Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (79 page)

None of these political topics were as popular with my pupils as the summer exploits of the Everest expedition and the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb at the end of the year, but no event caused more temporary excitement than the culmination of the Irish troubles, which had revived after the establishment of the Free State at the end of 1921, in the murder of Sir Henry Wilson on June 22nd.

This former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who had been returned unopposed as M.P. for North Down the previous February, was shot in broad daylight on the doorstep of his London house as a result of his anti-Sinn Fein policy, and for over a week a somewhat confused popular imagination endowed him with the halo of a great national hero and martyr. One chill, rainy morning at the end of June, Winifred and I pushed our way through half-hysterical crowds to the Blackfriars end of Fleet Street, and there watched Sir Henry’s funeral procession majestically mount the curve of Ludgate Hill. As the bier crept upwards to St Paul’s, the divine wailing of Chopin’s Funeral March - swelling, at the steps of the Cathedral, into its final outburst of triumphant sorrow:

- lent an inappropriate sanctity to the exit of that hard-bitten warrior, who in his own heyday had played off generals and statesmen against one another with singularly little compunction.

Of this and other symptoms of the world’s distress I tried to give impartial descriptions to my pupils; although I belonged as yet to no political Party, and had not reached the age at which women were then permitted to vote, I sometimes ventured audaciously to differ from Sir John Marriott’s interpretations of current events. On the whole - though I chafed perpetually to get back from them to my writing - I was agreeably happy at both my schools, and felt grateful to fate for allowing me to finance the work I really cared for at the cost of such tolerable employment. My aunt and the South Kensington headmistress were both willing, it seemed, to accept my standard of values; they employed me less for the subjects I taught or the way that I taught them, than for the life of literature and politics that I was trying to live. To the girls, at any rate, I appeared to represent a breath of vital wind blowing through their circumscribed classrooms from a thrilling world of public affairs, and they never tired of listening to the exciting, humorous, humiliating or triumphant stories of my varied adventures on League of Nations Union platforms.

4

Early in February 1922, when I had begun to regard the Union’s continued forgetfulness of my existence as one of the disappointing but inevitable facts of everyday life, a telephone message suddenly inquired whether I would take the place of a speaker who had succumbed to influenza. The meeting, my informant said, was a large affair on the following evening at a Baptist chapel in Watford, capable of holding an audience of two thousand; did I think that I could tackle so formidable a gathering? On my now established principle of never refusing anything, I replied as usual that I would, and in consequence spent a night and day of apprehensive anguish. There was no time to get up a new speech, and my few weeks of teaching had already shown me that the lengthy ‘specimen lecture’ could not possibly be delivered in full, so I reduced myself almost to delirium by the endeavour to make a digestible summary of all the chief points.

The next evening, after rehearsing the lecture before the looking-glass until my head was ready to split with nervous tension, I went down to Watford. When I arrived at the Baptist chapel after a shuddering search through dim, half-lighted streets, fifteen elderly females huddled in tweed coats awaited me in the vestry. The great hall next door was empty and dark, and I realised, to my crestfallen relief, that this was the meeting. Being then quite incapable of a hasty, informal speech, I breathlessly delivered the whole of my portentous discourse, but the long-suffering audience did not appear to mind, and even looked quite humanly amused. The local secretary must have given a tolerant report to Grosvenor Crescent, for twenty-four hours later I was again sent out, through a snowstorm, to act as substitute speaker at a meeting in Fulham, where the sceptical Cockney chairwoman introduced me to the audience as ‘the young person sent down by ’eadquarters to tell us about the League o’ Nytions’.

