Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (14 page)

At Uppingham Speech Day, however, I had no personal grounds for deploring the attitude of the older boys towards their feminine contemporaries. As the Headmaster strode, berobed and majestic, on to the platform of the School Hall, I was in the midst of examining with appreciation my Speech Day programme, and especially the page headed ‘Prizemen, July, 1914’, of which the first seven items ran as follows:

But, still automatically responsive to school discipline, I hastily put down the programme as the Headmaster began, with enormous dignity, to address the audience.

I do not recall much of the speech, which ended with a list of the precepts laid down for boys by a famous Japanese general - a monument of civilisation whose name I forget, but whose qualities were evidently considered entirely suitable for emulation by young English gentlemen. I shall always, however, remember the final prophetic precept, and the breathless silence which followed the Headmaster’s slow, religious emphasis upon the words:

‘If a man cannot be useful to his country, he is better dead.’

For a moment their solemnity disturbed with a queer, indescribable foreboding the complacent mood in which I watched Roland, pale but composed, go up to receive his prizes.

As Roland had no relatives there of his own - his mother was finishing a book, and in any case took her son’s triumphs for granted with a serenity which seemed to my own inconspicuous family almost reprehensible - he sat with me after luncheon at the school concert. This function gave Edward, who had as usual been second or third in every subject, the opportunity to atone for his lack of prizes by playing a violin solo, Dvoȓák’s ‘Ballade’. Apart from his performance, I was less interested in the music than in the various contemporaries of Edward and himself whom Roland pointed out to me in the choir and orchestra.

Of these I recall only one, Ivan Dyer, son of the general of Amritzar notoriety, but I missed an acquaintance of Edward’s whom I had seen at the Old Boys’ cricket match the previous summer, and Roland told me that this boy, Henry Maxwell Andrews - now the husband of Rebecca West - had left Uppingham in 1913. Henry Andrews, a slim, serious, very tall boy with dark, spectacled eyes, reappeared in my life ten years afterwards as a friend and New College contemporary of my husband. He seemed to me then to have altered very little since I saw him at Uppingham, and four years in Ruhleben - he had gone to Germany for the 1914 summer vacation, and was interned when war broke out - had developed in him a measure of kindness and tolerant wisdom considerably beyond the unexacting standards of the average Englishman.

The afternoon was so hot, and our desire for conversation so great, that Roland and I were relieved when the concert ended, and we could lose ourselves in the crowd at the Headmaster’s garden-party. I remember to-day how perfectly my dress - a frilled pink ninon with a tiny pattern, worn beneath a rose-trimmed lace hat - seemed to have been made for our chosen corner of the garden, where roses with velvet petals softly shading from orange through pink to crimson foamed exuberantly over the lattice-work of an old wooden trellis. But even if I had forgotten, I should still have Roland’s verses, ‘In the Rose-Garden’, to renew the fading colours of a far-away dream.

We were not long left in peace to resume our perpetual discussion of Olive Schreiner and immortality. Roland was deeply engrossed in explaining to me Immanuel Kant’s theory of survival, when our seclusion was suddenly invaded by his and Edward’s housemaster, who remarked, with the peculiar smile reserved by the middle-aged for very young couples who are obviously growing interested in one another, ‘Ha! I
thought
I should find you here,’ and bore us off triumphantly to tea. But we continued the conversation next day both before and after Sunday chapel, and leaving Edward and my mother to entertain each other, walked up and down a wooded park known as Fairfield Gardens in spite of long intervals of slow, quiet rain.

Two years afterwards Victor, a handsome, reticent boy even taller than Edward, who was alternatively known to him and to Roland as ‘Tah’ and ‘the Father Confessor’, spoke to me of this day.

‘I can’t of course remember,’ he told me in effect, ‘exactly what he said to me on that Sunday. It’s difficult to summarise the intangible. Do you remember the two Karg-Elert pieces that Sterndale Bennett played at the beginning of the service that afternoon? One of them, “
Clair de Lune
”, seemed to move him deeply. He said it reminded him of you in its coldness and the sense of aloofness from the world. He said that after talking with you in Fairfield it seemed very strange to go and mix with the others in the chapel . . . I told him that he loved you then. He said he didn’t, but I could see that that was merely a conventional answer. I said, “Very well, we’ll meet here again on Speech Day 1924 and see who is right.” I think he agreed to this.’

If Victor reported the conversation correctly, Roland at that time was certainly more courageously self-analytical and more articulate than I - though the latter quality may merely have been due to the fortunate possession of a friend with whom articulateness was easy. Not having any such confidant - since Edward was already too much depressed at the prospect of separation from Roland, who was going to another Oxford college, and from Victor, who had qualified for Cambridge, to be further burdened by a sister’s emotions which would then have seemed to him absurdly premature - I was thrust back as usual upon an inner turmoil for which there seemed no prospect of relief.

After bidding good-bye to Roland at the lodge gates that evening, I was conscious of nothing more definite than intense exasperation, which lasted without intermission for several days. All through the journey back to Buxton next morning I was indescribably cross; I answered my mother’s conversational efforts in surly monosyllables, and couldn’t find a polite word to say.

