Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (24 page)

At least, I thought, Roland hasn’t changed yet. On my table lay the letter in which he had mentioned Asquith - a letter which showed that he still loved me, and still cherished those memories of twelve months ago that seemed like a thousand years.

‘Do you remember the Sunday that we walked up and down Fairfield Gardens together and wouldn’t come in out of the rain? And I couldn’t keep the tears out of my eyes afterwards when Sterndale Bennett played Karg-Elert’s “
Clair de Lune
” in the chapel. You were sitting at the back near the door and I couldn’t see you without looking round, I remember. It all seems so far away now. I sometimes think I must have exchanged my life for someone else’s.’

6

Two days before Pass Mods., Norah and I took a punt up the river as far as Water Eaton. After that term I never saw her again; she went down to join a motor-cycle corps, and subsequently married a Serbian artist without returning to Somerville.

We took our dinner with us and stayed out till twilight. I felt that I liked her, and Oxford, more than - apart from the ignorant dreams of 1913 - I had ever cared for either before; I realised then how precious individuals and places become the moment that the possibility of leaving them turns into fact. No evening on the river had held a glamour equal to that one, which might so well be the last of all such enchanted evenings. How beautiful they seemed - the feathery bend with its short, stumpy willows, the deep green shadows in the water under the bank, the blue, brilliant mayflies which somersaulted in the air and fell dying into the water, gleaming like strange, exotic jewels in the mellow light of the setting sun.

Lying on our backs in the sunshine, we talked of our literary ambitions, of the War, of nursing, of going down for a time and never, perhaps, coming back. The lovely Oxford summer filled me with regret. I had meant to do such wonderful things that year, to astonish my fellows by unprecedented triumphs, to lay the foundations of a reputation that would grow ever greater and last me through life; and instead the War and love had intervened, and between them were forcing me away with all my confident dreams unfulfilled. For me, as for Roland, all that I had worked so hard to win had been turned by 1914 into dust and ashes. Should I ever return to Oxford, I wondered - ever really belong there? The water, still almost as metal, shone like molten gold as we punted homewards.

On the 17th of June, my four friends accompanied me, for luck, to the gates of All Souls. As the Examination Schools had been transformed into a hospital, the Codrington Library was temporarily dedicated to the baser uses of Pass Moderations - for which, in spite of the War, fifty men and only four women had entered. At one time its vicissitudes would have filled pages of my diary, but since this was now almost entirely occupied with Roland and his letters, my luck in the examination was relegated to a few hasty lines at the close of each day’s entry.

‘I can’t help thinking all this week,’ I wrote to him, ‘how charming you would have been to me over Pass Mods., and how tactfully condescending. You would have left your level of forty-eight books of Homer to talk to me about my five without even relapsing into the Quiet Voice. And I should have felt that it wasn’t quite so absurd as I thought to try and do Pass Mods. on nine months’ Greek. But now you are not here to show me the condescension which I once so teased you about and now would give anything to meet with again, face to face, even in its most blatant form, and it matters little enough whether it is absurd to do Pass Mods. or not.’

By way of compensating him for my heretical indifference to the loveliness of Greek - a loveliness that came back to me in quieter days, more potent than life, more permanent than war - I enclosed with my letter the cutting of a recent
Times
leader which had encouraged me to hope for the future resurrection of pre-war literary values. It was called ‘The Unsubmerged City’, and began as follows:

‘A medieval fancy that still lingers, ghost-like, on the more lonely sea-shores, such as that Breton one so tenderly described by Renan, is the legend of the submerged city. It lies out there barely hidden under the waves, and on a still summer eve they say you may hear the music of its Cathedral bells. One day the waters will recede and the city in all its old beauty be revealed again. Might this not serve to figure the actual conditions of literature, in the nobler sense of the term, submerged as that seems to many to be by the high tide of war? Thus submerged it seemed, at any rate, to the most delicate of our literary artists, who was lately accounting for his disused pen to an aggrieved friend. ‘I have no heart,’ he said, ‘for literature in this war; we can only have faith that it is still there under the waters, and will some day re-emerge.’ . . . There is fortunately no truth in the idea of a sunken literature. A function of the spirit, it can never be submerged, or, indeed, as much as touched by war or any other external thing. It is an inalienable possession and incorruptible part of man.’

Somehow, during the rest of that week, I did give my mind to Logic and Latin, to Proses and Unseens, to Homer’s
Iliad
and Plato’s
Apologia
. To keep my thoughts on the examination at all seemed something of an achievement, for in the middle of it came a letter from Roland, which after beginning: ‘I am feeling somewhat
ennuyé
and very far from bellicose at the moment. One never seems to get much forrarder, and I never was a very patient individual, as you may have found out by now - too ardent an admirer of the meteoric, with an innate abhorrence of gathering moss,’ concluded with a small, significant postscript: ‘It is just possible that I may get six days’ leave in the near future.’

If only it can be soon, I thought, absorbed by realistic visions of our meeting instead of revising the
Meno
; if only it can really happen! ‘Sometimes I have felt that I would forgive the future if it would only bring him to me once again . . . At other times I have thought I couldn’t bear to see him till the War is over, that though I am out for hard things there is just one I could not endure, and that is to live over again the early morning of March 19th on Buxton station. But now that there is a chance I may have to do it, I know it is worth while.’

The last week-end, which I had dreaded for its sadness, vanished away in rapt anticipations and a frantic round of farewells. Alone, since nearly all my friends had already departed, discreetly wishing me good luck in a relationship of which I had never actually spoken, I spent a final hour in New College Garden, visited Merton Chapel as an act of piety to Roland, and went to yet one more Cathedral service, where I tried to find an omen of hope in the closing words of the anthem:

And sorrow - and sorrow - shall flee away.

