Marriage, for any woman who considered all its implications both for herself and her contemporaries, could never, I now knew, mean a ‘living happily ever after’; on the contrary it would involve another protracted struggle, a new fight against the tradition which identified wifehood with the imprisoning limitations of a kitchen and four walls, against the prejudices and regulations which still made success in any field more difficult for the married woman than for the spinster, and penalised motherhood by demanding from it the surrender of disinterested intelligence, the sacrifice of that vitalising experience only to be found in the pursuit of an independent profession. But tired as I was of conflict, I felt that I must not shrink from that fight, nor abandon in cowardice the attempt to prove, as no theories could ever satisfactorily prove without examples, that marriage and motherhood need never tame the mind, nor swamp and undermine ability and training, nor trammel and domesticise political perception and social judgment. To-day, as never before, it was urgent for individual women to show that life was enriched, mentally and spiritually as well as physically and socially, by marriage and children; that these experiences rendered the woman who accepted them the more and not the less able to take the world’s pulse, to estimate its tendencies, to play some definite, hard-headed, hard-working part in furthering the constructive ends of a political civilisation.
The demonstration would not, I was well aware, be easy; for me and my contemporaries our old enemies - the Victorian tradition of womanhood, a carefully trained conscience, a sheltered youth, an imperfect education, lost time, blasted years - were still there and always would be; we seemed to be for ever slaying them, and they to be for ever rising again. Yet even these handicaps I no longer resented, for I was ceasing at last to feel bitterness against the obstacles that had impeded for half a lifetime my fight for freedom to work and to create. Dimly I perceived that it was these very handicaps and my struggle against them which had lifted life out of mediocrity, given it glamour, made it worth while; that the individuals from whom destiny demands too much are infinitely more vital than those of whom it asks too little. In one sense I was my war; my war was I; without it I should do nothing and be nothing. If marriage made the whole fight harder, so much the better; it would become part of my war and as this I would face it, and show that, however stubborn any domestic problem, a lasting solution could be found if only men and women would seek it together.
There remained now only the final and acute question of loyalty to the dead; of how far I and the other women of my generation who deliberately accepted a new series of emotional relationships thereby destroyed yet again the men who had once uncomplainingly died for them in the flesh. Up and down the narrow, solitary roads through Regent’s Park, or round and round the proletarian paths of Paddington Recreation Ground, I walked pondering this ultimate uncertainty. In spite of myself and the grief for their unfulfilled lives that no time could diminish, a gulf had stretched between my spirit and theirs; the world in which at the Armistice I seemed to have no part had closed in and absorbed me - or was it, rather, that my own view of my destiny had widened to the dimensions of its needs?
If the dead could come back, I wondered, what would they say to me? Roland - you who wrote in wartime France of ‘another stranger’ - would you think me, because I marry him, forgetful and unfaithful? Edward, Victor, Geoffrey, would you have me only remember you, only dwell in those days that we shared so long ago - or would you wish my life to go on? In spite of the War, which destroyed so much hope, so much beauty, so much promise, life is still here to be lived; so long as I am in the world, how can I ignore the obligation to be part of it, cope with its problems, suffer claims and interruptions? The surge and swell of its movements, its changes, its tendencies, still mould me and the surviving remnant of my generation whether we wish it or not, and no one now living will ever understand so clearly as ourselves, whose lives have been darkened by the universal breakdown of reason in 1914, how completely the future of civilised humanity depends upon the success of our present halting endeavours to control our political and social passions, and to substitute for our destructive impulses the vitalising authority of constructive thought. To rescue mankind from that domination by the irrational which leads to war could surely be a more exultant fight than war itself, a fight capable of enlarging the souls of men and women with the same heightened consciousness of living, and uniting them in one dedicated community whose common purpose transcends the individual. Only the purpose itself would be different, for its achievement would mean, not death, but life.
To look forward, I concluded, and to have courage - the courage of adventure, of challenge, of initiation, as well as the courage of endurance - that was surely part of fidelity. The lover, the brother, the friends whom I had lost, had all in their different ways possessed this courage, and it would not be utterly wasted if only, through those who were left, it could influence the generation, still to be, and convince them that, so long as the spirit of man remained undefeatable, life was worth having and worth giving. If somehow I could make my contemporaries, and especially those who, like myself, had once lost heart, share this belief; if perhaps, too, I could have children, and pass on to them the desire for this courage and the impulse to redeem the tragic mistakes of the generation which gave them birth, then Roland and Edward and Victor and Geoffrey would not have died vainly after all. It was only the past that they had taken to their graves, and with them, although I should always remember, I must let it go.
. . . Under the sway
Of death the past’s enormous disarray
Lies hushed and dark.
So Henley had written: and so, with my eyes on the future, I must now resolve.
