Testament of Youth, page 70
Reading it again some thirty years later, I am reminded of the things I valued about the book the first time around. But now, evenmore, I’m struck by how it is also a book about writing and becoming a writer: pamphlets, poetry, fiction, biography, history too. In these pages, VB is generous to writers of her generation – so many quoted within the pages and with such admiration: Olive Schreiner and Rose Macaulay, Hilda Reid, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, L.P. Hartley, Brooke and Rostand and Masefield, Sassoon and Hodgson. From the first pages, writing is at the heart of things: letters, that regular exchange of emotions and information that kept friends and family in touch with one another; snippets from articles and journalism, as well as many of her most iconic, most mournful poems – from the collection Verses of a V.A.D. to the plangent elegy ‘On Boar’s Hill, October 1919’, to the passionate anger of ‘The Lament of the Demobilised’. Her first attempts at fiction and her delight in the success of her friend Winifred Holtby.
Brittain is a writer with great descriptive powers too, both of place and emotion – the sinking of the Brittanic, the ship on which she’d travelled to Malta in 1916; the cold and damp of the shabby boarding house in London; the sickening horrors of Boulogne and the field hospital at Étaples; ‘the wrecks and drownings’; thoughts of the ‘shattered, dying boys’ she nurses; her inability to adjust to the ‘brightly lit, alien world’ of England post 1919; her visit to her brother’s grave on the Asiago Plateau; and, the final lines of the book, her feelings when seeing her husband-to-be – George, ‘G’ – disembarking the ship at Southampton, that come with the hope that she might, now, be able to escape the ‘wreckage of the past.’ Even the genesis of Testament of Youth itself gives an insight into how a book comes into being. Published seventeen years after VB first expressed her intention to commit her experiences to paper, she came to realise that stories so often choose their own shape. In the end, she realised that only the truth would do, it could not be fictionalised or disguised, for fear of robbing it of its power.
Testament of Youth is a beautiful book, a thought-provoking book, a clever book. A book about war and the consequences of war, about love and the consequences of love, about writing and responsibility and duty. It is as relevant now as it was on its first publication. But more than anything, Testament of Youth is a reminder of the power of the written word that helps us hear and listen and see things with the benefit of hindsight. This mightbe one woman’s autobiography, but, at the same time, it stands testament to the experiences of an entire generation of women and men, their children and their children’s children.
Kate Mosse
November 2013
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.
b Recorded verbatim by Time and Tide, November 10th, 1922.
c Hansard, Second Reading, July 5th, 1922; Standing Committee D., July 13th, 1922.
d Hansard, Second Reading, March 2nd, 1923.
Vera Brittain in Buxton, circa 1911.
The certificate showing Vera’s success in the Oxford Senior exhibition, only weeks before the outbreak of war.
Vera (front row, middle) with her father, Thomas Arthur Brittain, and her mother Edith (back row, first right), Derbyshire, circa 1911.
(Left to right) Edward Brittain, Roland Leighton and Victor Richardson at an Uppingham School OTC camp before the war.
Vera Brittain, 1914.
Roland Leighton (left) and Victor Richardson in their last term at Uppingham School.
Edward Brittain, 1915.
Roland Leighton, 1915.
Victor Richardson
Geoffrey Thurlow
Vera at the First London General, Camberwell, 1915.
Vera and patients at the First London General, Camberwell, circa 1916.
Convalescent patients at Camberwell, 1915.
Vera (third row from front, sixth from left) as a VAD in Malta.
Vera (third from left) with other VADs in Malta.
Vera at St George’s Bay, Malta.
Vera with patients in Malta, 1916.
VAD registration card, July 1917.
Operating theatre at Étaples.
Roland’s grave at Louvencourt.
Edward’s grave at Granezza on the Asiago Plateau.
The wedding of Vera Brittain and George Catlin, St James’s Spanish Place, June 1925.
In the background (left to right) Reverend Catlin, Edith Brittain, Winifred Holtby.
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A Phoenix eBook
First published by Victor Gollancz Limited in 1933
Ebook first published in 2009 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook published in 2014 by Phoenix
Copyright © Mark Bostridge & Timothy Brittain-Catlin,
Literary Executors of Vera Brittain, 1970
Preface copyright © Shirley Williams 1978
Introduction copyright © Mark Bostridge 2009
Afterword copyright © Kate Mosse 2013
The right of Vera Brittain to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of
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including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-2978-5914-7
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Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
