Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (22 page)

3

The day after Rupert Brooke’s death in the Ægean, and a few hours before the Allied landing at Cape Helles on April 25th, I returned for the last term of my first year to an Oxford that now seemed infinitely remote from everything that counted. During the vacation, Somerville College, adjacent as it was to the Radcliffe Infirmary, had been commandeered by the War Office for conversion into a military hospital. Since Oxford was now almost empty of undergraduates except for the Cadet Corps and a few of the permanently disabled, the St Mary Hall Quadrangle of Oriel had been offered to Somerville for the duration of the War, and the students were distributed between this hall and various ex-masculine lodging-houses.

But my thoughts were far less concerned with these changes than with the Second Battle of Ypres and the direction in which it might be spreading. ‘I would have given anything not to have had to come back,’ I confessed in my diary. ‘If it had not been for P. Mods. I could have started nursing at once’ - for to become a nurse was now my intention. It was not, perhaps, an obvious choice for a Somerville exhibitioner, but I was then in no mood for the routine Civil Service posts which represented the only type of ‘intellectual’ war-work offered to uncertificated young women. I never even dreamed of patiently putting in the two remaining years of self-qualification before taking part in the War. Even had I not believed - as everyone except Lord Kitchener then believed - that it could not possibly last for more than another year, I should still have been anxious to get as far as I could from intellect and its torment; I longed intensely for hard physical labour which would give me discomfort to endure and weariness to put mental speculation to sleep.

I left to my mother the task of completing my arrangements with the Devonshire Hospital, where I had planned to begin my nursing. After a few weeks of training there I hoped, if I could get a year’s leave of absence from Somerville, somehow to join up in a London hospital and thus be on the spot when Roland came home wounded or on leave. My mother co-operated willingly in these schemes, for she was sorry for me, and kind. She perhaps found love, even for a suitor whose brains were his capital, a more comprehensible emotion than harsh and baffling ambition; having come from a hard-working family herself, she had none of my father’s practical distrust of the unendowed professional classes. Thanks, however, to the noble Edward, with whom he had been staying at Folkestone, even his instinctive prejudice against ‘Bohemians’ was gradually undergoing modification, for Edward had tactfully told him, in the best public-school manner, that ‘Roland was of a most honourable nature, and there was no one he would rather see Vera married to.’

Preoccupied as I was, the excitement of the Somerville students over their altered circumstances seemed at first as remote as the soundless clamour of a dream. At an ancient panelled lodging-house known as Micklem Hall, in Brewer Street off St Aldate’s, I found myself separated from almost all my little group of friends. Theresa, ‘E. F.’, and Norah H. were in Oriel; only Marjorie went with me to Micklem to alleviate the noisy mediocrity of a type of student which we were snobbishly accustomed to designate ‘the lower millstone’. At meal-times the close proximity of the English tutor, who was in charge of the Micklem party, overwhelmed ‘the lower millstone’ into palpitating silence.

‘It’s just like a perpetual “High”,’ Marjorie and I complained to one another over cocoa in my room after we had exhaustingly maintained the conversation for several meals on end. Compared with the small, bright study which had looked on to the sunset from the Maitland building, my new room did not appear very attractive; it was old and dingy, with oak beams, a crooked floor, and innumerable dark corners and crevices partially concealed by fatigued draperies suggestive of spiders, blackbeetles, and similar abominations. But the garden, with its heavy, drooping trees, at least promised a refuge, and I was glad to be spared the chattering, pervasive femininity which had already taken possession of St Mary Hall.

I should not have to bear it very long, I reflected, as I stood in the Cathedral a week later and listened, indescribably uplifted by my new determination to play some active part in the glorious Allied fight against militarism, to a large contingent of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry singing, in their vigorous young voices, ‘The Son of God goes forth to war!’ In my coat pocket lay a letter that had come that morning from Roland - another of the dear and tender letters written in Ploegsteert Wood.

‘A little poem of W. E. Henley’s came into my head last night as I came across the fields in the starlight. Do you know it?

A wink from Hesper, falling
Fast in the wintry sky,
Comes through the even blue,
Dear, like a word from you . . .
Is it good-bye?

Across the miles between us
I send you sigh for sigh.
Good night, sweet friend, good night:
Till life and all take flight,
Never good-bye.

‘You can listen,’ he went on after a purely personal interlude, ‘to the undulating artillery bombardment from the direction of Ypres, not with equanimity but with a certain tremulous gratitude that it is no nearer. Someone is getting hell, but it isn’t you - yet . . . It was a glorious morning, and from where we were on the hill we could see the country for miles around. It looked rather like the clear-cut landscape in a child’s painting-book. The basis was deep green with an occasional flame-coloured patch in the valley where a red-roofed farm-house had escaped the guns. Just below the horizon and again immediately at our feet was a brilliant yellow mustard-field.’