12
At last the June weather, golden and benign, had come; the Ruhr was all but free of its invaders, and the days, busy with preparations of a kind that could not be delayed until G.’s return and the final week before our marriage, rushed past with the sudden alarming rapidity of an express train. The planning of a honeymoon in South-Eastern Europe - not Germany this time, I told him; it was too harsh and bitter a country for a newly married husband and wife with their own problems to discuss - involved getting a new passport, even though, with G.’s ready co-operation, I had decided to keep and use my own name after marriage.
‘Really,’ I complained to him, after discovering that all the visas expensively obtained for travelling as a spinster in 1924 would have to be acquired again if I wished to revisit Austria and Hungary as a married woman in 1925, ‘the legal disadvantages of being your mistress would be small compared with those of being your wife.’ But I determined to have my passport made out in my maiden name; and after a brief contest it was, and still is.
We had arranged to spend the first year of our marriage together in America, a new world which would symbolise for me the breaking away from my thraldom to the sorrows of the old. After that some expedient, we both knew, would have to be thought out by which partial residence in England, where my real field of work lay, would be possible for me; an experiment in that type of arrangement which I later described in books and articles as ‘semi-detached marriage’, and which rendered feasible a profession for both partners even when one had a post abroad. To Winifred, in the midst of other plans to round off appropriately the years which had bound me to Oxford by taking my M.A. at a Degree-giving two days before my marriage - an intention in which I had been confirmed by the immediate response of the first family acquaintance to whom I mentioned it: ‘How can you find time to think about a thing like that in the week you’re going to be MARRIED !’ - I outlined schemes and suggestions to which, while making her own plans for a long lecture-tour in South Africa, she listened with a half-amused, half-sad incredulity.
‘Dear Winifred, I shall never be parted from you for very long,’ I mentally insisted, undeterred by her scepticism; ‘I never can be. You represent in my life the same element of tender, undistressing permanence that Edward represented, and in the end, whe
n passion is spent and adventures are over, this is the thing that comes out on top.’
Our wedding-day was fixed for June 27th - the same date on which, ten years earlier, I had gone, untried and young and hopeful, as a new V.A.D. to take my part in the War. I had long intended, if I ever did marry, to go to a register office, but when G. explained to me that civil marriages were not recognised by the Catholic community, a memory suddenly came to me of Sunday mornings early in 1916, when I had knelt grieving beneath the tall, pointed arches of a Catholic church while the half-comprehended music of the Mass drugged my senses with anodyne sweetness. And I thought: ‘We’ll be married at St James’s, Spanish Place, and I’ll carry, not lilies nor white heather, but the tall pink roses with a touch of orange in their colouring and the sweetest scent in the world, that Roland gave me one New Year’s Eve a lifetime ago. When the wedding is over, I’ll give them to Roland’s mother; I know G. will understand why.’
And the letter which crossed the Atlantic agreeing with my plans showed me how truly he had indeed understood. ‘That it is I,’ he wrote, ‘who shall stand there is but the end of a long story.’
On June 16th, when G. was due to arrive home in the Aquitania, I went down to Southampton to meet his boat. It was one of the warmest days of that dry, sunny month, and I dressed myself with particular elegance in a new trousseau garment because he had told me that, in order to save towards our European honeymoon, he intended to travel third class. But I became, quite suddenly, so deeply apprehensive lest the companion whom I had not seen for ten months should prove after all to be a stranger in whose quality I had been mistaken, that Winifred characteristically decided to go with me to Southampton.
‘If he’s just as he was,’ she said, ‘I can easily disappear, but if you find you don’t like him, perhaps it will be useful to have me there.’
Being then unacquainted with the vagaries of Atlantic steam-ships, we took for granted that the probable time of arrival given us the previous day by the Cunard office could be implicitly relied upon, but as our train slid smoothly past the harbour, I saw with a pang of unspeakable disappointment the four scarlet funnels of the Aquitania already towering motionless in the docks. To our dismay we learnt at the station that she had arrived nearly two hours before, but the faint possibility that steerage passengers were disembarked long after their moneyed but completely uninteresting superiors persuaded me to make a hasty expedition to the boat before taking the first train back to London. A sympathetic taxicab driver, grasping our predicament, offered to drive us rapidly to the docks, and we were skidding dizzily round corners and over level crossings when I saw, for the moment stationary on a stretch of line close to the road, a long and impressive train indubitably labelled ‘SOUTHAMPTON-WATERLOO BOAT EXPRESS’.
It was, as I learnt later, the last of the three boat-trains, and there didn’t seem to be much chance of finding G. on it even though he was not one of those elevated beings whose class entitled them to arrive in London at the earliest possible moment. But at least, I thought, I might get to Waterloo by it before he had collected his luggage, and thus mitigate the bewildered distress that he must certainly have felt when I apparently broke, without warning, my promise to meet him. So I ordered the taxi to stop as near to the line as it could go, and the driver, appreciating our change of plan, drew up immediately below the lofty carriages.
