Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (8 page)

Ah! l’inertie est le seul vice, Maître Erasme,
Et le seul vertu, c’est . . . l’enthousiasme.

One entry, made on December 20th, 1913, after a local dance, runs as follows: ‘It leaves me with a very unsatisfied feeling to have met so many stupid and superficial men with whom all the girls are obviously so pleased. How I wish I could meet a good strong splendid man, full of force and enthusiasm, and in earnest about his life! There must
be
such!’

I have never shown this expression of my emotional aspirations to my husband, so I do not know whether or not he would regard himself as fulfilling the description.

By 1916, the optimistic ideals of earlier years had all disappeared from the title-page of my ingenuous journal; they were replaced by a four-line verse from the writings of Paul Verlaine which has always seemed to me to represent more precisely than any other poem the heavy sense of having lived so long and been through so much that descended upon the boys and girls of my generation after a year or two of war:

Oh, qu’as tu fait, toi que voila‘
Pleurant sans cesse?
Dis, qu’as tu fait, toi que voila‘
De ta jeunesse?

William Noel Hodgson, who when only twenty was killed on the Somme, similarly lamented this lost youth which we had barely known in one of the saddest little songs that the War produced. It brought me near to weeping, I remember, when after four years of hospitals, and last leaves, and farewells, I heard it sung by Topliss Green at the Albert Hall about 1919:

Take my Youth that died to-day,
Lay him on a rose-leaf bed,—
He so gallant was and gay,—
Let them hide his tumbled head,
Roses passionate and red
That so swiftly fade away.

Let the little grave be set
Where my eyes shall never see;
Raise no stone, make no regret
Lest my sad heart break, - and yet,
For my weakness, let there be
Sprigs of rue and rosemary.

But again I anticipate. The naïve quotations from my youthful diary which I have used, and intend to use, are included in this book in order to give some idea of the effect of the War, with its stark disillusionments, its miseries unmitigated by polite disguise, upon the unsophisticated
ingénue
who ‘grew up’ (in a purely social sense) just before it broke out. The annihilating future Armageddon, of which the terrors are so often portrayed in vivid language by League of Nations Union prophets, could not possibly, I think, cause the Bright Young People of to-day, with their imperturbable realism, their casual, intimate knowledge of sexual facts, their familiarity with the accumulated experiences of us their foredoomed predecessors, one-tenth of the physical and psychological shock that the Great War caused to the Modern Girl of 1914.

It is, of course, conceivable that young women brought up, like myself, in the provinces, were more childishly and idealistically ignorant than their London contemporaries; yet, looking back upon the London girls with whom I went to school, I do not think that the difference was very great. One of them I well remember saying to me, just after she ‘came out’, that she was always afraid of going too far with men, because she really didn’t know what ‘too far’ was. I was quite unable to enlighten her, though an incident that had happened to me two or three years earlier made me certain that the vague peril was something extremely embarrassing and profoundly uncomfortable.

At the end of one school term, I had been as usual shepherded by a mistress into the train at St Pancras for the long journey to Buxton. Carefully observing the rule, which originated in contemporary White Slave Traffic alarms, that we were never to travel in carriages alone with men, she selected a compartment in which the one male passenger was safely accompanied by a respectable elderly female. Unfortunately at Kettering, the first stop after we left St Pancras, the elderly female got out, and immediately the train started again the strange man, a swarthy, black-haired individual of the commercial-traveller class, with rolling eyes and large hairy hands, came over from his corner and sat down beside me.

‘I was waiting for that old cat to get out so that we could have a nice little talk,’ he promisingly began.

More alarmed than I allowed myself to appear, I looked helplessly at the closed door leading to the corridor, but though its very existence protected me better than I realised, it was completely cut off by my companion’s insinuating bulk.

‘I see you’re going to Buxton,’ he continued, looking at my initialled suitcase. ‘How I wish I hadn’t got to get out at Leicester! Now won’t you just tell me your name?’

Encouraged by the mention of Leicester, which was only another half-hour’s journey, I responded inventively that my name was Violet Brown and that I didn’t live in Buxton but was only going there for a week to stay with friends - a fabrication inspired by the nightmarish fear that this apparition might suddenly appear in search of me on our own front doorstep.

‘And how old are you?’ he inquired, pressing closer, and looked disappointed when I answered truthfully that I was fourteen.

‘Why,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’re such a pretty little girl - I thought you must be quite seventeen! When you get home you must send me your photograph—’ and he squeezed me still further into the corner.

It was then that I realised that the train, upon which I was depending to convey me to Leicester and salvation, had suddenly come to a standstill. Some shouts were raised along the line; my enemy heard them, and informed me with satisfaction that we had broken down, and could not possibly get to Leicester for over an hour.

‘Now what a lucky thing we’re together!’ he said softly, and took my hand - a grubby enough schoolgirl’s fist, with ink-stained nails chipped by games and amateur gardening. ‘Pretty little girls like you shouldn’t bite their nails,’ he murmured playfully, examining my fingers. ‘You’ll stop biting them to please me, won’t you? - and give me a kiss to show that we’re pals?’

