Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (12 page)

To the inhabitants of Buxton, my preoccupation with Goldsmith and Wordsworth and Unseen Translations seemed quite as unnatural as it could possibly appear to any present-day reader. No sooner had the bare mention of Oxford penetrated, at third or fourth remove, the astonished and affronted ears of my mother’s calling acquaintances, than rumour began to run wildly round the town.

‘Have you heard? Vera Brittain’s going to be a lecturer!’

Doubtful as I was even of my ability to fulfil with success the humble role of student that I had chosen, I found these extravagant inaccuracies of gossip both ludicrous and exasperating. Strange as it now seems, I was then far more deeply impressed by the superb remoteness, the godlike superiority of lecturers, than by the achievements of even the most famous of authors. I was accustomed to regard myself as destined - dimly, of course, and very distantly - to play some kind of star-turn in a paradisiacal Fleet Street, entirely vague in its details though splendidly Elysian in its glamour; but to stand on a platform like Sir John Marriott and harangue a breathlessly expectant audience seemed to me an utterly unattainable height of courage and power. Had I been able to look into the future and see myself finding platforms accessible long before editors and publishers ceased to be impervious, I should have believed myself destined to die in the interval and waken again to quite another life. And such a fate was perhaps, after all, not so different from the one that actually befell me.

Whatever their respective merits in the eyes of Omniscience, writers and lecturers and university women were all equally unnatural to the censorious Buxton ladies, and equally obnoxious. Had I possessed a gift for drawing and wanted to study in Paris; had I been, like Edward, a potential musician, and contemplated a career beginning at the Royal College of Music and continuing in Dresden or Leipzig, my parents’ acquaintances would probably have thought me interesting and even wonderful. But so unpopular at that time was the blue-stocking tradition, and so fathomless the depth of provincial self-satisfaction, that my decision to go to an English town to study the literature of my own language caused me to be labelled ‘ridiculous’, ‘eccentric’, and ‘a strong-minded woman’.

For a few weeks my mother had quite a bad time at the G.F.S. teas and Mothers’ Union meetings which she was then accustomed to attend. On these occasions she was invariably tackled by one or two stalwart middle-class mothers who did not hesitate to tell her how deplorable they thought my future plans, and to identify her acquiescence in them with her abandonment of all hope of finding me a husband. ‘How
can
you send your daughter to college, Mrs Brittain!’ moaned one lugubrious lady. ‘Don’t you want her ever to get
married
?’

But as soon as the initial ferment had died down, our feminine neighbours promptly ceased to take my examinations seriously at all. For the rest of that winter I was bombarded as usual with infuriating requests to help with jumble sales, ‘wait’ at bazaar teas, play in amateur theatricals, and take the place of tiresome individuals who had fallen out at Bridge. Girls who now, as a matter of course, prepare themselves for college in the comparatively peaceful seclusion of school, have no idea how strenuously each uninterrupted hour had to be fought for in the restless, critical, busy-busy atmosphere of a pre-war provincial town.

The month of the Somerville examination, March 1914, came far too quickly for the progress of my much-disturbed solitary studies. The journey to Oxford and the four hectic days that I spent there represented, I know, an immense experience at the time, but all that I can now remember of them is my alarmed impression of the imperturbable brilliance of my fellow-competitors - roughly a hundred for about twenty vacancies - and the bitter, paralysing cold of the little ground-floor room assigned to me in the west wing of the college.

I know of no place where the wind can be so icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter-time. On my first intimidating night, the longing to thaw my stiff fingers tempted me to abandon even a frantic last-minute revision for that prolonged struggle to light a fire with which every Somerville student is familiar. My efforts were, of course, unavailing; the Oxford women’s colleges have never had the means to afford the best drawing-room nuggets, and my previous experience with good Midland coal had not endowed me with the skill that I later acquired in wresting warmth out of a mass of dust, a few damp sticks, and some nobbly chunks of slate.

As Somerville did not then run to a large supply of hot baths - though I should have been too shy to appropriate one if it had - I spent the night in a shivering stupor, kept wretchedly awake by the misery of my frozen feet and the periodic clamour of unfamiliar bells. Consequently my first paper the next morning plunged me at once into panic, in which condition I sat for an hour without writing a word, desperately clasping and unclasping my hands under the table, and inwardly resolving that the moment we were permitted to leave the room, I would tell the Principal that I was returning home at once.

The subsequent course of my entire future probably depended upon the mere chance that something - perhaps my guardian angel, perhaps nothing more romantic than the warmth gradually restored to my icy limbs by the stuffiness of the lecture-room in which we were working - suddenly made me decide to ‘stick out’ the ordeal for which I had prepared at such cost of combat and exasperation, and to make the best of the job that had begun so badly. So, frantically seizing my pen, I started to write; any nonsense, I felt, was better than the blank sheets that would so forlornly typify my failure of imagination and courage.

