Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (69 page)

The
Oxford Outlook
was a new undergraduate production of that summer term; it provided self-expression for a group of remarkable young men who believed themselves to be the creators of a post-war university Renaissance, and had begun, amongst numerous other literary activities, the passionate reviewing of each other’s early works. Their names included those of P. H. B. Lyon, the present Headmaster of Rugby; Leslie Hore-Belisha, now Liberal M.P. for Devonport; V. de S. Pinto; P. P. S. Sastri, and Charles Morgan, the author of
The Fountain
. To the second number of this magazine Charles Morgan contributed a romantic poem, which represented the spirit of the surviving soldier-undergraduate at its most idealistic; it described the miracle of life, the wonder of love and the enhanced value of common possessions for those to whom death no longer beckoned with the urgent insistence of the past four years.

The founders and editors of the
Oxford Outlook
were two young Balliol men, N. A. Beechman and Beverley Nichols, the latter a nineteen-year-old Marlburian, who had just returned from serving as secretary to the British Universities Mission to the United States. The presence of so many mature undergraduates provided him with a first-rate background for the professional youth that, with the help of his chubby cheeks and his curly hair, he had already begun to cultivate; I used to think it odd that his rising reputation should be one of the results of the War for Democracy, though it seems less odd to-day. ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War ?’ I would mentally inquire in the words of the familiar poster; and always the experimental answer would come: ‘I made the world safe for Beverley Nichols, my son.’ And then I would reflect, rather remorsefully: ‘That’s too bitter! That’s unfair! It isn’t his fault that he was too young for the War.’

At any rate, he had manœuvred himself into an influential position in the new Oxford - which seemed more than I, for all the battering of the years, was ever likely to do - so I sent him an article for his
Outlook
. It was accepted with flattering promptitude, and published in the same number as Charles Morgan’s poem and a characteristic dissertation by the ex-Somervillian, Dorothy L. Sayers, called ‘Eros in Academe’. Isolated, as none of the men were isolated, from contemporaries who had shared the common experiences of wartime, I could not achieve the philosophical appreciations of Charles Morgan; instead I contributed, less loftily and more critically, an analysis of Oxford as seen after four years by a returning woman student, who found in her own colleagues little of the ‘Renaissance’ attitude so noticeable among the men released from death. Nevertheless, I concluded, the ex-war-worker had her special function to perform in the life of the post-war Oxford woman (a reflection with which the rest of Somerville was not, apparently, then inclined to agree):

‘The woman student is now in a stage of transition, and this is the conclusion of the whole matter. With the signing of the Armistice she passed from the all-important to the negligible. She has been the slender bridge over which university life has crept from the brilliant superficiality of the years immediately preceding 1914 to the sober but splendid revival of the present. This in itself has led her, if not to exaggerate the value of her own position, at any rate to see it in the wrong perspective. Her sudden relegation to her old corner in the university has shaken her into confusion, but time will prove that she can survive the shock of peace as surely as she has weathered the storms of war.

‘Finally, she will both claim and deserve the right to grow out of her corner till, side by side with Oxford’s new manhood, she will inherit that wider future which the university owes both to its living and its dead. And in this gradual renaissance the woman student who felt the claims of war upon her, and departed thence, and after many days came back again, will find her place at last. Because she is the connecting link between the women who remained and the men who have returned, she too will play her own momentous part.’

Just then, however, the part that I personally was playing seemed anything but momentous, for I was about to complete those inquiries into the excursions of St Paul which had begun in Malta by doing Divinity Moderations (more commonly known as ‘Divvers’, and now abolished). At the end of the term, when the Germans were sinking their fleet in Scapa Flow and Convocation at Oxford was wrangling hotly on the subject of compulsory Greek, I took this belated examination - a feat which had to be accomplished, since my own ‘compulsory Greek’ was now completely forgotten, by learning the translation by heart with the assistance of a ‘crib’ and hoping to recognise the first line of the text on the question-paper. Being more fortunate than the undergraduate who translated ‘δ γέγραϕα, γέγραϕα’ (‘What I have written, I have written’) as ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!’ and ran completely off the rails in consequence, I did not have to take the tedious papers again.

I went down quite cheerfully, for I had arranged to join Nina at Girton, where a vacation Summer School was being held on ‘Italian History and Art’. During my Malta adventure I had only spent a few hours in Naples and Rome, and I wanted to know more about the country for which - perhaps not untruly - I thought of Edward as having died; already I had begun to save up for a few weeks’ pilgrimage some day to that lovely and sorrowful land which had swallowed up my earliest memories and my last surviving hopes. Meanwhile Girton, incongruously enough, might supply some of the deficiencies of my experience; but when I arrived there a vague message greeted me, to the effect that Nina was ill and could not come. No longer tolerant of the shabby teachers and the gawky youths who had once so much impressed me - was it six years ago or six hundred ? - at a similar Summer School, I fled in shuddering distaste from the shrill, garrulous crowd, and took spontaneous refuge with Mary and Norah, my hospitable friends from 24 General, who lived in a village some twenty miles from Cambridge.

A day or two later a letter came to say that Nina, who had a weak heart, had died quite suddenly from pneumonia, the result of a chill presumably caught from sitting on damp grass. I pushed the thought of her away and flung myself furiously into Mary’s tennis-parties, for I was sick beyond description of death and loss. But before I left the village to go home, I looked one evening into my bedroom glass and thought, with a sense of incommunicable horror, that I detected in my face the signs of some sinister and peculiar change. A dark shadow seemed to lie across my chin; was I beginning to grow a beard, like a witch? Thereafter my hand began, at regular intervals, to steal towards my face; and it had quite definitely acquired this habit when I went down to Cornwall in the middle of July to spend a fortnight with Hope Milroy and escape the Peace Celebrations.