After that, for the greater part of the next three years and sometimes as often as four times a week, I made speeches or led discussions on the League in almost every London suburb and in numerous small towns and villages all over the South of England and the Midlands. Such names as Hounslow and Bromley, Fleet and Broadstairs, King’s Lynn and Norwich, remain in my mind without reviving any particular impression. One of my most successful lectures was given at University College, Nottingham, on the historical development of the peace ideal. Another, addressed to a garden meeting near Beaconsfield, followed an authoritative discourse by Mr H. A. L. Fisher, once Minister of Education and now warden of that Oxford college which has entered with such persistence into my private life; when it was over, he and his wife charitably took me home in their car, though the frivolous garments that I had selected for the occasion could hardly have conformed to their academic standards of suitability. At Southwell, the tiny cathedral city on the edge of Sherwood Forest where I spoke to a selection of the local congregation, I stayed at the comfortable house of Archdeacon Conybeare, a keen-faced and stimulating cousin of Rose Macaulay. After an hour’s conversation when the meeting was over, I felt as though I had known this sardonic and benevolent clergyman all my life. The next day he showed me, in the Cathedral, some records of fallen Sherwood Foresters which included Edward’s name, and characteristically refrained from intrusive condolences when I blew my nose fiercely and became temporarily speechless.

All through the autumn of 1922, the chief subjects asked for by audiences were the Greco-Turkish conflict which had sent thousands of refugees flying in terror from devastated Smyrna, and the League scheme for the reconstruction of Austria. I had to deal with both these topics at a curious open-air gathering in Penge, where I spoke from the same platform as two Members of Parliament and a Liberal candidate. This meeting, described in the pink advance leaflets as ‘A Grand Open-Air Rally’, was held on a small three-cornered piece of public ground known as the Triangle - ‘the usual sort of thing,’ I wrote to my mother, who was then in Cornwall; ‘grass and one or two trees enclosed with a railing in the middle of some wide cross roads in a very slummy district. ’Buses, trams, etc., were going by all the time. We had a big platform erected on this triangle against the railings and facing it on the opposite side of the road was a large pub. Just at the back of it and going under the triangle, was a big “Gentleman’s Lavatory” of the underground variety. Consequently our audience mainly consisted of the gentlemen who patronised both the pub and the lavatory. The former variety was inclined to be argumentative and one particularly truculent gentleman had to be removed by a policeman.’

By 1923 I had been promoted from isolated speeches to giving ‘courses’ of four or six lectures, and with one of these series, given to a village audience at Mere, in Wiltshire, I combined an almost identical set delivered in the Parish Hall at Gillingham, in Dorset. For four weeks in succession I was entertained to luncheon by the Clergy House at Gillingham, where half a dozen raw, cheerful young curates consumed enormous platefuls of cold beef and boiled potatoes. The cleric then presiding over this animated table was the Rev. R. C. Abbott, a courteous and intelligent man with a strong sense of humour, who afterwards became, for two years, Bishop of Sherbourne. Although a Scholar of Trinity and the Seventh Wrangler of his year, he was accustomed to keep his youthful curates in a good humour by regaling them with ludicrous parish anecdotes or simple schoolboy ‘howlers’ of a Scriptural variety. (‘So they brought Him a penny. And Jesus said: “Whose is this miserable subscription?” They say unto Him: “Cæsar’s.” So He said: “Return it to Cæsar.” ’)

In retrospect I am still grateful to the organisers of my lectures at Gillingham and Mere for always appearing to take me seriously, and treating me as the mature woman and competent lecturer that I sometimes felt but never succeeded in looking. Photographs of the time now show me that I still gave the impression, at most, of a juvenile twenty-three; it seemed strange and a little humiliating that so many storms should have passed over my head without leaving any apparent trace upon my external personality. Organisers and secretaries were apt to greet me at stations with fallen faces and the irrepressibly spontaneous exclamation: ‘Are
you
the speaker? I was looking for somebody
older
!’ and on one deplorable occasion the disappointed words emerged: ‘You don’t mean to say that
you’re
Miss Brittain? I thought headquarters was sending us a
proper
lecturer !’

