodied all intimacy, all comradeship, all joy, which included everything that was the past and should have been the future. Incessantly I tramped across the Hill, subconsciously pursuing this symbolic figure like a lost spirit seeking for its mate, and one dark afternoon, when I came back from a long walk to a solitary tea, followed by a lonely evening in the chill room at whose door nobody ever knocked, I endeavoured to crystallise the mood of that search in a poem which later, in Oxford Poetry, 1920, I called ‘Boar’s Hill, October 1919’:

  Tall slender beech-trees, whispering, touched with fire,

  Swaying at even beneath a desolate sky;

  Smouldering embers aflame where the clouds hurry by