Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (16 page)

It was a very bright, clear September in which the British and French Armies won their decisive victories on the Marne and the Aisne. ‘ALLIES ADVANCING!’ triumphantly announced the placards which told us that Paris had been saved, but though the news sent a shudder of relief through London, the air was thicker than ever with dramatic and improbable rumours. Stories of atrocities mingled with assertions that in ten days’ time the Austrian Emperor would be suing for peace and in fourteen the Kaiser fleeing from his people. Edward, while waiting vainly for news from Oxford, composed a violin ballade; he and I were plunged into gloom by a fresh though inaccurate rumour that Fritz Kreisler, his favourite violinist, had been killed on the Austrian front, but his anxiety lasted longer than mine, for I found St Monica’s garden a most peaceful and appropriate place in which to soliloquise about Roland. He was, I told myself, ‘a unique experience in my existence; I never think definitely of him as man or boy, as older or younger, taller or shorter than I am, but always of him as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but are all in the same key.’

Whether it was really true at that time that Roland represented to me only a congenial mind, I cannot now determine. If it was, it did not remain so for very much longer. One afternoon during a game of golf when we had returned to Buxton, Edward and I discovered a fairy ring; I stood in it, and quite suddenly found myself wishing that Roland and I might become lovers, and marry. Edward asked me to tell him my wish. I replied: ‘I’ll tell you if you ask me again in five years’ time, for by then the wish will have come true or be about to come true, or it will never come true at all.’

Although we had examined, only a day or two before, some Press photographs of the damage done by the German bombardment of Rheims, we still talked as though our life-long security had not been annihilated and time would go on always for those whom we loved. And it was just then that Roland wrote that he had, after all, some chance of a commission in a Norfolk regiment.

‘Anyhow,’ he told me, ‘I don’t think in the circumstances I could easily bring myself to endure a secluded life of scholastic vegetation. It would seem a somewhat cowardly shirking of my obvious duty . . . I feel that I am meant to take an active part in this War. It is to me a very fascinating thing - something, if often horrible, yet very ennobling and very beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it above the reach of all cold theorising. You will call me a militarist. You may be right.’

‘Scholastic vegetation’, hurt just a little; it seemed so definitely to put me outside everything that now counted in life, as well as outside his own interests, and his own career. I felt it altogether contrary to his professed feminism - but then, so was the War; its effect on the women’s cause was quite dismaying.

‘Women get all the dreariness of war, and none of its exhilaration, ’ I wrote in reply. ‘This, which you say is the only thing that counts at present, is the one field in which women have made no progress - perhaps never will (though Olive Schreiner thinks differently). I sometimes feel that work at Oxford, which will only bear fruit in the future and lacks the stimulus of direct connection with the War, will require a restraint I am scarcely capable of. It is strange how what we both so worked for should now seem worth so little.’

Obviously I was suffering, like so many women in 1914, from an inferiority complex. I did not know that only a week or two before his letter, he had written one of his curiously prophetic poems, ‘I walk alone’, which certainly did not suggest that I and my work no longer counted. It bears, I think, only one interpretation - that he visualised me as having fulfilled those ambitions of which we were always talking and writing, but pictured himself as dead.

Actually, he went to Norwich about a fortnight later and was gazetted to the Norfolks shortly afterwards. But at the beginning of October, when I was getting ready to go to Somerville, neither Edward nor Roland nor Victor, who lived at Hove and had periodically tackled various battalions of the Royal Sussex Regiment, seemed much nearer commissions than they had been in August. Though all three had definitely decided not to go up to their various colleges, the prospect, which at moments had come near, of the War affecting me personally, seemed once again to become quite remote.

3

So I went up to Oxford, and tried to forget the War. At first, though Edward should have gone up the day that I did and Roland the day after, I succeeded pretty well.

‘This is an important step I am taking, the biggest since I left school, perhaps the biggest I have ever taken,’ I reflected with the consoling priggishness that then sustained me through the initial stages of every new experience: ‘But it does not do to dwell overmuch on the responsibilities such a decision as I made a year ago will now begin to involve, but rather to take them up as they come, and throughout them all remain true to myself and my ideals.’