In spite of such crushing criticisms, the Union continued to urge me forth upon long hot journeys in trains, or long cold journeys in trams, until the halls and chapels at which I spoke, and the houses and vicarages at which I stayed while thus carrying out the resolution made before taking History at Oxford, gradually merged into a vague kaleidoscopic dream of swaying lights and upturned faces; of sparsely furnished clerical drawing-rooms with leather-backed books, horsehair sofas and crochet antimacassars; of high teas in complacent Nonconformist parlours; of chilly bedrooms of all denominations, with semi-carpeted floors, white tomb-like jugs filled with cold water on marble-topped washstands, and black grates camouflaged with newspaper or coloured crinkled tissue. Sometimes - especially in the households of Anglican clergymen, where almost without exception the level of hospitality was far higher than that attempted by the laity - a bright, consoling fire burned in the alien hearth, but this was almost as rare as a bathroom or really hot water. So seldom, indeed, was even tepid water supplied to me at night after the longest and dustiest journey, that I was driven to conclude that most English families are still in the habit of retiring to bed with the day’s grime deposited on their persons. It was all one vast demonstration-lesson in those homes of England which are so widely regarded as the backbone of our national morality, one prolonged personal experience of the great British middle class with its universal standards of respectable discomfort.

5

Each League of Nations Union speaker who could afford the cost of a short holiday in Switzerland was accustomed to visit Geneva every September for the meeting of the League Assembly, in order to revive with direct contacts and ‘local colour’ the material for next year’s speeches.

The Assemblies of those early years were worth attending, for the Foreign Ministers of the Great Powers had not yet realised how easily, by means of a little tact and some elegant camouflage, the League might be used as a stage on which they could play the skilled game of the Old Diplomacy circumspectly dressed up in international costume. Before 1925, perhaps as many as fifty per cent of the delegates who went to Geneva honestly believed that the organisation of international peace was a workable proposition - as indeed it might be, although for the past half-dozen years it has never been permitted to become anything of the kind - and thus entered with enthusiasm into the work of debates and committees. Only a few individual representatives amongst the Great Powers - Lord Cecil, for instance, and M. Herriot, and Mrs Swanwick - could be reliably included amongst the fifty per cent, but at that time certain delegates from the smaller Powers, such as Dr Nansen of Norway, Count Mensdorff of Austria, M. Motta of Switzerland, M. Branting and Madame Bugge-Wicksell of Sweden, determinedly created an Assembly ‘atmosphere’, and kept in check the insolent nationalism of their more aggressive colleagues.

But when I first saw Geneva, in August 1922, the Third Assembly had not yet begun, and I joined a League of Nations Union Summer School which happened to coincide with an early meeting of the Mandates Commission. Winifred, who was now also a speaker for the Union, went with me to Geneva, and together we heard Sir Joseph Cook, my Newcastle predecessor who had become High Commissioner for Australia the previous January, wrathfully endeavouring to answer satisfactorily some awkward questions asked by the Commissioners on the subject of Nauru, a phosphates-producing island which, as a ‘C’ Mandate, had recently been allocated to Australian supervision. Whenever I was not zealously occupied in collecting material for my first commissioned article, for
Time and Tide
, on ‘Women at Geneva’, I joined my fellow thirsters for knowledge in the sultry lecture rooms at the Palais des Nations to hear the words of wisdom that fell from the inspired lips of Secretariat speakers.

We returned to England to read, in an evening paper bought at Folkestone, of the death of Lord Northcliffe, but a week later another death occurred which seemed, to us who went frequently to the Union Office, far more untimely and incongruous. In Geneva the members of the staff who were attending the Summer School had anxiously waited, day by day, for news of their brilliant colleague, Elizabeth Murray, who had accompanied some of them to a conference in South-Eastern Europe, and was now lying dangerously ill in France. On August 23rd I sent Winifred, who had gone to Yorkshire, the brief
Times
notice of her death from appendicitis in Auvergne.