Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (71 page)

Between the first life that ended with Edward’s death in 1918, and the second that began with Winifred’s companionship in 1920, no links remain except Roland’s family and my parents; they alone can remember the world that revolved for me round Edward, round Roland, round Victor and Geoffrey. Of those others upon whom my deepest affections now rest - Winifred, my husband, my children - not one knew even by name a single contemporary who counted for me in the life before 1918. For a time I felt forlorn, even bitter, because they could not share my memories, but now I have grown accustomed to revisiting that past world alone.

Only the permanence of my fondest ambitions, and the strange and growing likeness of my son to Edward, reminds me that I am still the individual who went to Uppingham Speech Day in July 1914, for although I was a student at Oxford in both my lives, it was not the same Oxford and I was not the same student. The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be - I believe that there is not - resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.

It is not, however, possible for everyone. I was fortunate. Too many victims of the Great War have not risen again and will never rise, while there appear to be quite a number of that younger generation which swings between jazz and unemployment in a world denuded of prospects and left arid and pointless, who have never risen at all. Even for me, the new life took long enough to begin, for, try as I would to conceal my memories, the War obstinately refused to be forgotten; and by the end of the Easter term, 1920, its extraordinary aftermath had taken full possession of my warped and floundering mind. When I left Millbank, I had never contemplated any alternative other than an immediate return to Oxford; the idea of a long holiday did not occur to me, and I had no one to go with had the suggestion been made. Although persistent dreams recurred of Roland and Edward - the one missing and purposely hiding his identity because facially mutilated, the other suffering some odd psychological complex which made him turn against us all and keep silence - I endured none of those nightmare recapitulations of hospital sounds and sights of which other wartime nurses complained for two or three years. Only the horrible delusion, first experienced after the flight from Girton, that my face was changing, persisted until it became a permanent, fixed obsession.

I have since been told that hallucinations and dreams and insomnia are normal symptoms of over-fatigue and excessive strain, and that, had I consulted an intelligent doctor immediately after the War, I might have been spared the exhausting battle against nervous breakdown which I waged for eighteen months. But no one, least of all myself, realised how near I had drifted to the borderland of craziness. I was ashamed, to the point of agony, of the sinister transformation which seemed, every time I looked in the glass, to be impending in my face, and I could not bring myself to mention it even to Winifred, who would probably have dispelled the illusion by a sane reassurance that I was neither developing a beard nor turning into a witch. Nothing has ever made me realise more clearly the thinness of the barrier between normality and insanity than the persistent growth, like an obscene, overshadowing fungus, of these dark hallucinations throughout 1920.

7

The strained and hectic atmosphere of that summer term was hardly calculated to restore to sanity any man or woman driven to the edge of neurosis by the War. It was the first summer in which the university had its full complement of men after demobilisation, and the now almost successful struggle for Degrees for women contributed to a strange biological excitement in which the eagerness of the women students to associate with young men after so many years of war was intensified by the chaperon rules which not only made it difficult to do so, but appeared specially important to female dons anxious to create a good impression in the university.

The swarming male undergraduates varied in type from the ex-officers - mainly Colonials - on shortened courses who were determined to have a good time and forget, to the small but very articulate group of young writers such as Edmund Blunden, Charles Morgan, Louis Golding, Robert Graves, L. A. G. Strong, Robert Nichols and Edgell Rickword, who were seriously analysing the effect of the War upon themselves and their world. Between these two extremes, large numbers of exhausted ex-soldiers pursued their War Degrees with the dull-eyed determination of tired brains, while the normal contingent of nineteen-year-old boys just up from Public Schools oscillated between a profound inferiority complex in the presence of the ex-officers, and a noisy determination to make their youthful presence felt in this abnormal university. A few of the latter found the intense post-war atmosphere a first-rate forcing house for the talents of those whose vitality had not been impaired by four years of strain.

Whatever their type, one and all combined to create that ‘eatdrink-and-be-merry-for-to-morrow-we-die’ atmosphere which seemed to have drifted from the trenches
via
Paris hotels and London night-clubs into the Oxford colleges. The War generation was forcibly coming back to life, but continued to be possessed by the desperate feeling that life was short. An inexplicable sense of urgency led, as in wartime leaves, to a greedy grasping after the second-rate lest the first-rate should never materialise. For a time the normal interest in Final Schools became almost as unfashionable at Somerville as it usually was at Magdalen or Exeter; reaction against the sex-stagnation of the War meant that for the first time in their ascetic history, the women’s colleges were obsessed by those values - so familiar to provincial towns - in which success is measured in terms of sex-attraction rather than by intellectual achievement.

This phase passed quickly enough with the departure, in 1920 and 1921, of the undergraduates who had returned from the War. As far as the women were concerned, it had to pass, for the intense competition for vacancies at their four colleges had made the conditions of residence almost as inexorable as death; there was literally no room for students who did not intend to work all or most of the time, and tutors had always a rod in pickle for the backs of the would-be frivolous. The post-war outbreak was sufficiently rare to be satirised in the 1920 Somerville Going-Down play in a song which was sung to the then popular tune of ‘O Hel—, O Hel-’:

Oh pen—, oh pen—, oh penetrating eye!
Why do you gaze so coldly from the High?
Say, is the cause which makes your glances freeze
Our men—, our men—, our many ‘unchapped’ teas?

