Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (68 page)

2

Two days before the League of Nations came into existence at the end of April by the adoption of the revised Covenant at the Fifth Plenary Session of the Peace Conference, I returned to Oxford to find Somerville in the last term of its long occupation of Oriel. My parents, like myself, took my reincarnation as a student entirely for granted; my father, indeed, so strongly approved of college in comparison with the perturbations of hospitals and foreign service that he was now as ready to send me there as any modern father who considers the safeguard of a profession to be as much the right of a daughter as of a son.

Going back felt disturbingly like a return to school after a lifetime of adult experience; nevertheless, I pinned to Oxford - having nothing else to which to pin them - such hopes for the future as I still possessed. The dons, I believed, would recognise and concede to me the privileges of maturity; time had obliterated in my mind the various differences between the average academic and my adventurous Classical tutor, who had urged me after Edward’s death to keep to my plan of coming back to Somerville - especially because at college, more than anywhere else, one was likely to make the friendships that supported one through life.

She was quite right, as she always was; had I not taken her advice I should never have known either of the persons who now share my home, but at the time I scarcely bargained for the period of forlorn isolation that would have to be endured before the fulfilment of her prophecy. My own ‘Year’ had gone down long ago, but the unknown students would be, I felt confident, quite different from Kensington calling acquaintances or some of my relatives, who only wanted to be told how splendid our dear boys had been at the front, and how uplifting it was to be on active service in hospital, and how edifying to have had a lover and a brother who had died for their country. These young Somervillians were bound, I thought hopefully, to feel an interest in someone who had had first-hand experience of the greatest event of their generation, and, being interested, perhaps they would be kind. At the moment I felt as though kindness, provided it were intelligent kindness, mattered more than anything else. I was sore and angry and bitter, and I wanted desperately to be comforted and restored; the still rational remnants of my mind recognised anger and bitterness as crippling things which made for inefficiency, and I could not afford to be inefficient; it was more than time, if I were ever to accomplish it, to get on with the job of becoming a writer.

My confidence in this sympathetic, congenial future was considerably shaken by my first interview with the Principal of Somerville. When I had last seen her, between my periods of service in Malta and in France, she had been cordial and benevolent, but now her face wore an inscrutable and rather grim expression. ‘This is going to be a difficult term - a very difficult term,’ it seemed to say. ‘If we’re not careful these wild young men and women back from the War will get out of hand!’ Her greeting, at any rate, was as brief and laconic as though she had taken leave of me the previous Easter.

‘How do you do, Miss Brittain?’

‘Quite well, thank you,’ I answered conventionally, being as yet unaware that the War’s repressions were already preparing their strange, neurotic revenge. ‘I’m so glad to be back - at last,’ I added, unable to resist that injudicious, emotional plea for one word of welcome, of encouragement, from the university which had become, for me, the last refuge of hope and sanity. But the disturbing hint was quietly disregarded, and any suggestion that my interview represented more than an ordinary beginning-of-term routine visit was discreetly tidied out of the atmosphere by the Principal’s next words.

‘You are living in King Edward Street this term, I think?’

I agreed that this was so. I had gone down four years ago from Micklem Hall and now I was living in King Edward Street; that was, apparently, the only change in my circumstances of which the university was prepared to take cognisance.

Looking back, after fourteen years, upon the spiritual jar of that rebuff, I realise now that the college authorities had been, according to their lights, thoroughly generous. (Had I been an ex-service man, their concessions would have seemed obvious enough, and were, indeed, granted to every male who wanted to take advantage of them, but Oxford women, after Mr H. A. L. Fisher’s pronouncement, were never officially regarded as ‘patriots’ whatever their service might have been.) They had kept my exhibition for me for four years; they had undertaken, since I was so excessively ‘over-standing’ for Honours, a special procedure on my behalf to enable me to take an Honours Degree at all; they had even tolerated my inauspicious change of School. But they could not add the final graciousness and make me feel welcome.

