Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (94 page)

And the letter which crossed the Atlantic agreeing with my plans showed me how truly he had indeed understood. ‘That it is I,’ he wrote, ‘who shall stand there is but the end of a long story.’

On June 16th, when G. was due to arrive home in the
Aquitania
, I went down to Southampton to meet his boat. It was one of the warmest days of that dry, sunny month, and I dressed myself with particular elegance in a new trousseau garment because he had told me that, in order to save towards our European honeymoon, he intended to travel third class. But I became, quite suddenly, so deeply apprehensive lest the companion whom I had not seen for ten months should prove after all to be a stranger in whose quality I had been mistaken, that Winifred characteristically decided to go with me to Southampton.

‘If he’s just as he was,’ she said, ‘I can easily disappear, but if you find you don’t like him, perhaps it will be useful to have me there.’

Being then unacquainted with the vagaries of Atlantic steam-ships, we took for granted that the probable time of arrival given us the previous day by the Cunard office could be implicitly relied upon, but as our train slid smoothly past the harbour, I saw with a pang of unspeakable disappointment the four scarlet funnels of the
Aquitania
already towering motionless in the docks. To our dismay we learnt at the station that she had arrived nearly two hours before, but the faint possibility that steerage passengers were disembarked long after their moneyed but completely uninteresting superiors persuaded me to make a hasty expedition to the boat before taking the first train back to London. A sympathetic taxicab driver, grasping our predicament, offered to drive us rapidly to the docks, and we were skidding dizzily round corners and over level crossings when I saw, for the moment stationary on a stretch of line close to the road, a long and impressive train indubitably labelled ‘SOUTHAMPTON-WATERLOO BOAT EXPRESS’.

It was, as I learnt later, the last of the three boat-trains, and there didn’t seem to be much chance of finding G. on it even though he was not one of those elevated beings whose class entitled them to arrive in London at the earliest possible moment. But at least, I thought, I might get to Waterloo by it before he had collected his luggage, and thus mitigate the bewildered distress that he must certainly have felt when I apparently broke, without warning, my promise to meet him. So I ordered the taxi to stop as near to the line as it could go, and the driver, appreciating our change of plan, drew up immediately below the lofty carriages.

Just as we reached it the train began gently to move, and with Winifred propelling me vigorously from behind I scrambled, regardless of the dove-coloured coat-frock and new terra-cotta hat, up the steep step from the dirty siding. Completely ruining my pale sue‘de gloves with the coal-dust on the grimy handle, I opened the nearest door and fell into the corridor, while Winifred, panting at my heels, was herself pushed up by the taxi-driver - to whom, with great presence of mind, she flung a ten-shilling note from the window as we were wafted away. A scandalised porter shouted at us, but I waved my ticket and harbour permit, and as the wheels were now moving quite fast, he relinquished his conscientious endeavour to prevent this unorthodox method of boarding a boat-train. I gave one swift glance round to see that Winifred was safe, and then, climbing desperately over trunks and packing-cases and junctions of carriages, I began a frantic and none too confident search for G.

I was half-way up the train and had almost abandoned hope, when I came upon him in the process, like myself, of exploring the corridor - very tall, very thin, a little dishevelled, and forgetful, in his urgent seeking, of the haughty air worn by young dons who deliberately go steerage. Quite suddenly he saw me and started eagerly forward, his hands outstretched and his face a radiance of recognition beneath his wide-brimmed hat. And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistake; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.

Notes to Introduction

1
Vera Brittain (VB), 28 August-3 September 1933,
Chronicle of Friendship. Vera Brittain’s Diary of the Thirties 1932-1939
, edited by Alan Bishop, London: Gollancz, 1986, p. 148.

2
The main British reviews of
Testament of Youth
in 1933 included: N. Mitchison,
Week-End Review
, 26 August; J. Brophy,
Sunday Referee
, 27 August; S. Jameson,
Yorkshire Post
, 28 August; E. Sharp,
Manchester Guardian
, 29 August;
Morning Post
, 29 August;
Queen
, 30 August;
Times Literary Supplement
, 31 August; J. Agate,
Daily Express
, 31 August; C. Mackenzie,
Daily Mail
, 31 August; R. Pippel,
Daily Herald
, 31 August; P. Hinkson,
Time and Tide
, 2 September; S. Jameson,
The Sunday Times
, 3 September;
Punch
, 6 September;
The Listener
, 6 September;
Church Times
, 8 September; R. West,
Daily Telegraph
, 15 September;
New Statesman & Nation
, 16 September; M.R. Shaw,
The New English Weekly
, 12 October.

3
R. L. Duffus. ‘A Revealing Record of the So-Called “Lost Generation”,
The New York Times
, 15 October 1933. VB’s experiences as a lecturer in the United States are recorded in
Thrice a Stranger: New Chapters of Autobiography
, London: Gollancz, 1938.

4
Virginia Woolf, 2 September 1933,
The Diary of Virginia Woolf
, vol. 4, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, London: The Hogarth Press, 1982, p. 177.

5
Virginia Woolf to VB, 15 June 1934. VB Archive, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

6
Marion Shaw, ‘Alien Experiences: Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain in the Thirties’ in
Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After
, edited by Keith Williams and Steven Matthews, London: Longman, 1997.

7
VB to Elizabeth Nicholas, 16 October 1961. VB Collection, Somerville College, Oxford.

8
The published version of the diary,
Chronicle of Youth. Vera Brittain’s War Diary 1913-1917
, edited by Alan Bishop with Terry Smart, London: Gollancz, 1981, reduces the diary’s length by about a half. The original manuscript is in the VB Archive at McMaster University, while a typed transcript of the complete diary is available in the VB Collection at Somerville College, Oxford.

