Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £30
Vera Brittain (1893-1970) was one of the greatest writers of the last century and, however familiar to you from previous readings, her Testament of Youth will always hit you where it hurts. Its power never diminishes.
She came from a secure middle class background but in Edwardian England there were great difficulties for a woman to achieve advancement through higher education and into the professions. Nevertheless, in 1914 she won an exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, but gave up her education the following year to become a nurse. The Great War killed the man she loved and hoped to marry, her dear brother and several friends. She went back to Oxford and became a journalist and writer and an ardent campaigner for women’s rights and world peace. The war changed her utterly and – at a terrible cost – she now saw things with a searing clarity which gave her a mission to tell the world what she now knew and understood so well.
She had written to her brother in March 1916 that if the war spared her, it would be her aim to immortalise in a book “the story of us four”. As she says, it was to rescue something of value – “some element of truth and hope and usefulness” – from those years in which youth had been smashed. She alone was spared. She knew people didn’t like to dwell on the past but knew with the deep instincts of a natural historian that “it is only in the light of the past that we…can understand ourselves or hope to be understood by our successor”. But what form would her book take?
Successively she considered a novel, fictionalised and edited diaries and journals – only to dismiss such attempts and finally to tell her own “fairly typical story as truthfully as I could against the larger background.”
I think the germ of this masterpiece lies in the moment when, after experiencing the dreadful slaughter of her dearest and after the horrors of nursing the wounded – from both sides – she declines an invitation to coffee with the clerical host of the ecclesiastical mansion where the nurses were housed. She records: “I knew that the elderly cleric merely intended a gesture of ecclesiastical goodwill towards the ‘War Office tweenies’ who occupied the humbler quarters of his establishment…At that stage of the war…I did not propose to submit to pious dissertations on my duty to God, King and Country. That voracious trio had already deprived me of all that I valued most in life…”
Testament of Youth recounts in a plain, straightforward way what it was actually like personally to experience such deep seated turmoil of the spirit. Everyone should read this book. Like all true classics, it has something to say to us all, one generation after another. And this handsome new edition benefits from photographic illustrations and an elegant preface by Shirley Williams, Vera Brittain’s distinguished daughter. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
Robert Giddings