It would have been, perhaps, more remarkable than I was then able to perceive if I had been welcome. The few other female rebels from Somerville had nearly all conveniently failed to come back; they had married, or found jobs, or merely become bored at the thought of re-curling themselves into the chrysalis stage of development. Except, the following term, for Winifred Holtby, who had only been down for a year and had not come into direct contact with the War until it was almost over, I was the only woman returning, bringing with me, no doubt - terrifying thought! - the psychological fruit of my embarrassing experiences. During the War the tales of immorality among V.A.D.s, as among W.A.A.C.s, had been consumed with voracious horror by readers at home; who knew in what cesspools of iniquity I had not wallowed? Who could calculate the awful extent to which I might corrupt the morals of my innocent juniors?

Undoubtedly the Senior Common Room, like other Senior Common Rooms, was nervous. All over Oxford, university and college authorities were quaking in their carpet slippers at the prospective invasion of war-hardened, cynical, sophisticated youth; their attitude vacillated between elaborate preparations against ruthless presumption, and an ostentatious unawareness that there had been a war at all. One undergraduate, an ex-officer with three years’ service and a wound stripe, who returned the same term as myself, told me later that at his first interview the President of his college had addressed him thus: ‘Let me see, Mr X., you’ve been away a long time, I think; a very long time? It’s a pity - a great pity; you’ll have to work very hard to catch up with the others!’

Those first eight weeks of renewed contact with a once familiar world proved, in many minor ways, to be curiously disconcerting. I found that I had completely forgotten the daily detail of a student’s life; I innocently disregarded - until surprisedly called to order - most of the regulations involved in being
in statu pupillari
, and could not even recollect the trivial procedure for getting books out of the library. Each person whom I asked for information on these points appeared astonished and almost affronted. ‘Whatever’s come over her, she’s as bad as a fresher!’ their looks seemed to imply. But on the whole I marked time that term, feeling like a ship waiting in harbour before starting out on a new and strenuous voyage to an unknown port.

3

Once again, as in 1915, Oxford from Carfax to Summertown was warm and sweet with lilac and wallflowers and may; it seemed unbearable that everything should be exactly the same when all my life was so much changed. Living quietly among the six seniors in the rooms in King Edward Street, I found it easy - and preferable - to avoid contact with the other students, whose very names I hardly knew. Occasionally at lectures I met a girl who was then in her last term, waiting to take her History Finals; I never spoke to her, but I carried away a definite impression of a green scarf, and dark felt hat negligently shading a narrow, brooding face with arrogant nose and stormily reserved blue eyes; it was Margaret Kennedy. One of the seniors in my rooms, Nina Ruffer, an anthropology student with a hard, good mind and an incongruously pale, diffident exterior, was the daughter of Sir Armand Ruffer, the medical chief of the British Red Cross Society in Egypt; he had been drowned in the Mediterranean on the torpedoed
Arcadian
in the spring of 1917, when I was in Malta, and this link with the War drew Nina and myself together. As the term went on I came to depend more and more upon her eager, intelligent society, for it quickly became clear that some of the more obvious alleviations to memory and nervous fatigue on which I had counted were not to materialise.

One of the pleasantest recollections of my previous Oxford summer had been, for my athletic disposition, the vigorous games of tennis and the closely fought matches on the green, sunny lawns; I had hoped to take part in them again, but these expectations were hardly of a type to commend themselves warmly to the second-year tennis captain. As I had played for Somerville in 1915 and thus interfered rather inconveniently with the calculations of more recent candidates, I had to be tried for the six although I had never handled a racket since the stolen games in Malta on night-duty. Testing me early in the term before I had had much opportunity to practise, the young captain must have been greatly relieved when I fell far below team standard, and felt - and indeed had - no compulsion to test me a second time at a later stage. In consequence I never again had a first-class game; only the second-rate were prepared to play with the universal stranger whose sudden appearance out of a remote and unknown world was a little embarrassing for everyone, and from that time onwards my tennis steadily descended from bad to execrable.

