Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (38 page)

So on a half-day in March, I went up to Oxford to discuss the uncertain future with the Principal of Somerville. My first-year friends, Marjorie and Theresa, met me at the station, and later gave me tea - to which they invited my Classical tutor - in their Oriel study overlooking the High Street. Perhaps it was the wandering ghosts of bygone conversations among generations of men in that old college room which broke down the normal barrier between tutors and students, for we talked of the War and those who went to it and those who died, until my tutor and I forgot our hostesses, who sat, quite silent, on either side of the blazing fire. People realised in these days, she said, how much more than physical existence a man’s life meant, and how much life was gained by laying down the physical side of it.

At that stage of the War, mercifully preserved from knowledge of a world seventeen years older, in which second-rate masculine ability would struggle helplessly with almost insoluble problems because the first-rate were gone from a whole generation, we were still able to believe that a country which laid down the best of its life would somehow surely find it. Nothing thus given up, my tutor maintained, was ever lost, and those who died were not really gone but were with us always, canonised for us more truly than the saints. She was thinking, I knew, of a distinguished life which had been cut short by a bullet in Mesopotamia, and I, she knew, was thinking of Roland, whom I had dreamed of in my coachings with her when we were reading the
Iliad
, and who now was dead. Then, all at once, she was gone and we three were alone, staring at each other, shy, surprised, queerly exalted.

Later I saw the Principal, of whom I had strangely ceased to be in awe. She was so much less terrifying than most hospital Matrons, so I told her finally that I should not return to college until after the War.

Back at Camberwell, I found a notice pinned to the board in the dining-hall asking for volunteers for foreign service. Now that Roland was irretrievably gone and my decision about Oxford had finally been made, there seemed to be no reason for withholding my name. It was the logical conclusion, I thought, of service in England, though quite a number of V.A.D.s refused to sign because their parents wouldn’t like it, or they were too inexperienced, or had had pneumonia when they were five years old.

Their calm readiness to admit their fears amazed me. Not being composed in even the smallest measure of the stuff of which heroines are made, I was terrified of going abroad - so much publicity was now given to the German submarine campaign that the possibility of being torpedoed was a nightmare to me - but I was even more afraid of acknowledging my cowardice to myself, let alone to others. A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with the persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage; throughout the War I was warding off panic, but so long as I was able to do that, I could put up a fair show of self-control. If once I allowed myself to recognise my fear of foreign service, and especially of submarines, all kinds of alarming things that I had survived quite tolerably - such as Zeppelin raids, and pitch-black slum streets, and being alone in a large hut on night-duty - would become impossible.

So I put down my name on the active service list, and never permitted my conscious self to hear the dastardly prayer of my unconscious that when my orders came they might be for anywhere but a hospital ship or the Mediterranean.

7

The final and worst stage of my refusal to be reconciled to my world after the loss of Roland was precipitated by quite a trivial event.

When the bitter Christmas weeks were over, my parents, for the sake of economy, had moved from the Grand Hotel to a smaller one, where the service was indifferent and the wartime cooking atrocious. As the result of its cold draughtiness, its bad food, and her anxiety over Edward, my mother, in the middle of March, was overcome by an acute species of chill. Believing herself, in sudden panic, to be worse than she was, she wrote begging me to get leave and come down to Brighton and nurse her.

After much difficulty and two or three interviews, I managed to obtain the grudging and sceptical leave of absence granted to V.A.D.s who had sick relatives - always regarded as a form of shirking, since the Army was supposed to be above all but the most vital domestic obligations. When I arrived at the hotel to find that my mother, in more stoical mood, had already struggled out of bed and was in no urgent need of me, I felt that I was perpetrating exactly the deceit of which I had been suspected. Forgetting that parents who had been brought up by their own forbears to regard young women as perpetually at the disposal of husbands or fathers, could hardly be expected to realise that Army discipline - so demonstrably implacable in the case of men - now operated with the same stern rigidity for daughters as for sons, I gave way to an outburst of inconsiderate fury that plunged me back into the depths of despondency from which I had been struggling to climb.