9
VB,
Testament of Experience
, London: Gollancz, 1957, p. 77.

10
VB to Winifred Holtby, 24 August 1931. Winifred Holtby Archive, Hull Central Library.

11
For the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of
Testament of Youth
, see Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge,
Vera Brittain: A Life
, London: Chatto & Windus, 1995; Virago, 2001, especially pp. 236-68.

12
George Catlin to VB, 21 February 1933. VB Archive, McMaster University.

13
Oliver Edwards, ‘The Writer’s War’,
The Times
, 19 November 1964.

14
See Joyce Ann Wood, ‘Vera Brittain and the VAD Experience. Testing the Popular Image of the Volunteer Nurse’, Ph.D thesis, Department of History, University of South Carolina, 2000. UMI no. 9981306. For a more critical view of VB’s portrayal of the VAD experience see Sharon Ouditt,
Fighting Forces, Writing Women. Identity and Ideology in the First World War
, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 3-4.

15
Rebecca West, ‘The Agony of the Human Soul in War’,
Daily Telegraph
, 15 September 1933.

16
VB,
Testament of Youth
, p. 12.

17
Deborah Gorham,
Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life
, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 234-5.

18
VB to Edward Brittain, 8 March 1916,
Letters From a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends
, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, London: Little, Brown, 1998, p. 242.

19
For finding aids to the VB Archive at McMaster, including details of unpublished works, see
McMaster Library Research News
, vol. 4, nos. 3, 4 and 5 (1977-79), and the website
http://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/findaids/findaids/b/brittain.htm
.

20
VB,
Verses of a V.A.D
., London: Erskine MacDonald, 1918; reprinted with an introduction by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Imperial War Museum, 1995.

21
For the question of Edward Brittain’s sexuality, see Berry and Bostridge,
Vera Brittain: A Life
, pp. 129-35.

22
A recent account of the publication of ‘disillusioned’ novels and memoirs, which observes that disenchantment with the First World War was mainly literary in character and limited in its impact on other war veterans and the public in general, is Gary Sheffield,
Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities
, London: Headline, 2001, pp. 5-12.

23
VB to Winifred Holtby, 26 December 1928. Winifred Holtby Archive, Hull Central Library.

24
VB,
Time and Tide
, 4 October 1929.

25
VB,
Nation and Athenaeum
, 24 January 1931.

26
See the extensive bibliography of war books by women in Claire Tylee,
The Great War and Women’s Consciousness. Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914-64
, London: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 263-71, and
Women and World War 1. The Written Response
, edited by Dorothy Goldman, London: Macmillan, 1993.

27
Quoted in Berry and Bostridge,
Vera Brittain: A Life
, p. 240.

28
A point made by Maroula Joannou in ‘Vera Brittain’s
Testament of Youth
revisited’,
Literature and History
, 2, 1993, p. 67.

29
Winifred Holtby to VB, 27 August 1932. Winifred Holtby Archive, Hull Central Library.

30
Thus in the foreword to the ‘1st version, Holograph manuscript’ of
Testament of Youth
, at McMaster, VB writes of showing ‘what the whole war and post-war period . . . meant to the women of my generation’. In the published edition, this is amended to ‘the men and women of my generation’.

31
C.F. Kernot,
British Public Schools’ War Memorials
, London: Roberts & Newton, 1927, p. 136.

32
J.M. Winter,
The Great War and the British People
, London: Macmillan, 1986, pp. 65-99, provides a detailed study of war losses relating to ‘The Lost Generation’ myth.

33
Robert Wohl,
The Generation of 1914
, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, p. 115.

34
VB, 23 August 1933,
Chronicle of Friendship
, p. 147.

35
The discrepancies between the records kept by the base administrative staff at Etaples and VB’s account in
Testament of Youth
of nursing German prisoners are discussed by Douglas Gill in ‘No Compromise with Truth. Vera Brittain in 1917’,
Krieg Und Literatur
, V, 1999, pp. 67-93. See also Vera Brittain, Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After, edited with an introduction by Mark Bostridge, London: Virago, 2008, xxxiii-xxxiv.

36
VB to Edward Brittain, 27 April 1917,
Letters from a Lost Generation
, p. 344.

37
VB to Edward Brittain, 31 May 1916,
Letters from a Lost Generation
, p. 259.

38
For examples of this unwillingness, see Berry and Bostridge,
Vera Brittain: A Life
, pp. 60-2.

39
VB, ‘A Woman Speaks for Her Generation’,
Sunday Chronicle
, 23 October 1933. For an interesting examination of the ways in which the Battle of the Somme solidified into myth in VB’s writing, from her diary account to
Testament of Youth
, see Alan Bishop, ‘The Battle of the Somme and Vera Brittain’,
English Literature of the Great War Revisited
, edited by Michel Roucoux, Amiens: University of Picardy, 1986, pp. 125-42.

40
Terry Castle reconsiders
Testament of Youth
in the light of 9/11, in
Courage, mon amie
, London: London Review of Books, 2003, pp. 41-54.

41
VB, manuscript material for
Testament of Youth
. VB Archive, McMaster University.

a

Since writing the description of the mutiny at Étaples I have learnt from ‘Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914-1918’, by John Brophy and Eric Partridge (Eric Partridge Ltd.), that the only account of it hitherto published appeared in the
Manchester Guardian
on several dates during February, 1930. The mutiny was due to repressive conditions in the Étaples camps and was provoked by the military police.