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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  PART I

  Chapter 1 - Forward from Newcastle

  Chapter 2 - Provincial Young-Ladyhood

  Chapter 3 - Oxford versus War

  Chapter 4 - Learning versus Life

  Chapter 5 - Camberwell versus Death

  PART II

  Chapter 6 - ‘When the Vision Dies . . .’

  Chapter 7 - Tawny Island

  Chapter 8 - Between the Sandhills and the Sea

  Chapter 9 - ‘This Loneliest Hour’

  PART III

  Chapter 10 - Survivors Not Wanted

  Chapter 11 - Piping for Peace

  Chapter 12 - ‘Another Stranger’

  Notes to Introduction

  Testament of Youth

  VERA BRITTAIN

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

  First published by Victor Gollancz Limited in 1933

  This edition published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2009

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Mark Bostridge & Timothy Brittain-Catlin,

  Literary Executors of Vera Brittain, 1970

  Preface copyright © Shirley Williams 1978

  Introduction copyright © Mark Bostridge 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

  The right of Vera Brittain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 2978 5914 7

  Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  To

  R.A.L. and E.H.B.

  In Memory

  ‘And some there be, which have no memorial; who are

  perished, as though they had never been; and are

  become as though they had never been born; and their

  children after them. But these were merciful men, whose

  righteousness hath not been forgotten . . . Their bodies

  are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.

  The people will tell of their wisdom, and the

  congregation will shew forth their praise.’

  ECCLESIASTICUS XLIV

  The opening page of chapter 1 from the holograph manuscript of

  Testament of Youth (William Ready Division of Archives and Research

  Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada)

  Introduction

  On 28 August 1933, Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain’s classic memoir of the cataclysmic effect of the First World War on her generation, was published by Gollancz to a generally enthusiastic reception and brisk sales. ‘Oh what a head-cracking week . . .’, Brittain recorded in her diary, after reading the early reviews. ‘Never did I imagine that the Testament would inspire such praise at such length, or provoke - in smaller doses - so much abuse.’1 Lavish praise came from, among others, Rebecca West, Pamela Hinkson, Compton Mackenzie and John Brophy while, in the Sunday Times, Storm Jameson commented that ‘Miss Brittain has written a book which stands alone among books written by women about the war’.2 By the close of publication day, Testament of Youth had sold out its first printing of 3,000 copies, and was well on its way to becoming a bestseller. In Britain, up to the outbreak of the Second World War, it would sell 120,000 copies in twelve impressions. In the United States, where Macmillan published the book in October, and where Brittain was feted on a triumphant lecture-tour in the autumn of 1934, it enjoyed similar success. ‘Of all the personal narratives covering the World War period’, wrote R. L. Duffus in the New York Times, ‘there can surely have been none more honest, more revealing . . . or more heartbreakingly beautiful than this of Vera Brittain’s.’3

  Several of the original reviewers, though, were unnerved by the autobiography’s frankness. James Agate struck a blow for misogyny when he wrote that it reminded him of a woman crying in the street. However, in her diary, Virginia Woolf expressed the more widespread response. Although she mocked Brittain’s story - ‘how she lost lover and brother, and dabbled hands in entrails, and was forever seeing the dead, and eating scraps, and sitting five on one WC’4 - she admitted that the book kept her out of bed until she had finished reading it, and later wrote to Brittain about how much Testament of Youth had interested her.5 Woolf’s interest in the connections that Brittain had ‘lit up’ for her between feminism and pacifism would leave its mark on the novel she was then writing that would eventually become The Years, and even more decisively on the radical analysis of Three Guineas.6

  For Vera Brittain, the publication of Testament of Youth represented the crossing of a personal Rubicon. Approaching forty, she had at last passed from relative obscurity to the literary fame she had dreamed about since childhood, when as a girl she had written five ‘novels’ on waste-cuts from her father’s paper-mill. In the process she had exorcised her ‘brutal, poignant, insistent memories’7 of the war, releasing her deeply felt obligations to her war dead: her fiancé Roland Leighton, shot and fatally wounded at Christmas 1915; her brother Edward, killed in action on the Italian front just months before the Armistice; and her two closest male friends, Victor Richardson, shot through the head and blinded at Arras, who survived for a matter of weeks until June 1917, and Geoffrey Thurlow, killed in an attack on the Scarpe earlier that spring.