Wretched, remorseful, and still feeling horribly guilty of obtaining leave on false pretences, I stayed in Brighton for the two days that I had demanded. But the episode had pushed my misery to the point of mental crisis, and the first time that I was off duty after returning to Camberwell, I went up to Denmark Hill to try to think out in solitude all the implications of my spasmodic angers, my furious, uncontrolled resentments.

It was a bitter, grey afternoon, and an icy wind drove flurries of snow into my face as I got off the tram and hastened into the hostel. Huddling into a coat in my cheerless cubicle, I watched the snowflakes falling, and wondered how ever I was going to get through the weary remainder of life. I was only at the beginning of my twenties; I might have another forty, perhaps even fifty, years to live. The prospect seemed appalling, and I shuddered with cold and desolation as my numbed fingers wrote in my diary an abject, incoherent confession of self-hatred and despair.

‘I really am becoming quite an impossible person nowadays. I never could have dreamed of the effect Roland’s death would have on me . . . Maybe one day I shall be better for having suffered, when I can get far enough away from his life and death to remember the sweetness of possessing him without the anguish of losing him, to remember the grandeur of his death when the sense of its appalling waste and pitifulness will have grown less acute . . . But at present I really am an abominable person . . . I have a bad character everywhere . . . Perhaps any place I had been in, anything I had been doing, would have had the same effect on me under the circumstances. And I begin to feel that perhaps after all I must accept defeat, and must do something to change my present conditions of life if I am going to have any personality left that is worth having. And yet all the time I know that I am not a horrid person at all inside . . . Will the Recording Angel, I wonder, put down a little to one’s credit for all one meant, and yet failed, to do? . . . The last three months have been dark, confused, nightmare-like - I can barely remember what has happened in them, any more than one can properly remember a terrible illness after it is over. Everything I loved and love, everything I lived for, worked for, prayed for, seems to be slipping away . . . Oh, God ! How unhappy I am!’

In April, with the first termination of my contract, I knew that I should have to decide either to leave the 1st London or to sign on again, and for the next few weeks I worked myself into a nervous frenzy because I could not make up my mind whether to stay at the hospital, or to abandon nursing and take up work at the War Office - where I imagined, quite erroneously, that such intelligence as I possessed would be more appropriately employed. I even went so far as to interview a War Office official, and to take a tiny bedroom in the Bayswater apartment occupied by Clare’s ex-governess.

I had notified the Matron of my intention to leave and had even begun to pack, when I was suddenly overwhelmed by a passionate conviction that to give up the work and the place I hated would be defeat, and that Roland, and whatever in the world stood for Right and Goodness, wanted me to remain at the hospital and go on active service. I was far too deeply immersed in my obsession to speculate even for a second whether Right and Goodness, if personified, were likely to turn from the terrific task of assessing war-guilt to interest themselves in my little difficulty about the hospital and the War Office. Overcome with shame and remorse, I begged the Matron to allow me to withdraw my notice. Tolerant and understanding as always, she permitted me to sign on again, and I dropped limply back into the hospital routine, too much exhausted by the irrational conflict to resent my family’s resigned conclusion that anyone so madly erratic was beyond even protest.

On April 23rd - it was Easter Sunday, and exactly four months after Roland’s death - I went to St Paul’s Cathedral for the morning service, and sat in a side aisle beneath G. F. Watts’s picture of Hagar in the Desert. Her Gethsemane, I thought, had been even darker than that of the Man of Sorrows, who after all knew - or believed - that He was God; she was merely a human being without omnipotence, and a woman too, at the mercy, as were all women to-day, of an agonising, ruthless fate which it seemed she could do nothing to restrain. ‘Watchman, will the night soon pass?’ ran the inscription under the painting, and I wondered how many women in the Cathedral that morning, numbed and bewildered by blow after blow, were asking the self-same question.