Nor, to begin with, did my prospects in the Honours School of Modern History appear much more promising. Fully conscious of my limitations in this unfamiliar field, I had hoped to be allowed, that extra term, to work alone, studying world history in outline, and afterwards fitting modern European history into its place in the story of the world, and English history into the story of Europe. But the rest of the second-year History School were in process of studying Tudors and Stuarts, and for Tudors and Stuarts, detached from their past and their future and completely unrelated to anything whatever in time or space, I had to whip up some kind of enthusiasm. With my conjectural essays on the vicissitudes of these momentous monarchs, I combined a few miscellaneous lectures which were intended to prepare me for the carefully selected period of European history - 1789 to 1878 - that I was to begin the next term. At one of these lectures - the second or third of a course by Mr J. A. R. Marriott on the Eastern Question, to which I had asked to go as much for the sake of old memories as for the purpose of studying nineteenth-century Europe - an incident occurred which I related to my mother in one of the few animated letters of that term:

‘Yesterday when at Mr Marriott’s lecture I was sitting near the front, and after it was over and I was putting up my books he came up to me and said: “Don’t I know you? Weren’t you up here before?” So then I explained who I was and what I had been doing away so long. He remembered me perfectly, also that I had been doing English; shook hands, said he was very pleased to see me again and was so glad I was doing History as he was sure it would interest me more. He certainly has a wonderful memory; do you remember him saying he never forgot a face? It was nice of him to come and speak to me too; he is a very great person in Oxford now he is M.P.’

What a coincidence it seemed, I thought, that he, the person mainly responsible for getting me to college, should be almost the only one to take the slightest interest in my return! The small, human act of recognition warmed my chill stagnation for several days.

Apart from lectures, and walks with Nina, the suspended existence of that summer was enlivened chiefly by what was, for the university, a most daring innovation, in the form of inter-collegiate debates between the men and the women. Somerville’s programme included debates with New College, Oriel and Queen’s - ‘so we are coming on!’ I told my mother triumphantly - and at each of these I plunged recklessly into speeches as halting and unpractised as my tennis. To the New College debate - on the economic consequences, so far as I remember, of the peace then raging on the Franco-German frontier - came the young rifleman who had spent the previous winter at Mons; he was back in Oxford now, taking up the New College exhibition that he had won in 1914, but I never spoke to him there nor even consciously saw him. If the War had not happened, he and Edward would have been college contemporaries, but the cataclysm of Europe, as I learnt long afterwards, caused each to remain unknown to the other. Even the New College Roll of Honour did not, and does not, contain Edward’s name - presumably because he was never in residence as an undergraduate, though he gave up his university ‘years to be’ as deliberately as any first-year student.

The ex-rifleman had more time now for writing in the unwieldy manuscript volume that had once weighed down his pack, and a little group of intelligent friends, chosen with unerring judgment, gave him innumerable opportunities of discussing the foundation of a Science of Politics and the future elimination of war, but though he was destined to achieve academic reputation and to occupy a distinguished position in an American university, limited parental resources and a temperament naturally mystical and religious caused him to live quietly and without notoriety amongst his Oxford contemporaries. Occasionally, in the intervals of endeavouring to maintain himself upon his exhibition, reinforced by scholarships from St Paul’s School and the London County Council, he permitted himself ambitions both more worldly and more romantic than his contemplated plan of becoming a Dominican friar. These led him to read, and become unduly interested in, the poems and controversial articles contributed to the
Oxford Chronicle
and the
Oxford Outlook
by a Somerville student who signed herself Vera Brittain. In the hope of meeting her he attended the inter-collegiate debates, but he was too shy to ask her fellow-students to introduce him, and it was not until four years afterwards that she first heard his name.