  Brittain had been attempting to write about her experiences of the war, during which she had served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse in military hospitals in London, Malta, and close to the front line in France, for more than a decade. In 1922 she had selected and typed sections of the diary she had kept from 1913-1917, and submitted it for a prize offered by a firm of publishers for a personal diary or autobiography.8 It was not chosen, and in the course of the next few years she struggled with several unsuccessful attempts to write her war book as fiction. Having finally settled on the autobiographical form, with the intention of making her story ‘as truthful as history, but as readable as fiction’,9 she subsequently found her progress on the book impeded by all manner of domestic interruptions and tensions. Within weeks of beginning Testament of Youth, in November 1929, Brittain had unexpectedly discovered that she was pregnant with her second child, her daughter Shirley, born the following summer. In 1931, a year after Shirley’s birth, she wrote to her friend Winifred Holtby: ‘My “Testament of Youth”, if only I get the time . . . to do it properly, might be a great book. It is boiling in my mind and I shall become hysterical if I am prevented from getting down to it very much longer . . . If I am to continue sane I must have . . . a) rest from the children & house and b) freedom and suitable circumstances to continue my book’.10

  By the middle of February 1933, she had completed her manuscript, but other problems soon became apparent. In the final stages leading to publication, she was confron
ted by the strong objections of her husband, the political scientist George Catlin, to his own appearance in the book’s last chapter. Catlin scrawled his comments in the margins of the typescript: ‘intolerable’, ‘horrible’, ‘pretty terrible’.11 Believing that his wife’s book would hold him up to ridicule among his academic colleagues - not least, one suspects, because of the account of the continuing importance to her of her intimate friendship with Winifred Holtby - he begged Brittain to make changes to certain passages, and prayed that ‘this spotlight’ would pass swiftly.12 She complied by reducing him to a more shadowy figure in the final draft, though she bitterly regretted that the theme of her post-war resurrection, symbolised by her marriage, had been irretrievably weakened.

  Testament of Youth underwent its own remarkable resurgence in the late seventies, almost a decade after Brittain’s death. Brittain had been heartened by the assessment of Oliver Edwards (nom de plume of Sir William Haley) in The Times in 1964, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, that Testament of Youth was ‘the real war book of the women of England’. 13 However, she had believed in her final years that as a writer she was largely forgotten, and that any future interest in Testament of Youth would be of only a minor kind. She would certainly have been surprised by the extent of the book’s renewed success after it was reissued in 1978 by a feminist publishing house and adapted as a landmark BBC TV drama. Carmen Callil, head of the nascent Virago Press, found herself weeping while reading it on holiday in her native Australia, and back home propelled the book once more to the top of the bestseller lists; while the five-part television adaptation in 1979, with a luminous performance by Cheryl Campbell in the central role, and an intelligent script by Elaine Morgan, introduced Brittain’s story to a wider audience than ever before. It has never been out of print since.

  Today, Testament of Youth is firmly enshrined in the canon of the literature of the First World War. It remains the most eloquent and moving expression of the suffering and bereavement inflicted by the 1914-18 conflict, as well as offering generally reliable testimony of a VAD serving with the British army overseas,14 together with a host of other aspects of the social conditions of the war as experienced by the English middle-classes. Furthermore, in writing her autobiography - or ‘autobiographical study’ as she preferred to call it - Vera Brittain was also contributing a chapter to the wider history of women’s emancipation in England. It has sometimes been overlooked that a little more than a third of Testament of Youth is concerned with Brittain’s account of her wartime experiences. Two chapters of almost a hundred pages precede the beginning of her narrative of the war, which describe Brittain’s attempts to escape the living death of her provincial young ladyhood and her personal struggles for education. Rebecca West saw this as ‘an interesting piece of social history, in its picture of the peculiarly unsatisfying position of women in England before the war’.15 And in the book’s final section, after the declaration of the Armistice in November 1918, and following the granting of the vote to women over thirty in February of that year (an event that passed unnoticed by Brittain at the time because of her absorption in her work as a nurse in France), Testament of Youth returns to feminist themes: to Brittain’s post-war involvement in equal-rights feminism, to her working partnership with her great friend Winifred Holtby and, finally, to her engagement to a survivor of the war generation, and the promise of a marriage that will be defined in feminist terms.

  More insidiously, though, Brittain’s autobiography dramatises a conflict between a pre-war world of ‘rich materialism and tranquil comfort’ and the more liberated society that developed partly as a consequence of the war. Its avoidance of modernist idioms seems to underline this, while the autobiographical figure of Brittain herself embodies a central paradox: that though she proposes a form of egalitarian marriage and other radical reforms, and despite the fact that she envisages herself as a modern woman, she remains at heart a product of her Victorian bourgeois background.

