I can’n remember now, precisely when I first read Testament of Youth. With all significant books, we cast our eyes back – wanting the moment itself to be memorable, special. But the best books – those that will keep us company for longer than the days spent reading them – take time to make their mark, to sink in. But I do remember the sun and sitting outside, cross-legged on the grass, reading. I remember the emotion and the disbelief as, one by one, those closest to VB were lost – her fiancé, Roland, her brother, Edward, their friends, Geoffrey and Victor (Tah). I remember the cover of the Virago Classic and felt a frisson of connection, an imagined fellow-feeling, when places I knew were mentioned. And though the book had been recommended (background reading for History A level and to supplement the volumes of war poetry studied on the English syllabus), I remember thinking even then that Testament of Youth – the first in a trilogy of Vera Brittain’s autobiographical writings – wasn’t background reading, but rather a book that stood at the heart of things. Some eighty years after first publication, it still does.
It was in Testament of Youth that I first came across the word ‘feminism’, the idea that women and men should be treated equally, that opportunities available for the one should be available for the other. It was in these pages that I read about how VB and like-minded fellow-travellers campaigned for women’s suffrage, girls’ education, for female students to be granted degrees, to serve their country, to be able to marry and work, to speak in public and contribute to political life. Here too, ruminations about the ways in which affairs of the heart and affairs of the head might be in collision. The loss and the folly of it all, the pity of it.
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