All through the days of the examination, in spite of the three or four quickly-made friends with whom between papers I ate large teas in the town, I felt an unadapted alien to an extent that privately filled me with shame, and remember still the ludicrous shock from which I suffered after first meeting two or three of my terrifying competitors from East End or north-country High Schools. Probably no other girl who came up to take the Somerville Scholarship papers in 1914 had been reared to be quite such a sensitive plant as myself, or so securely sheltered in the greenhouse warmth of bourgeois comfort and provincial elegance. My mother’s conscientious standards of cooking and cleanliness were, and are, about the most exacting that I have ever encountered, while at St Monica’s, with its tasteful decorations and gracious garden, its appetising meals and large staff of servants, its limited number of fashionable pupils from homes far wealthier than my own, a still higher level of luxury had been taken for granted.

Until I spent those four days at Somerville in that freezing March, I had unthinkingly assumed that women’s colleges were much the same as men’s; Virginia Woolf had not then written
A Room of One’s Own
to emphasise the sad difference between iced pudding and prunes and custard. It had never consciously occurred to me that, in nine households out of ten, linen sheets and hot and cold water and thickly carpeted floors were unattainable ambitions rather than the accepted facts of everyday life, nor that, by much more than half mankind, gristly mutton, boiled potatoes and tepid rice pudding would be considered an ample and even a luxurious diet. Still less had I realised that girls from homes far more genuinely cultured than mine could speak in accents as thick as a London fog, or wear ill-fitting, shabby clothes which compared unfavourably with the maids’ Sunday reach-me-downs purchased from the pegs of the Buxton drapers.

When, on my first evening at Somerville, I stood timidly at the door of the big dining-hall, heard the shrill clamour of feminine accents from every geographical area, noticed the long-sleeved dowdiness of dinner frocks, and shuddered to see the homely food and piles of emptied soup-plates in the hatches, a suddenly sinking heart threatened me with the fear that even if I succeeded in getting to college, I should never be able to endure it. It required all my ambition, and all my touching belief that I was a natural democrat filled with an overwhelming love of humanity, to persuade me that I had never really felt the snobbish revulsion against rough-and-readiness which my specialised upbringing had made inevitable.

There is an unduly optimistic proverb which declares that God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. My subsequent history was hardly to justify such naïve faith in the Deity, but on this first occasion Providence at least let me down gently by giving me a year at college before pitchforking me, a willing victim, into the crudities of Army service.

I had hardly been at home for a week when a letter from the Principal informed me that I had been awarded a college exhibition, to take effect the following autumn if I passed the Oxford Senior in July. Neither I nor my astonished parents, who had never seriously believed that my inconvenient eccentricities could possibly have any sound cash value, took in the contents of her brief note until we had each read it several times. Even now I do not really understand how it happened that my amateur, untutored efforts, in competition with the carefully trained sophistication of a hundred other young women from High Schools and provincial universities, succeeded in winning one of the few prizes that the college had to offer. I can only conclude that a sudden weariness of Sixth Form cocksureness must have seized the Somerville judges, or that some hopeful quality in my wild essay (on the well-worn theme that ‘History is the Biography of Great Men’) atoned by its unexpectedness for the obvious lack of information displayed in the subjects that I was supposed to have prepared.

Overwhelmed though I was by the exciting relief of the news, amazement rather than jubilation remained my prevailing emotion. The gate to liberty was not yet completely open, for the Oxford Senior, to me far more formidable, still barred my way into Somerville. But before I resumed my work for that intimidating final test which awaited me in the summer, something occurred that was destined - at any rate for the next few years - to affect me far more deeply than success in examinations.

7

Late one night the previous holidays, my mother, noticing the light still burning in Edward’s room, had gone up to see if anything was the matter. She found Edward, flushed and absorbed, sitting on the bed in his pyjamas surrounded by loose sheets of ruled manuscript. He was setting to music, he told her, a poem called ‘
L’Envoi
’, which the captain of his House had written for last summer’s school magazine in honour of the boys who were leaving Uppingham.

A day or two later Edward showed me both the setting and the poem. I have the setting still; I know nothing of its musical merits, but it was melodious and memorable, and well suited to the words.

In April 1914, Edward invited the author of the poem to Buxton to stay with us for part of the Easter holidays. He looked forward to his friend’s coming with definite pleasure but also with a little trepidation, for Roland, besides being captain of their House, was considerably Edward’s senior, and had an enormous school reputation for brilliance and unapproachableness; he was head of Uppingham in work, and editor of the school magazine. Like Edward, he was destined for Oxford in the autumn, and had recently won the Senior Open Classical Postmastership at Merton College. I had seen him for a brief interval at the Uppingham function known as ‘Old Boys’ the previous summer, but could not remember him at all clearly.

Armed with my Somerville exhibition and my few months’ seniority, I refused to be prospectively impressed by this person, but such equanimity was difficult to achieve, for to Roland’s family attached the glamour which Bohemia always possesses for aspiring provincials. His father, a popular writer of stories for boys, who had been on the literary staff of a great daily newspaper, and his mother, the celebrated author of many romantic novels and
feuilletons
, had once lived amid a famous circle of writers and artists in St John’s Wood, but now they had moved to a pleasant house on the coast at Lowestoft. In those days neither Roland nor his parents as yet realised the full potentialities of his gifted schoolgirl sister Clare, who was to be known seventeen years later as one of the best of young woodcut artists.

L’ ENVOI

Words by R.A.Leighton

Music by E.M. Brittain

Larghetto con expressione