4

My real return to Oxford seemed to come the next term, when I found myself, lost and bewildered, amid a crowd of unfamiliar ex-schoolgirls in a semi-familiar Somerville, which had now been restored, considerably the worse for wear, to its original owners. Nobody knew or appeared to want to know me; one or two stared with half-insolent curiosity at my alien face, and my Classical tutor, though she was no longer responsible for my work, invited me occasionally to tea in her study, but the majority disregarded me completely, and I thanked my seniority and the Principal for the fact that I was living out of college. But now there was no Nina to share the solitude of my cold little room in Keble Road, and though the term had its humours (it was, I think, this autumn that the Bishop of London, at a special service for women students, told us that we were all destined to become the wives of ‘some good man’ - a polygamous suggestion which delighted Somerville), I spent many hours of it in lonely walks and in ‘cutting’ college dinner.

On Boar’s Hill, where I wandered alone very often, the cherry-trees were turning to flame against the lowering greyness of the stormy October clouds. Had I actually walked there with Edward when for a few weeks we had both been in Oxford during that first autumn term so long ago, or had he accompanied me only in spirit? With Roland, I knew, I had never been on the Hill, and yet it was as vivid with memories of him as though we had often seen it together. The two of them seemed to fuse in my mind into a kind of composite lost companion, an elusive ghost which embodied all intimacy, all comradeship, all joy, which included everything that was the past and should have been the future. Incessantly I tramped across the Hill, subconsciously pursuing this symbolic figure like a lost spirit seeking for its mate, and one dark afternoon, when I came back from a long walk to a solitary tea, followed by a lonely evening in the chill room at whose door nobody ever knocked, I endeavoured to crystallise the mood of that search in a poem which later, in
Oxford Poetry
, 1920, I called ‘Boar’s Hill, October 1919’:

Tall slender beech-trees, whispering, touched with fire,
Swaying at even beneath a desolate sky;
Smouldering embers aflame where the clouds hurry by
At the wind’s desire.

Dark sombre woodlands, rain-drenched by the scattering shower,
Spindle that quivers and drops its dim berries to earth—
Mourning, perhaps, as I mourn here alone for the dearth
Of a happier hour.

Can you still see them, who always delighted to roam
Over the Hill where so often together we trod,
When winds of wild autumn strewed summer’s dead leaves on
the sod,
Ere your steps turned home?

Only occasionally was I driven by loneliness to seek the companionship of students in one of the numerous ‘Years’ to which I did not belong; even less frequently it was thrust upon me, but in neither event did the experiment appear particularly successful. It seemed, indeed, doomed with unusual certainty to failure in the case of the girl with whom I had to share my coachings in modern European history with the Dean of Hertford College. Miss Holtby, my tutor told me, was anxious, like myself, to study the nineteenth century; she had also been down from college for a year serving in the W.A.A.C., so perhaps that too would form a link between us. Quite sure that it would not, and wishing that I could have had the Dean to myself, I sauntered lugubriously down to Hertford, where I was to meet both him and this stranger towards whom I felt so unaccountably antagonistic.

At Hertford I found the Dean waiting for me; I had some confidence in the prospect of his teaching, for I had attended his lectures the previous term on ‘Nationality and Self-Determination’, and though I had hardly understood a word of them, their dynamic picturesqueness had lighted one or two minute candles of interest in the dark chaos of ignorance and confusion that called itself my mind. The unknown ex-W.A.A.C. had not arrived, so we sat on either side of the Dean’s hearth and waited for her, he puffing at a pipe and wearing carpet slippers. I had a bad cold, caught the previous week while seeing Hope Milroy off to India; my last friend, my final contact with the War, and all that it meant, had vanished into space, I reflected, and my much-enduring nose was indubitably turning red from the heat of the fire. I certainly did not feel as though I were awaiting so much of my destiny.

I was staring gloomily at the Oxford engravings and photographs of the Dolomites which clustered together so companionably upon the Dean’s study wall, when Winifred Holtby burst suddenly in upon this morose atmosphere of ruminant lethargy. Superbly tall, and vigorous as the young Diana with her long straight limbs and her golden hair, her vitality smote with the effect of a blow upon my jaded nerves. Only too well aware that I had lost that youth and energy for ever, I found myself furiously resenting its possessor. Obstinately disregarding the strong-featured, sensitive face and the eager, shining blue eyes, I felt quite triumphant because - having returned from France less than a month before - she didn’t appear to have read any of the books which the Dean had suggested as indispensable introductions to our Period.

He ‘put her off’, she told me long afterwards, for he had been in the War and looked like a colonel, and she expected him to treat her as all colonels treated all W.A.A.C.s, who weren’t supposed to be ladies. Not, she explained, that she pretended to be a lady; she was accustomed good-humouredly to boast that, as a prospective journalist, she had a great advantage over me because she was a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter, whereas I, a descendant of the Staffordshire
bourgeoisie
, was merely ‘genteel’.

In the autumn of 1919, however, the social and intellectual differences between agriculture and industry contributed less towards thrusting Winifred and myself apart than the sanguinary drama of the French Revolution. For some obscure reason, the Dean approved of my essays, and at our joint coachings I sat, doubtless with an exasperatingly superior air, and listened while he, with no more intuitive vision of Winifred’s distinguished future as novelist and journalist than I had insight into the essential nobility of her generous spirit, proclaimed her style laborious, her sentences involved, her subject-matter confused and her spelling abominable. When the end of the term came, I was able to write triumphantly home of a really stimulating report from the Dean - and took care to add, with patronising blindness, that ‘he didn’t give a bit of a good report to the girl I coach with, and yet she always strikes me as being quite good.’