As soon as I arrived at Somerville, I was dismayed to learn that I had to take Responsions Greek in December and Pass Moderations the following June, instead of embarking, as I had fondly imagined, straight away upon English. The unwelcome discovery was made the more bitter by the fact that my Classical tutor obviously attributed my lack of Greek to laziness, instead of to a complete inability to understand why the Principal, after learning the result of my Oxford Senior, had advised me to study it.

‘Oh, how many better ways I might have chosen to get into Oxford than the ones I did in my ignorance choose!’ I lamented to my diary; ‘How much better prepared I might easily have been!’

But my perturbation quickly evaporated as soon as I emerged from the first confusion of newness, and drifted into the company of Norah H., a first-year student from Winchester, who had come up to college chiefly because she was bored by the Cathedral set. Our mutual detestation of small-town snobberies made us friends for the time being, and together we observed and discussed the more interesting personalities of the different Years.

‘There are,’ I observed, ‘two classes of second- and third-year people, (1) those who thoroughly examine every atom of you, (2) those who do not look at you at all; and appear perfectly oblivious of your presence even if you get in their way. Of the two I prefer the former.’

Several potentially interesting young women were then in their last year at Somerville. They included Charis Ursula Barnett, now Mrs Sidney Frankenburg and the author of numerous books and articles on birth-control and the rearing of children; Margaret Chubb, who soon afterwards became Mrs Geoffrey Pyke and is now Secretary of the National Birth Control Association; Muriel Jaegar, subsequently the writer of several intelligent novels; Jeannie Petrie, daughter of the celebrated Egyptologist, and Dorothy L. Sayers, who dominated her group at college, and does so still by the fame of her vigorous detective stories.

I took an immediate liking to Dorothy Sayers, who was affable to freshers and belonged to the ‘examine-every-atom-of-you’ type. A bouncing, exuberant young female who always seemed to be preparing for tea-parties, she could be seen at almost any hour of the day or night scuttling about the top floor of the new Maitland building with a kettle in her hand and a little checked apron fastened over her skirt. She belonged to the Bach Choir, which I too had joined, and her unconcealed passion for Sir Hugh - then Doctor - Allen was a standing joke in college. During the practices of the Verdi Requiem, which we were preparing to sing in the Easter term, she sat among the mezzo-contraltos and gazed at him with wide, adoring eyes as though she were in church worshipping her only God. But a realistic sense of humour always saved her from becoming ridiculous, and at the Going-Down Play given by her Year the following summer, she caricatured her idol with triumphant accuracy and zest.

Against one of these Third-Years, a plain, mature-looking girl with penetrating eyes, who wore high-collared blouses and knew how to put freshers in their places, I conceived the strong prejudice natural to the snubbed after meeting her at a tea-party to which I had been invited by a friendly senior. Ten minutes after the introduction, she suddenly turned to me and inquired witheringly: ‘
What
is your name? I wasn’t paying any attention when it was told me.’ Infatuated still by the glamour of Oxford, I did not remark as I might have done how closely the manners of Third-Years to First-Years resembled those of the Buxton élite to persons outside ‘the set’. But I noted in my diary that evening that the Principal was ‘not nearly so condescending as one or two of the third-year people’.

I soon found that a far more persistent and disturbing centre of interest than any third-year student was Agnes Elizabeth Murray, Professor Gilbert Murray’s beautiful daughter, whose presence relegated her second-year contemporaries to impersonal mediocrity. Wildly brilliant and fiercely in love with life, she did not in the least suggest her mournful fate of early death. At college she had not yet acquired the lovely elegance which for a short time after the War caused her to shine like a bright meteor amid the constellation of humbler stars at the League of Nations Union. Her eccentric clothes were untidy, and her straight black hair was often unkempt, but she strode like a young goddess through the Somerville students and condescended to notice very few of them outside a small group which included her devoted friend, Phyllis Siepmann. They were a tragically predestined couple, for Phyllis died before Elizabeth, in 1920 - as the result, I believe, of an illness due to war-work.