At St Monica’s, the obvious refuge for the two days between my last paper and the Viva Voce, my mother’s delicate and charming brother, known to the family as ‘Uncle Bill’, endeavoured to encourage me with reassuring news about the progress of the War. To his sorrow and secret shame, for it prevented him from enlisting, he held a ‘key’ position at the head office of the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate, and was believed by all of us to have secret access to official sources of information. Lemberg, he told me cheerfully, was about to fall; the French would have the Germans ‘on the run’ as soon as they had taken Souchez;
The Times
’s attack on Kitchener and its perturbation over munitions were only a ‘putup job’ to persuade our men into making armaments for the Russians; a steel net stretched across the Channel north of all the Continental routes enabled our ships to run between England and France in absolute safety.

They sound ludicrous enough now, these rumours, these optimisms, these assurances, to us who still wonder why, in spite of all our incompetence, we managed to ‘win’ the War. But at the time they helped us to live. I cannot, indeed, imagine how long we should have succeeded in living without them.

‘It seems years and years since I was here - more like thirteen than three,’ I wrote to Roland, sitting at one of the windows from which as a child I had meditated over the dark outline of the Surrey Downs, curving serenely beneath the pale night skies of far-off care-free summers. ‘Everything before the War seems centuries ago; I told my headmistress that I felt about thirty, and she said that the War did have that effect on anyone who realised it at all, but how very glad I should be when the War was over and I woke up from the nightmare to find that I was only twenty-three or twenty-four after all. Shall I ever, my dear, shall I ever? It is not I myself that can bring me that awakening.’

The next day, after the Viva, I soon learnt that I was safely through Pass Mods., and with a sigh of relief at having satisfactorily rounded off a phase of life, I caught the last train to Buxton. Had I failed to pass the examination my entire post-war future would certainly have been different, but at the time the significant little success seemed less important than a letter which I found at home from Roland’s mother, telling me how strongly she approved of my decision to become a nurse. Roland had told her that I hoped after a time to get out to France, and she felt sure I knew as well as she did that if one had an original mind and something of ambition, it was not by poring over books that one grew and developed. One’s intellect, she said, could always take care of itself. It was one’s personality that counted, and that could be better nourished sometimes in active life than in halls of learning.

It was a point of view that I was ready most enthusiastically to endorse. Learning, for the moment, had certainly been pushed into the background by life.

7

On Sunday morning, June 27th, 1915, I began my nursing at the Devonshire Hospital. The same date, exactly ten years afterwards, was to be, for me, equally memorable. Between the one day and the other lies the rest of this book.

From our house above the town I ran eagerly downhill to my first morning’s work, not knowing, fortunately for myself, that my servitude would last for nearly four years. The hospital had originally been used as a riding-school, but a certain Duke of Devonshire, with exemplary concern for the welfare of the sick but none whatever for the feet of the nursing staff, had caused it to be converted to its present charitable purpose. The main part of the building consisted of a huge dome, with two stone corridors running one above the other round its quarter-mile circumference. The nurses were not allowed to cross its diameter, which contained an inner circle reserved for convalescent patients, so that everything forgotten or newly required meant a run round the circumference. As kitchens, sink-rooms and wards all led off the circular corridors and appeared to have been built as far from one another as possible, the continuous walking along the unresistant stone floors must have amounted, apart from the work itself, to several miles a day.

My hours there ran from 7.45 a.m. until 1 p.m., and again from 5.0 p.m. until 9.15 p.m. - a longer day, as I afterwards discovered, than that normally required in many Army hospitals. No doubt the staff was not unwilling to make the utmost use of so enthusiastic and unsophisticated a probationer. Meals, for all of which I was expected to go home, were not included in these hours. As our house was nearly half a mile from the hospital on the slope of a steep hill, I never completely overcame the aching of my back and the soreness of my feet throughout the time that I worked there, and felt perpetually as if I had just returned from a series of long route marches.

I never minded these aches and pains, which appeared to me solely as satisfactory tributes to my love for Roland. What did profoundly trouble and humiliate me was my colossal ignorance of the simplest domestic operations. Among other ‘facts of life’, my expensive education had omitted to teach me the prosaic but important essentials of egg-boiling, and the Oxford cookery classes had triumphantly failed to repair the omission. I imagined that I had to bring the saucepan to the boil, then turn off the gas and allow the egg to lie for three minutes in the cooling water. The remarks of a lance-corporal to whom I presented an egg ‘boiled’ in this fashion led me to make shamefaced inquiries of my superiors, from whom I learnt, in those first few days, how numerous and devastating were the errors that it was possible to commit in carrying out the most ordinary functions of everyday life. To me, for whom meals had hitherto appeared as though by clockwork and the routine of a house had seemed to be worked by some invisible mechanism, the complications of sheer existence were nothing short of a revelation.

Despite my culinary shortcomings, the men appeared to like me; none of them were very ill, and no doubt my youth, my naïve eagerness and the clean freshness of my new uniform meant more to them than any amount of common sense and efficiency. Perhaps, too, the warm and profoundly surprising comfort that I derived from their presence produced a tenderness which was able to communicate back to them, in turn, something of their own rich consolation.

Throughout my two decades of life, I had never looked upon the nude body of an adult male; I had never even seen a naked boy-child since the nursery days when, at the age of four or five, I used to share my evening baths with Edward. I had therefore expected, when I first started nursing, to be overcome with nervousness and embarrassment, but, to my infinite relief, I was conscious of neither. Towards the men I came to feel an almost adoring gratitude for their simple and natural acceptance of my ministrations. Short of actually going to bed with them, there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day - thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy - beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single.