Ostensibly, that term, I was working once again at the recurrent Tudors and Stuarts, and studying the portentous topic of political science; actually, my mind was in a condition of heated chaos which I managed to camouflage only by dividing with another student the Somerville Coombs Prize for ‘the best work in History’ done during the year. Perpetually through my head, interfering with the detached contemplation of Hobbes’s
Leviathan
and Mill on
Liberty
, ran a sentence from one of the Elizabethan documents: ‘The Queen of Scots is the mother of a gallant son, but I am a barren stock.’

What follies they drove some of us into, the biological needs of that tense, turbulent year! I myself even became argumentatively engaged for a few weeks to an undergraduate taking a ‘shortened course’ at one of the less conspicuous colleges - an error of judgment which, in the light of the sorrowful but dignified past, soon filled me with deep humiliation. As soon as I went down with Winifred, in July, to the Cornwall house that I had shared the previous summer with Hope Milroy, I put a speedy end to an intolerable situation which no neurotic metamorphosis seemed by then to excuse. That evening I breathed again in grateful freedom, with a sense of emerging into normal daylight after a night of delirium, yet the next day I wrote one more bitter poem, which was almost the last of my post-war efforts. I did not send it to any of the Oxford magazines, and it certainly would not have found favour in the eyes of my feminist friends of a year or two later, for it was called ‘The Superfluous Woman’.

Back at Oxford after a vacation spent in reading Grotius and Machiavelli and Treitschke in preparation for my special subject, ‘International Relations’, I was more than ever a victim of delusions. My lodging in Keble Road had now been changed for a supposedly superior room in a Bevington Road house where Winifred was also living; it contained five large mirrors and for this reason had been selected for me by the Bursar, who was amusedly aware of that vain interest in clothes for which my fellow-seniors were accustomed good-humouredly to tease me. This ground-floor habitation, which faced due north and was invaded at night by armies of large, fat mice, soon became for me a place of horror; I avoided it from breakfast till bed-time, and if ever I had to go in to change my clothes or fetch a book, I pressed my hands desperately against my eyes lest five identical witches’ faces should suddenly stare at me from the cold, remorseless mirrors. Because of the mice, and the constant watch on the impending witch’s beard, I became progressively unable to sleep; the old inability to put the secret dread into words prevented me from asking the Bursar to change my room, and I took to spending the nights on a couch in Winifred’s attic. The next term, though the sleeplessness persisted, the hallucinations began at last slowly to die away; and for the fact that they did not quite conquer me,
Oxford Poetry
, 1920, and the objective, triumphant struggle for women’s Degrees were probably, together with Winifred’s eager and patient understanding, jointly responsible.

8

The term after I had published my article, ‘The Point of View of a Woman Student’, in the second number of the
Oxford Outlook
, the editor of the weekly
Oxford Chronicle
, a competently managed local newspaper which represented both Town and Gown, sent for me and asked if I would care to undertake a small piece of journalistic work. Could I contribute a weekly column of half a dozen paragraphs describing the activities of the women’s colleges, similar to that habitually sent in by the men? He offered me 10
s
. 6
d
. for each contribution and I accepted with enthusiasm; not only would the four guineas more than cover my book bill for each term, but I should really have started to tread the path of authentic, remunerated journalism. I had lately begun to imagine, quite correctly, that I should not for years be able to live on the proceeds of any book that I might write, and free-lance journalism, if only I could push my way into that charmed circle which seemed to exclude everyone who had not already - God knew how - made a reputation, seemed by far the most agreeable and appropriate method of supplementing an elusive income. Consequently, when my History tutor of the previous summer had contemptuously described the vivacious but utterly uninformed essays on ‘The Great Discoverers’ and ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ which I inflicted upon her, as ‘mere journalism’, I did not feel so ashamed of the criticism as she evidently expected.

‘I may make a little money,’ I wrote triumphantly of the
Chronicle
suggestion to my mother, ‘unless the Principals of the women’s colleges interfere; I hear they are afraid of topical articles for fear anything will reflect on them.’ The desire of Degree-seeking Principals, during a difficult period of post-war excitement, to represent their students as meek, chaste little angels, who would never under any circumstances criticise the university nor incur the wrath of the proctors, did indeed create an obstacle upon which the
Chronicle
editor had not reckoned, for as soon as I began to demand from the other colleges those simple details about debates and hockey-matches which I required for my column, I found my contemporaries, especially at Lady Margaret Hall, timidly unwilling to supply them. So I went again to the editor and explained to him that, at a time when every woman don was waiting in nervous trepidation for Convocation’s verdict on Degrees, it would probably be wise to ask official permission for any activity which could possibly be construed as an innovation.

The editor, being a reasonable man, grasped the position and wrote to the Principal of Somerville, asking if I might contribute the paragraphs and even offering to submit them to her before publication. No immediate answer was forthcoming to this request, and when, after several days’ delay, I inquired from the Somerville senior student if she knew what was happening, I was told that the five Principals of the women’s societies were sitting in solemn conclave over the editor’s letter. Eventually the verdict came through; the Principals had decided that I was not to be permitted to write the paragraphs, the Head of Lady Margaret Hall especially insisting that ‘she did not consider it suitable for a student to do such work’.

There was no court of appeal to which I could protest that, for a student who intended to become a journalist, it could hardly be ‘unsuitable’ to practise journalism, and that the men had contributed a similar column from time immemorial. I had perforce to accept the absurd decision and tell the editor that I could not do the work. He received the news with ludicrous dismay, but asked me to let him have as many general articles and poems as I cared to publish. In the winter of 1919-20 I found the
Oxford Chronicle
a convenient stamping-ground for a good deal of wrathful self-expression, and through this and other minor literary activities I came to know Basil Blackwell, then partner with his father in the famous bookselling and publishing business in Broad Street.