Norah and I blinked our eyes with proper reverence at these radiant lights, but we discussed with less respectful frankness the members of our own first year, and particularly a trio which later co-opted me as a fourth - an English scholar whom we all knew as ‘E. F.’, Marjorie B., afterwards a teacher, and Theresa S., a fair, gay, half-Belgian girl, who developed into my one real friend amongst these 1914 contemporaries. ‘E. F.’ was subsequently to fulfil in appropriate fashion her early promise, for she became a don at a famous women’s college and a distinguished authority on Marlowe, but, like many other successful academics, she was the source in her student days of a good deal of secret amusement.

A slight girl with fine, clear-cut features, smooth dark hair and dreamy, humourless eyes, she bore a strong resemblance to Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies, the actress, and went about the corridors with an expression of earnest pursuit. Her attitude towards Marlowe was mystical, and though she never quite reached the point of putting it into words, we suspected her of a private belief in herself as his reincarnation. A more incongruous embodiment of that roystering taverner it would be difficult to imagine, for ‘E. F.’ then possessed a soft, precise voice and a deferential manner to conspicuous seniors. Her special goddesses belonged to an eclectic little group known as M.A.S. (Mutual Admiration Society), the members of which had made a corner in literary aspirations. They took themselves very seriously, and apparently do so still, for only a year or two ago one of them wrote to me to protest that in a popular article on Somerville novelists I had underestimated their subsequent achievements.

4

In spite of the prosaic demands of Greek verbs and the tedium of ploughing with a ‘crib’ through the
Alkestis
of Euripides almost before I knew the Greek alphabet, I spent my first few weeks at Somerville in a state of exhilaration, ‘half-delightful, half-disturbing, wholly exciting’. I had never known anything so consistently stimulating as that urgent, hectic atmosphere, in which a number of highly strung young women became more neurotic and
exaltées
than ever through over-work and insufficient sleep.

Like the half dozen freshers with whom I consorted, I rarely went to bed before 2 a.m. through the whole of that term. Having hitherto been thrown for speculative companionship chiefly upon my own society, I found cocoa-parties and discussions on religion, genius, dons and Third-Years far too enthralling to be abandoned merely for the sake of a good night’s rest. After years of regular ten-o’clock bedtime in Buxton, the short nights told on me very quickly, but I never dreamed of attributing my excitement to fatigue.

Early in the term, with a heart swelling with pride, I learnt from Norah that I was considered one of the ‘lions’ of my year. This information inspired me with a pleasant sense of mental and moral superiority, of which I was particularly aware at a certain tea-party where, as I recorded in my diary, ‘we talked religion most of the time. Miss G. and Miss P. were there too - two simple souls who evidently had not thought much for themselves, and who cannot - yet, at any rate - stand alone, or ever conceive the idea of doing so.

‘It is so vastly different from me, who think one has no right to have great and intimate friends unless one can stand alone first,’ I reflected with satisfaction. ‘The time may come - in fact does come to everyone - when we have to decide something important on our own, be responsible perhaps not only for our own lives and fortunes, but those of other people. And if when the momentous decision must be made by us alone, if we have been accustomed to depend on others, to refer all resolutions to others, and never to be sufficient unto ourselves - what then? We may fall,’ I concluded tragically, ‘never more to rise.’

My elated consciousness of growing prominence soon drove me vigorously into action. I joined the Oxford Society for Woman Suffrage; I joined the Bach Choir; I joined the War and Peace Society; I reviewed
Sinister Street
for the women’s intercollegiate magazine, the
Fritillary
; I did not, despite much persuasion, join the Christian Union. For the choir, Dr Allen, who enjoyed living up to his Oxford reputation of
enfant-terrible
eccentricity, tested my voice and asked me if I thought I had a good one. When I replied that I imagined I was a soprano though I really wanted to sing alto, he remarked: ‘I see. You’re one of those cantankerous people. I suppose if you’d been an alto you’d have wanted to sing soprano.’