The leering black eyes, the pawing hands and the alcoholic breath combined with the train’s delay to drive me into a panic. Suddenly desperate, and probably more muscular than my tormentor had anticipated, I flung myself with an immense effort out of his encroaching arms, and dashed frantically into the corridor. The subdued middle-aged woman into whose compartment I blindly stumbled, flushed and hatless, regarded me with amazement, but she accepted my incoherent tale of an ‘awful man’, and pacified my agitation by giving me a share of her luncheon sandwiches. When, after quite an hour’s breakdown, we did at last pass Leicester, she went with me to retrieve my suitcase from the compartment in which I still feared to see my swarthy assailant, but he had gone.

I never related this incident to my family - the thought of the hullabaloo that would follow, of the fuss that would be made both at home and at school whenever I had to travel alone, filled me with too great a distaste - but so deep was the repugnance aroused in me that I remember it as clearly as though it had happened last week. It was not, however, until the summer of 1922, when from an open-air platform in Hyde Park I supported the Six Point Group in urging the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill by the House of Commons, that I realised the existence, as legal conceptions, of indecent assault and the age of consent.

So far as I can now judge, at eighteen I was at least as interested in social problems and in what were then always referred to as ‘the facts of life’ as most of my contemporaries, though my sexual curiosity was always a bad second to my literary ambition. Yet when the War broke out, I did not clearly understand what was meant by homosexuality, incest or sodomy, and was puzzled by the shadow that clung to the name of Oscar Wilde, whose plays I discovered in 1913 and read with a rapturous delight in their epigrams.

Nearly all the older girls with whom I went to school had been addicted to surreptitious conversations about the advent of babies; periodic discovery by parents or teachers thrust these intriguing speculations still further underground, and led to that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as
David Copperfield
and
Adam Bede
which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation. Thanks to this composite enlightenment in addition to the decorous elucidations of
Household Medicine
, I had a fairly comprehensive though somewhat Victorian idea of the primitive fashion in which the offspring of even the most civilised parents make their appearance, but of how to rear infants and train small children I had not the slightest notion either in theory or in practice, since the influence of married women in the education of girls mostly destined for wifehood and maternity was then considered even less desirable than it is to-day. I was also, despite my stock of physiological information, still extremely hazy with regard to the precise nature of the sexual act.

This half-knowledge engendered in me so fierce an antipathy to the idea of physical relationship in so far as this happened to be separable from romance, that when, soon after I left school, I was proposed to by a neighbour of ours - a large, athletic young man with limited brains and evangelical principles, who strongly disapproved of my ‘unwomanly’ ambitions, and could not possibly have been attracted by anything more substantial than my childish pretty-prettiness - my immediate and only reaction was a sense of intolerable humiliation and disgust.

When first I had to nurse a case of venereal disease - which I had hitherto seen referred to in the Press only under the mysterious title of ‘the hidden plague’ - I did not know exactly what it was; I was fully enlightened only in 1917, when in a Malta hospital I watched a syphilitic orderly die in convulsions after an injection of salvarsan. Finally, my pre-war knowledge of Army doctors and nurses was derived entirely from the more idealistic poems of Kipling, which by no means helped me to understand the suggestive words and movements, the desperate secret manœuvrings, of men and women tormented by unnecessary segregation.

It should now be clear that - easy victims as I and the boys and girls similarly reared provided, with our naïve, uninformed generosities and enthusiasms, for the war propagandist in a non-conscription country - few young women could have been less forewarned and forearmed than I was against war in general, and Army Hospital Service in particular.

2

Provincial Young-Ladyhood

IN THE ROSE-GARDEN

Dew on the pink-flushed petals,
Roseate wings unfurled;
What can, I thought, be fairer
In all the world?

Steps that were fain but faltered
(What could she else have done?)
Passed from the arbour’s shadow
Into the sun.

Noon and a scented glory,
Golden and pink and red;
‘What after all are roses
To me?’ I said.

R. A. L. July 11th, 1914.

1

But when I became, in 1912, a provincial debutante, decked out in London-bought garments that I did not know how to wear, the War was still two years away and my hospital service more than three. That unparalleled age of rich materialism and tranquil comfort, which we who grew up at its close will never see again, appeared to us to have gone on from time immemorial, and to be securely destined to continue for ever.

At my first dance, the High Peak Hunt Ball, I appeared modestly attired in the conventional white satin and pearls; this ingenuous uniform entitled me to spend the greater part of the next few weeks gyrating to the strains of ‘Dreaming’ and ‘The Vision of Salome’ in the arms of physically boisterous and conversationally inept young men. Those dances were by no means the mere gay functions that they seemed; they were supposed to test out the marriageable qualities of the young women on the basis of their popularity as dancing partners, and were therefore attended by numerous competitive chaperones who watched the proceedings with every symptom of apprehension and anxiety. Judging from the inferiority-complex permanently implanted in one or two of my contemporaries who did not come out of the test with flying colours, I am inclined to believe that provincial dances are responsible for more misery than any other commonplace experience.

Three years afterwards, as I was clearing my desk before going as a V.A.D. to London - I was quitting Buxton for ever, though I did not then realise it - I came across a ribbon-tied heap of my early dance-programmes carefully put away in a drawer. By that time so many of the fatuous young men had acquired dignity through death in France and the Dardanelles, that these records of my dances with them seemed like the incongruous souvenirs of a long-vanished and half-forgotten world - a world in which only the sinking of the
Titanic
had suddenly but quite temporarily reminded its inhabitants of the vanity of human calculations. I put the programmes back with the half-sorrowful, half-scornful indulgence that a middle-aged woman might feel when coming upon the relics of some youthful folly.