9

I have written so much of Uppingham Speech Day because it was the one perfect summer idyll that I ever experienced, as well as my last care-free entertainment before the Flood. The lovely legacy of a vanished world, it is etched with minute precision on the tablets of my memory. Never again, for me and for my generation, was there to be any festival the joy of which no cloud would darken and no remembrance invalidate.

To my last week of mathematics and Latin I returned apprehensively enough - the more so since Oxford had begun, dimly and for the first time, to represent something more than the object of unmitigated ambition. I even permitted myself, at the close of a long day’s work, to visualise a pair of dark, intent eyes examining with me the Joshua Reynolds windows in New College Chapel, and to picture a scholar’s gown swinging up St Giles’s on its way to Somerville.

On July 20th, exactly a fortnight before the world as I had known it crashed into chaos, I went to Leek to take my Oxford Senior. As in the case of the earlier examination, I had been obliged to ascertain for myself the various regulations and the localities at which the papers could be taken, and had chosen Leek because my father, who motored every day from Buxton into Staffordshire, could put me down there on his way to the mills.

After two years of having been (so to speak) ‘grown-up’, it felt strange and a little humiliating to be examined in the airless atmosphere of Leek Technical School, surrounded by rough-looking and distinctly odoriferous sixteen-year-olds of both sexes. It was not a heroic setting for the final stage of my prolonged battle with persons and circumstances, and I left Leek with a depressed sense that I had certainly failed.

War had already broken out, and the map of Europe was undergoing daily transformation, when I learnt, in the last week of August, that my papers had reached the ‘required standard’. But instead of arousing congratulations, this news, coming when it did, provoked one of those breakfast-table scenes which were once common in our household, though they have long become legendary. No sooner had I, for the moment completely forgetting the state of Europe, begun proudly to announce this final triumph, when my father - though he soon relented - gave way to an outburst of fury. It was useless for me, he thundered, to think of going to Oxford now this War was on; in a few months’ time we should probably all find ourselves in the Workhouse!

An unexpected scolding seemed a hard reward for a year’s steady work. For some moments a sharp family altercation ensued, I, fortified by my full share of the ancestral explosiveness, hotly pointing out how many obstacles I had surmounted, and my father - violent in speech though always generous in action when once convinced of its necessity - fulminating furiously against the Government, the Germans, the financial situation at the mills, and the trouble and expense that we were all causing him. The controversy ended, none too satisfactorily, with Edward remarking, placidly but firmly, that if I could not be sent to Oxford he wouldn’t go either.

For the time being I simmered wrathfully in anger and hopeless resentment. By means of what then appeared to have been a very long struggle, I had made for myself a way of escape from my hated provincial prison - and now the hardly-won road to freedom was to be closed for me by a Serbian bomb hurled from the other end of Europe at an Austrian archduke.

It is not, perhaps, so very surprising that the War at first seemed to me an infuriating personal interruption rather than a world-wide catastrophe.

3

Oxford versus War

AUGUST, 1914

God said: ‘Men have forgotten Me;
The souls that sleep shall wake again,
And blinded eyes be taught to see.’

So, since redemption comes through pain,
He smote the earth with chastening rod,
And brought destruction’s lurid reign;

But where His desolation trod,
The people in their agony
Despairing cried: ‘There is no God !’

V. B. 1914. From
Verses of a V.A.D.

1

My diary for August 3rd, 1914, contains a most incongruous mixture of war and tennis.

The day was Bank Holiday, and a tennis tournament had been arranged at the Buxton Club. I had promised to play with my discouraged but still faithful suitor, and did not in the least want to forgo the amusement that I knew this partnership would afford me - particularly as the events reported in the newspapers seemed too incredible to be taken quite seriously.

‘I do not know,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘how we all managed to play tennis so calmly and take quite an interest in the result. I suppose it is because we all know so little of the real meaning of war that we are so indifferent. B. and I had to owe 30. It was good handicapping as we had a very close game with everybody.’

In spite of my vague memories of the South African campaigns, Spion Kop and Magersfontein were hardly more real to me than the battles between giants and mortals in the Andrew Lang fairy-books that I began to read soon afterwards. My father had taken Edward and myself round Macclesfield in a cab on Mafeking Night, and I had a confused recollection of fireworks and bonfires and excited shouting which were never clearly distinguished in my mind from the celebrations for Edward the Seventh’s postponed coronation.

Throughout July, and especially after the failure of the Home Rule Conference and the agitation over the Dublin shooting, there had been prayers in all the churches for salvation from the danger of civil war in Ireland, and to those of us who, wrapped up in our careers or our games or our love-affairs, had paid no attention to the newspapers, the direction from which the storm was rolling was quite unexpected. At St Monica’s, Miss Heath Jones, with the accurate foresight of the vigilant, had endeavoured to prepare our sceptical minds for disasters that she believed to be very near; I remembered her gravity in 1911 at the time of the Agadir crisis, and the determination with which, when she and my aunt were visiting Buxton a year or two earlier, she had made me accompany her to the local theatre to see a play that I had thought crude and ridiculous, called
An Englishman’s Home
. At school we had treated her obsession with the idea of a European War as one of those adult preoccupations to which the young feel so superior. ‘She’s got her old German mania again,’ we said.

But when I arrived home warm and excited from the amusing stimulus of the tournament, the War was brought nearer than it had yet been by the unexpected appearance of Edward - whom I had supposed to be at Aldershot - still wearing his O.T.C. uniform.