Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (73 page)

A few of us were divided that day into groups of ‘distinguished students’ - scholars and exhibitioners, Colonials, games captains, ‘notable old students’, and war-workers. I preferred the last of these groups to the first, and stood rather self-consciously between Winifred and a First-Year who had been quartermaster in a Surrey Red Cross hospital. Among the ‘distinguished students’ who awaited the Queen there was naturally no group - though even then its nucleus might have been collected - which described itself, in accordance with the label afterwards bestowed upon it by the popular Press, as ‘the Somerville School of Novelists’. I cannot remember whether, among the Somervillians from previous ‘Years’, Rose Macaulay or Dorothy Sayers or Margaret Kennedy or Doreen Wallace was present in the hall that day, but Winifred Holtby and Hilda Reid appeared there as Third-Years, while among the new students who had come up the previous term was Sylvia Thompson, whose
Hounds of Spring
was to carry her so early in life into the ranks of the best-sellers. Sylvia, at eighteen, already possessed the luscious beauty of a ripened grape; her elaborate clothes were carefully selected, and she wore large drooping hats and coloured shoes when these were still a daring and unusual fashion. But her reputation for schoolgirl precocity had not the same interest for us who were mature undergraduates with literary ambitions as the rising star of Rose Macaulay, who after pressing slowly towards fame before and during the War with several novels, had suddenly achieved it in 1920 with the brilliant and cynical
Potterism
. To Winifred and myself she was a portent, a symbol, an encouraging witness to the fact that a university education could produce writers of a non-academic yet first-rate calibre; and we collected all the tales of her, both authentic and apocryphal, that we could gather together from dons and old students.

On the afternoon of the royal visit, those of us - namely, Winifred and myself - who were entitled to active-service ribbons had been ordered to wear them, and as the Queen, followed by Princess Mary and tall, gracious Lady Ampthill, whose appreciative letter about
Verses of a V.A.D
. I still secretly treasured, moved solemnly up the large oak-panelled dining-hall, I reflected with a slightly bitter satisfaction that, for the first time since returning to Oxford, I hadn’t to feel ashamed of the War.

Noticing the ribbons, the Queen and Princess Mary both stopped in front of me; had I enjoyed my war-work? the Princess inquired. I compromised with truth by saying that I had preferred nursing to anything else while the War was on, and had just begun an enthusiastic conversation with Lady Ampthill about 24 General, when I noticed, as I subsequently related to my mother, that the Queen had ‘suddenly turned round to Winifred who was standing beside me. She had on her blue coat frock and a high white blouse collar; her hair was very nicely brushed and waved and the light was shining on it. She really looked quite beautiful and Mary was evidently rather struck with her appearance. She said to Winifred, “I see you were abroad too - where were you?” and Winifred said, “I was at Abbeville, your Majesty.” The Queen then asked, “Were you nursing too?” and I was terrified she was going to say, “I was in the Waacs,” which would hardly be tactful to the Queen, but fortunately Miss P. came up and said, “This is Miss Holtby, who was in Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps.” . . . Winifred by this time was scarlet all over, but I wasn’t so much impressed by the Queen as she had been, because her manner is so exactly like Aunt F.’s that it seemed quite familiar. She looked stiff but really very impressive; she is almost as tall as Winifred so no wonder she makes the King look small.’

11

The weeks immediately preceding Schools in the summer of 1921 were as inauspicious for me as for the whole country, which after the evanescent post-war boom was already beginning its long descent into trade depression and unemployment. By the end of the Easter term my sinister hallucinations were practically gone, but I had fought so long against threatening, indefinite neuroses that I fell an easy victim to a sharp attack of influenza. The college nurse for whose institution Winifred and I had contended gave me an efficient care very different from the perfunctory attention meted out to me during the uncomfortable illness of 1915, but I returned to London considerably devitalised, only to find my mother stricken down by the same exasperating disease.