‘Will the night soon pass? Will it ever pass? How much longer can I endure it? What will help me to endure it, if endured it must be?’

In a Regent Street tea-shop after the service had ended, I sat over one of the innumerable cups of coffee that we drank during the War in order to get a few moments of privacy, and endeavoured, as earnestly as though humanity itself had entrusted me with the solution of its problems, to discover what was left that would help. In the small notebook that I always carried with me, I scribbled down some of the conclusions at which, in those weeks of wrestling with unseen enemies, I seemed to have arrived.

‘I know that, come what may, our love will henceforth always be the ruling factor in my life. He is to me the embodiment of that ideal of heroism - that “Heroism in the Abstract” - for which he lived and died, and for which I will strive to live, and if need be, die also.

‘If people say to me, “Why do you do this? It is not necessary, your duty need not take you thus far,” I can only answer that in one way heroism is always unnecessary, in so far as it always lies outside the scope of one’s limited, stereotyped duty. I do not know with how much or how little courage I should face dangers and perils if they came to me - I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.

‘But perhaps - and this is my anchor in the present deep waters - self-knowledge is a surer foundation than self-exaltation, and having reached down to it, the ground which nothing can cut away from under my feet, I may achieve more than in the old days. Perhaps one can never rise to the heights until one has gone right down into the depths - such depths as I have known of late.

‘Perhaps now I shall one day rise, and be worthy of him who in his life both in peace and in war and in his death on the fields of France has shown me “the way more plain”. At any rate, if ever I do face danger and suffering with some measure of his heroism, it will be because I have learnt through him that love is supreme, that love is stronger than death and the fear of death.’

8

Fortunately for the mental balance of average mankind, exalted emotions of this type do not as a rule last very long, but before mine relapsed once more into despondency, respite came from an undignified but not altogether unwelcome source.

So preoccupied had I been with my griefs and problems that I had barely noticed a mild epidemic of German measles which was distributing members of the Camberwell nursing staff round various London fever hospitals. But when Betty went down with it, and a day or two later I awoke to find my arms speckled with red from wrist to elbow, I reported sick at once, and was sent off to a fever hospital in south-west London.

In this elegant institution, thankful for a few days of rest for an aching body and of release from introspective torment for a tired mind, I shared with one other V.A.D. a small ground-floor ward looking out upon a coal-heap. The ‘rest’ was psychological rather than physical, for the loud and continuous noises in the Fever Hospital ran to even greater variety than its infectious diseases. When I had listened for two or three days to the children crying in the next ward, the maids yelling and screaming in the kitchen opposite, coal being carted in the yard outside the window, a piano in a near-by house being execrably thumped from early morning till close upon midnight, the roaring and whistling of trains from the railway a hundred yards distant, an apparatus in an adjacent shed making an incessant sound like a hoarse threshing-machine, and the continual dropping of plates and trays with resounding crashes all over the ground floor, I began to feel acutely sorry for any patients who were seriously ill.

‘I forget if I told you about morning visits here - which are the greatest trial of the day,’ runs a letter written on April 30th to my mother, who by then was in Macclesfield, where she and my father, tired of the tedium of Brighton hotels, had taken a pleasant furnished house before deciding upon a final move. ‘First the Matron comes round, then the house-doctor and then the visiting doctor. They all address you with fatuous, condescending remarks, to which you are expected to make a bright reply. The Matron . . . calls the smell of a rose “a delightful perfume”. The doctors have a very pronounced bedside manner, and talk to you in a half-teasing way as if you were a child - the “Well, how are
we
to-day?” kind of attitude. To crown everything, on Friday afternoon we were visited by the C. of E. chaplain, a very shy, nervous young man. When he entered, I happened to be sitting up in a chair in my dressing-gown, showing a good deal of mauve-striped pyjama leg. I suppose this frightened him, for he relapsed at once into an embarrassed silence, and the whole of the conversation devolved upon me, while he wriggled in his chair and played with his cassock.’