Testament of Youth

A new edition of Vera Brittain’s witness to a generation’s experience of war invites rediscovery of this classic.

This book, first published in 1933, now reissued in a handsome hardback edition, is part of the canon of WWI literature, alongside Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. It tells the true story of a determined, clever girl, born into middle-class provincial society in 1893, who won a place at Somerville College, Oxford (then an achievement in itself) and who brilliantly captures the protracted horrors of a war into which her generation was precipitated unprepared.

 

Vera Brittain spent those years as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in London, France and Malta. Being a woman she survived; all the young officers of her close circle – her beloved brother and his three friends from Uppingham School, which lost one in five of every old boy who served – were killed. Although she had aspired to be a novelist, it is for this book that she is rightly remembered.

The reason is not hard to discover; she was a born writer of a certain kind: diarist, letter-writer and perceptive social commentator, describing with honesty and poignant power the feelings and emotions of a whole generation. By 1933, after several fictional attempts to put into words what she had experienced, Britain had discovered ‘the emotion recollected in tranquillity’ necessary to pen this memorable witness.

Divided into three parts, it charts her life before the war, living through 1914-1918, and the difficulties of adjusting to post-war existence. It combines a fascinating chronicle of leisured Edwardian England, its bloody demise and the problem of rediscovering a purpose in life when pre-war assumptions, aspirations and values had been irretrievably wrecked.

Life before the war comprised endless games of bridge, tennis and golf, interspersed with social calls and country walks around Buxton where she grew up. Girls were expected to marry, not study or have careers. Vera rebelled against such a destiny – “a mentally vivacious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery” - and by perseverance, strong will and intelligence, went to Oxford to study English Literature. Then the war intervened.

The middle section, dealing with the deaths, first of her fiancé, Roland Leighton, Uppingham prize scholar, then his friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, and finally that of her brother Edward, killed on 15th June 1918 in northern Italy, is written with a controlled anguish that still grips the heart of a modern reader, despite familiarity with the story. In 1916, Vera comments with dread, “I was only at the beginning of my 20s; I might have another 40, perhaps 50 years to live”. Her brother’s death, only a few months before the end of the war, was heralded by “the sudden loud clattering at the front-door knocker that always meant a telegram”.

In fact Vera did not die until 1970. She finally found happiness with her marriage to the university lecturer and philosopher George Catlin, and spent her remaining 50 years in unstinting, duty-driven pursuits: lecturing on pacifism (a lifelong conviction) and feminism and writing articles on aspects of social work as they concerned women and children. Her daughter, the Liberal Democrat life peer, Baroness Shirley Williams, in her preface to the 1977 edition, comments that after the war “it was hard for [her mother] to laugh”. Brittain herself writes here that the war “had condemned me to live to the end of my days in a world without confidence or security.”

A compulsive diarist – “I poured into it the chaotic wretchedness which, had...no other outlet” - her book relies heavily on extracts from it and from the letters she wrote and received from family and from the Front. This gives it an immediacy and accuracy that recollection alone would not have provided. Religious belief could give no consolation; Vera rejected conventional Christianity during the war and hope in the resurrection of her loved ones was replaced by an ardent resolve to change the world by political means: “There was only a brief interval between darkness and darkness in which to fulfil obligations both to individuals and society, which could not be postponed to the comfortable futurity of a compensating heaven.”

One might, from a contemporary perspective, challenge her firmly held convictions on feminism and children’s upbringing, or her support for Marie Stopes’s “Society for Constructive Birth Control”. Yet as a personal and social document of its turbulent times, written from the viewpoint of a serious and reflective young woman, this autobiographical work fully merits rediscovery.

Francis Phillips writes from Buckinghamshire in the UK.