Nearly all my vacations had been - as was perhaps inevitable during those disturbed and difficult years of transition - to some extent interrupted by family illnesses or domestic crises. After the hard-working Bessie had left to get married, efficient single-handed maids appeared, in spite of the general demobilisation, to be almost as difficult to find as they were during the War; the multitudinous obligations of domesticity seemed overwhelming, and I was involved in a perpetual struggle between my clamant reading and my remorseful conscience. Trained nurses were not popular at home owing to the strong probability that a starched, bustling presence would completely demolish the tottering edifice of household organisation; so I nursed my mother by day for about a fortnight, and at night plunged from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m. into a course of belated, frantic revision which quite extinguished my now eager interest in the developing problem of Reparations and Greece’s new war with Turkey. By the time that I went back to Oxford for my final term, the intermittent insomnia of the spring had become chronic, and throughout the weeks before Schools I rarely slept until 5 a.m.

The May and June which began that long, radiant summer had nevertheless their compensations, of which the most spectacular centred round Eights Week. I had by now a good many undisturbing acquaintances among the men undergraduates, and I watched the upward progress of New College from bump to bump in the sociable atmosphere of the college barges. ‘I wore the yellow dress and blue hat on Thursday and Hilda said it was a vision of beauty,’ I told my mother on May 19th; ‘to-day I shall wear the patterned voile dress and the black hat with the feather.’

New College ended as head of the river that summer, but the ex-rifleman was no longer there to watch the races; he had gone down the previous year with a wartime History Degree, with Distinction, in order to become a lecturer in a northern university. I took little interest then in university prizes, which had not been open to women students before Michaelmas, 1920, and did not know until long afterwards that he had broken Oxford’s prize record by winning three of these prizes in eighteen months, as well as being placed
proxime accessit
for a fourth before he went down to begin a career which was later to include the practice as well as the theory of politics.

On the long, hot evenings which followed Eights, Winifred and I occasionally rested from the race against time of our last-moment revision by taking a punt up the river with Hilda Reid or Grace Desmond (daughter of G. G. Desmond of the
Daily News
, who later stood as Labour candidate for Bath, and in 1923 introduced us to our first Labour rally after Robert Smillie had been elected as M.P. for Morpeth). The placid reaches around the Cherwell Hotel provided an ideal atmosphere for the composition of the Going-Down play, which Winifred and another inventive Third-Year were writing, with the assistance of parodies contributed chiefly by Hilda and myself. It was called
Bolshevism in Baghdad
, and was based upon the performance by O.U.D.S., the previous term, of
Antony and Cleopatra
, with C. B. Ramage and Cathleen Nesbitt in the title-rôles. Having seen the two of them walking up and down the garden at Somerville, where Cathleen Nesbitt knew one of the dons, we had drawn conclusions not dissimilar from those arrived at by other junior members of the university, and in November of that year, when we were undergraduates no longer and were about to take our B.A. Degrees, I was able to write triumphantly to Winifred: ‘What a swiz for all the people who swore that there was nothing in it between Ramage and Cathleen Nesbitt . . . If only it weren’t the day we go to Oxford, I would go to the wedding.’

In June 1921, however, the rumours of an impending marriage were still being vigorously denied, and in the Going-Down play I had merely to act the part of the not-yet-attached heroine, Cleopatra O’Nesbitt, a romantic combination of the Queen of Egypt with our Irish History tutor, who as a young Oxford don was being sent to convert the Baghdad Bolsheviks to political sanity.

‘Do you know if my old white satin frock is about anywhere?’ I inquired anxiously of my mother. ‘I have got to try and look like Cathleen Nesbitt as Cleopatra in the scene where she wore white and a feather sticking up on her head.’

Whenever we felt too tired even to manufacture the ribald witticisms of the Going-Down play, we took it in turns to read Professor A. F. Pollard’s ironic
History of England
or Lytton Strachey’s newly published
Queen Victoria
aloud to each other, while the sun sank splendidly behind the willows. These two books still bring back to me the strange, half-waking dream of that summer term, in which I always felt so sleepy and yet could never sleep.