Enclosed in the letter was a ‘souvenir’, which I examined with deep interest after I had crossed St Aldate’s to go back to my room. It consisted of a few pages torn from a child’s exercise-book that he had found in a ruined house, and appeared to contain some stumbling translations from Flemish into French. The first exercise that caught my eye, in infantile writing and with many erasures, ran as follows:

‘Avelghem le 27/4/12.
‘Description.
‘Les Vacances.

‘Les vacances
, que j’allongeais depuis longtemps etaient
enfin arrivées.’

It seemed an eloqent comment on the situation. Where, I wondered, was the child spending his prolonged
vacances
now?

In my reply I told Roland of my intention to nurse, and described how much I had been moved by the Cathedral service.

‘At such times I worship Oxford. One is able then to forget that there are dusty old dons and proctors who exact the same from women as from men and yet treat us sometimes as if we were strangers in a strange land. They have criticised Oriel exceedingly for taking us in! One realises at such times the value of men who have sufficient imagination and far-sightedness to be feminists. On the day we come into our own the dons and proctors won’t be shown much mercy!’

That evening, in her Sunday ‘sermon’, the Principal delivered an impressive discourse on the conduct required of us as temporary inhabitants of St Mary Hall. We must be careful, she said, ‘to avoid conspicuousness and exercise self-restraint’. Conspicuousness, however, was by no means easy to avoid, for to the Press our anomalous position seemed a fruitful subject for mirth. Thankful to find a new source of comic relief amid the growing gloom engendered by the
communiqués
from Flanders,
London Opinion
came out with the following lively production:

A hundred wounded soldiers fill
(In days like these one might have feared it)
The pleasant haunts of Somerville
For Kitchener has commandeered it!

But, driven from their loved abodes,
The learned ladies find a corner
Where once was sheltered Cecil Rhodes,
Clough, Matthew Arnold, P. F. Warner!

The quads adorned by Newman, Froude,
Keble, and other grave professors,
Are thronging with a multitude
Of ardent feminine successors!

The Common Room, which saw contend
Logician with acute logician,
Is proving in the latter end
The home of merest intuition!

O Oriel, centuries ago
To flowing-vested monks devoted,
To think that thou again canst show
A horde of scholars petticoated!

And when thy gallant sons return,
Of whom the cruel wars bereave thee,
Will not thy fair alumnæ spurn
Suggestions that it’s time to leave thee?

Before the term was very old, the few remaining undergraduates in the still masculine section of Oriel not unnaturally concluded that it would be a first-rate ‘rag’ to break down the wall which divided them from the carefully guarded young females in St Mary Hall. Great perturbation filled the souls of the Somerville dons when they came down to breakfast one morning to find that a large gap had suddenly appeared in the protecting masonry, through which had been thrust a hilarious placard:

‘’OO MADE THIS ’ERE ’OLE?’
‘MICE!!!’

Throughout that day and the following night the Senior Common Room, from the Principal downwards, took it in turns to sit on guard beside the hole, for fear any unruly spirit should escape through it to the forbidden adventurous males on the other side. Long after the War, I discovered that the graduates of New College still cherished a ribald legend of this incident, based upon the report that part of the historic nocturnal vigil had been shared by the Somerville dons with the Provost of Oriel.

4

I remember that summer term much as a traveller might recall a tranquil hour spent securely in a sunny garden before setting out on a harsh and dangerous journey. In spite of the dread that darkened its calm, golden evenings, the memories that survive are fragrant and serene.

Since the others had all done Pass Mods. the previous term, I was relegated to solitary coachings with the Classical tutor, who accompanied me patiently through Pliny and Plato and Homer. The trial and death of Socrates, the lovely lines from the
Iliad
which describe Andromache holding out the child Astyanax to Hector before Troy and ‘smiling through her tears’, will be for ever associated for me with those poignant early days of the War. My tutor, I think, realised that I was in love, for she was always very kind to my evident distress over each new catastrophe - the more so, perhaps, because she herself was beginning to desire some occupation less detached from the War than the coaching of immature females. A year or so afterwards she escaped from Oxford to war-work in Serbia and Salonika.

I still recall the quiet hour spent in her panelled room at Oriel on the warm May evening that the news came through of the sinking of the
Lusitania
. It appropriately closed a day of disasters which included the recapture of Hill 60 by the Germans and a melancholy letter from Roland to say that he had been under shell-fire and it was ‘a nerve-racking job’ - ‘horror piled on horror till one feels that the world can scarcely go on any longer,’ I recorded miserably. By the time that my coaching came I was almost in tears, though I knew no one on the
Lusitania
and should not even have recognised among the survivors the names of the future Food-Controller and his daughter, Lady Mackworth, afterwards Viscountess Rhondda, to whose weekly review,
Time and Tide
, I was to contribute many years later. There was no escape from these stormy preoccupations except in the small successive events of everyday life - May Morning, the Somerville tennis team, uncensored letters from Roland in green envelopes, services at the Cathedral or New College Chapel, and invalid cookery classes which the Classical tutor also joined, working with real vigour in a voluminous overall, and tersely commenting on the disconcerting number of facets possessed by a potato.