  For an understanding of Testament of Youth in a broader context, the book needs to be viewed as one of the large number of women’s autobiographies and biographical histories published in the twenties and thirties, which attempted to reconstruct and assess the pre-war period and the years between 1914 and 1918. Works like Beatrice Webb’s My Apprenticeship (1926), Ray Strachey’s The Cause (1928), Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Helena Swanwick’s I Have Been Young (1935), adopted what had hitherto been a predominantly masculine form of writing in order to celebrate the achievements of women’s public lives. Vera Brittain, too, was concerned to place on record the unsung contribution of women to the war effort, though, ironically, much of the confidence and assurance of her autobiographical voice emanates from her passionate identification with her young male contemporaries and her experience of living vicariously through them. But in keeping with her fundamental belief in ‘the influence of worldwide events and movements upon the destinies of men and women’,16 she was also anxious to write history in terms of personal life, and to illustrate what she had come to regard as the inextricable connection between the personal and the political.17

  The germ of the idea behind Testament of Youth can be traced back to March 1916, when Vera Brittain wrote to her brother Edward that ‘. . . if the War spares me, it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four . . .’18 (her close friendship with Geoffrey Thurlow, the fifth member of her wartime circle, still lay in the future). The seventeen years between this statement and the appearance of her autobiography saw Brittain produce a bewildering number of fictional versions of her war experiences, some of which are preserved in the vast Brittain archive at McMaster University in Ontario.19 As early as the summer of 1918 - at the time when Brittain’s earliest published utterances about the war, her Verses of a V.A.D.,20 were just appearing - she was close to completing her first war novel. Variously entitled ‘The Pawn of Fate’ or ‘Folly’s Vineyard’, and drawn from her spell as a VAD at Étaples in northern France, it centred on a melodramatic plot involving a senior nursing sister, based on Faith Moulson, the sister in charge of the German ward where Brittain had nursed in 1917.

  Fear of potential libel action led Brittain to put this manuscript aside, and when she returned to plans for a war novel in the early twenties, after the publication of two other works of fiction, The Dark Tide (1923) and Not Without Honour (1924), it was to a more broadly conceived book. The survival of a variety of incomplete novel drafts, together with references in Brittain’s correspondence to several similar projects that appear never to have materialised, indicates the extent of her confusion as to how best to commit her experiences to paper. ‘The Two Islands’ contrasts the ‘sombreness of the Grey Island’ (Britain) with ‘the brightness of the Gold’ (Malta, where Brittain had served 1916-17), but portrays the deepening of the shadow that war cast over both of them. The Roland Leighton character, Lawrence Sinclair, killed at Loos, is little more than a cipher. This is probably because Brittain was still wary of how his family, especially his dominating mother Marie, would react to his appearance in a book by her. However, one of Roland’s characteristics, as a poet, has been transposed to the brother figure, Gabriel, whose loudly proclaimed hatred of women, depicted in his preference for being nursed by male orderlies rather than pretty young VADs, is an extreme version of Brittain’s view of her own brother Edward.21 In ‘The Stranger Son’, another novel from the late twenties, Brittain makes a determined effort to write away from her direct experience through the character of Vincent Harlow who dramatises ‘the clash between the desire to serve one’s country, & the desire to be true to one’s belief that War is wrong’. But with ‘Youth’s Calvary’, she is entrenched in firmly autobiographical territory. Nominally it is still fiction, but surviving chapters show it to be a very close progenitor of Testament of Youth. Yet, without a first-hand narrative, and especially without the first-hand testimony provided by letters and diaries, ‘Youth’s Calvary
’ altogether lacks the vivid immediacy of its famous successor.

  Testament of Youth’s eventual appearance came at the tail-end of the boom in the war literature of disillusionment that began a decade after the Armistice with the publication in 1928 of Edmund Blunden’s autobiography, Undertones of War, and of Siegfried Sassoon’s skilfully fictionalised Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. In 1929 the spate of war books had reached its numerical peak: twenty-nine were published that year, including the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s In Westen nichts Neues as All Quiet on the Western Front, which sold 250,000 copies in its first year, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero.22

  Vera Brittain made a close study of the war books of Blunden, Sassoon, and Graves, and they revived her own hopes of contributing to the genre. ‘I am reading “Undertones of War”’, she wrote at Christmas 1928; ‘grave, dignified, but perfectly simple and straightforward; why shouldn’t I write one like that?’23 Early in 1929 she went with Winifred Holtby to see R.C. Sherriff ’s trench drama, Journey’s End, the theatrical hit of the season; and towards the end of that year, she reviewed Aldington’s Death of a Hero in Time and Tide, finding it to be ‘a devastating indictment of pre-war civilization, with its ignorance, its idiocies and its values even falser than those of today’.24