Just as we reached it the train began gently to move, and with Winifred propelling me vigorously from behind I scrambled, regardless of the dove-coloured coat-frock and new terra-cotta hat, up the steep step from the dirty siding. Completely ruining my pale sue‘de gloves with the coal-dust on the grimy handle, I opened the nearest door and fell into the corridor, while Winifred, panting at my heels, was herself pushed up by the taxi-driver - to whom, with great presence of mind, she flung a ten-shilling note from the window as we were wafted away. A scandalised porter shouted at us, but I waved my ticket and harbour permit, and as the wheels were now moving quite fast, he relinquished his conscientious endeavour to prevent this unorthodox method of boarding a boat-train. I gave one swift glance round to see that Winifred was safe, and then, climbing desperately over trunks and packing-cases and junctions of carriages, I began a frantic and none too confident search for G.
I was half-way up the train and had almost abandoned hope, when I came upon him in the process, like myself, of exploring the corridor - very tall, very thin, a little dishevelled, and forgetful, in his urgent seeking, of the haughty air worn by young dons who deliberately go steerage. Quite suddenly he saw me and started eagerly forward, his hands outstretched and his face a radiance of recognition beneath his wide-brimmed hat. And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistake; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.
Notes to Introduction
1 Vera Brittain (VB), 28 August-3 September 1933, Chronicle of Friendship. Vera Brittain’s Diary of the Thirties 1932-1939, edited by Alan Bishop, London: Gollancz, 1986, p. 148.
2 The main British reviews of Testament of Youth in 1933 included: N. Mitchison, Week-End Review, 26 August; J. Brophy, Sunday Referee, 27 August; S. Jameson, Yorkshire Post, 28 August; E. Sharp, Manchester Guardian, 29 August; Morning Post, 29 August; Queen, 30 August; Times Literary Supplement, 31 August; J. Agate, Daily Express, 31 August; C. Mackenzie, Daily Mail, 31 August; R. Pippel, Daily Herald, 31 August; P. Hinkson, Time and Tide, 2 September; S. Jameson, The Sunday Times, 3 September; Punch, 6 September; The Listener, 6 September; Church Times, 8 September; R. West, Daily Telegraph, 15 September; New Statesman & Nation, 16 September; M.R. Shaw, The New English Weekly , 12 October.
3 R. L. Duffus. ‘A Revealing Record of the So-Called “Lost Generation”, The New York Times, 15 October 1933. VB’s experiences as a lecturer in the United States are recorded in Thrice a Stranger: New Chapters of Autobiography, London: Gollancz, 1938.
4 Virginia Woolf, 2 September 1933, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, London: The Hogarth Press, 1982, p. 177.
5 Virginia Woolf to VB, 15 June 1934. VB Archive, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
6 Marion Shaw, ‘Alien Experiences: Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain in the Thirties’ in Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After, edited by Keith Williams and Steven Matthews, London: Longman, 1997.
7 VB to Elizabeth Nicholas, 16 October 1961. VB Collection, Somerville College, Oxford.
8 The published version of the diary, Chronicle of Youth. Vera Brittain’s War Diary 1913-1917, edited by Alan Bishop with Terry Smart, London: Gollancz, 1981, reduces the diary’s length by about a half. The original manuscript is in the VB Archive at McMaster University, while a typed transcript of the complete diary is available in the VB Collection at Somerville College, Oxford.
9 VB, Testament of Experience, London: Gollancz, 1957, p. 77.
10 VB to Winifred Holtby, 24 August 1931. Winifred Holtby Archive, Hull Central Library.
11 For the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of Testament of Youth, see Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life, London: Chatto & Windus, 1995; Virago, 2001, especially pp. 236-68.
12 George Catlin to VB, 21 February 1933. VB Archive, McMaster University.
13 Oliver Edwards, ‘The Writer’s War’, The Times, 19 November 1964.
14 See Joyce Ann Wood, ‘Vera Brittain and the VAD Experience. Testing the Popular Image of the Volunteer Nurse’, Ph.D thesis, Department of History, University of South Carolina, 2000. UMI no. 9981306. For a more critical view of VB’s portrayal of the VAD experience see Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women. Identity and Ideology in the First World War, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 3-4.
15
Rebecca West, ‘The Agony of the Human Soul in War’, Daily Telegraph, 15 September 1933.
16 VB, Testament of Youth, p. 12.
17 Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 234-5.
18 VB to Edward Brittain, 8 March 1916, Letters From a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, London: Little, Brown, 1998, p. 242.
19 For finding aids to the VB Archive at McMaster, including details of unpublished works, see McMaster Library Research News, vol. 4, nos. 3, 4 and 5 (1977-79), and the website http://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/findaids/findaids/b/brittain.htm.
20 VB, Verses of a V.A.D., London: Erskine MacDonald, 1918; reprinted with an introduction by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Imperial War Museum, 1995.
21 For the question of Edward Brittain’s sexuality, see Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life, pp. 129-35.
22 A recent account of the publication of ‘disillusioned’ novels and memoirs, which observes that disenchantment with the First World War was mainly literary in character and limited in its impact on other war veterans and the public in general, is Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities, London: Headline, 2001, pp. 5-12.
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