Some weeks afterwards my young tutor, once optimistic but now regretfully kind, remarked to me of my Schools papers: ‘They represent, I take it, the best you can do when your energy and intellect are at their nadir. I feel sure that for some reason or other the edge of your mind was blunted’ - and perhaps the excuse was as true as any that our compassionate friends make for us when we fail to come up to their expectations. Certainly, as my Finals approached, I began to feel more and more ill and apprehensive; the enormous cumulative tiredness of the past seven years seemed to gather itself up into a crushing weight which lay like a clod upon my brain. The week of the examination itself was a feverish torment, and two of the papers completely annihilated such flickering powers as I still possessed. One of the subjects, Early English History, had always bored me to the limit of impatience. Are Vinagradoff on
The Growth of the Manor
and J. H. Round on
Scutage
still the authorities for this remote and difficult period, I wonder, or has some incisive and lucid writer at last let in light on its tangled obscurity? The other subject, Political Science, I was supposed to have studied during the hectic term of my ludicrous little engagement; the ‘
γ
+’ - a very poor mark - that I received for it was the price of that unbalanced excursion into spurious romance.

Waiting with Winifred in the Examination Schools for our Viva Voce a month later, after recapitulating the papers in my head for nights on end and dwelling lugubriously upon tutorial expectations, I doubtless looked unduly pale and extinguished, for a benevolent fellow-student who had brought a flask insisted upon fortifying me with a large dose of brandy. I was not accustomed to spirits, and as my name, amongst the women, came first in alphabetical order, I went almost immediately before the examiners feeling very cheerful but completely intoxicated.

To the benevolent and helpful questions on the Political Science Schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by means of which one of them, Mr G. W. Wakeling, endeavoured to make me redeem my deplorable paper, I replied with confident equanimity that I had never heard of any political scientist later than Hobbes - although I had spent several afternoons with J.-J. Rousseau, and had studied Treitschke and the
Testament Politique
of Frederick the Great as part of my Special Subject. I saw the faces of the examiners only as an agreeable blur, though I remember the amused smile that spread over the large pale countenance of Professor C. K. Webster as I gave my ridiculous answers, and the saturnine expression of the chairman, Professor H. W. C. Davis, whose alleged conviction that women students were second-rate simpletons who should never have been given Degrees on the same terms as men must certainly have been confirmed by my self-possessed idiocy. I often wondered afterwards if the young university don who had admired my articles in the
Oxford Outlook
would have maintained his respect for me and my writings had he listened in to that rag-time performance.

Immediately after the Viva, Winifred and I returned together to Yorkshire, where her parents had taken a house after retiring from their farm. There, a few days later, we learnt that we had both got Seconds - a catastrophe for which I personally ought to have been thankful, since a Third would more accurately have represented the amount of history that I knew. I was never, I think, even within jumping distance of the First of which Somerville had hopefully believed me to be capable, but Winifred came so near to that desirable goal that, under a different chairman of examiners, and in any other but that crowded year in which five hundred undergraduates took History and the usual number of examiners was doubled, she would certainly have reached it. As it was, she was viva-ed for a First for forty-five minutes; and for days the ten examiners carried her papers about with them, unable to make up their minds. After the Viva the anti-feminist chairman gave his casting vote against her, and she still maintains that she lost her First by a facetious remark about the domestic idiosyncrasies of Henry VIII.

The day after the results came out, my name - the only one beginning with ‘B’ amongst the women - was accidentally omitted from the official list published by
The Times
, and my mother, who was staying with one of her sisters, had some perturbing speculations to go through before an exchange of telegrams cleared up the mistake. Too disgusted by my failure to get a First to send in a correction to
The Times
, I had the bitter amusement during the next few days of replying to several letters tactfully condoling with me on having ‘ploughed’. The men and women tutors who had hoped that I might achieve the highest academic honours did not seriously believe that I had not even ‘satisfied the examiners’, but many of them, away on vacation, depended for their information upon
The Times
, and a good deal of agitated correspondence ensued before everyone interested realised that I was not the heroine of a dramatic
débâcle
.