Memoir of war that’s lost none of its power
ONE hundred years ago, at 11am on November 11, 1918, a volley of gunfire sounded over London, marking the end of World War I. Vera Brittain, a VAD nurse at Queen Alexandra’s hospital, heard the victory guns, but she could not celebrate. It’s come too late for me, she thought.
The war had taken the four people she loved most: her brother, Edward; her fiance, Roland; and her two closest friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow. Walking up Whitehall among the victory celebrations, Vera realised ‘how completely everything that had made up my life had vanished . . . A new age was beginning; but the dead were dead and would never return.’ She was only 24, but she had experienced more than most of today’s 24-year-olds will in a lifetime.
Fifteen years later, in 1933, Vera published an autobiography, Testament Of Youth, reissued this month to mark the centenary of the Armistice. On publication day, the first print run sold out: her agonisingly personal memoir was a bestseller.
While the war, in which she served as a nurse in London, Malta and France, was the defining experience of her early life, Vera (right) also wrote movingly about her struggle for independence and a career.
She was born in 1893 and grew up in Buxton, Derbyshire. Her father was a prosperous businessman, but while her brother was destined for Oxford, Vera was simply expected to marry.
A family friend persuaded her parents to send her to Oxford, but she had fallen in love with Edward’s schoolfriend, Roland Leighton. When Edward and Roland went to war, Vera, feeling that ‘Oxford now seemed infinitely remote from everything that counted’, volunteered as a nurse.
That experience would bring her face-toface with the chaos of warfare her brother and lover were facing. On Christmas Day 1915, as she was preparing for a reunion with Roland, the telephone rang with the news that he had been killed. During their courtship, they had met on only 17 days and scarcely exchanged a kiss. Yet theirs was an intense and transformative first love.
Vera was an idealist who held passionate views on issues such as education and equal opportunities that still trouble us today.
But her memoir also reveals a capacity for finding beauty in the direst circumstances. Tending the agonies of dying men, she would notice flowers blooming amid the carnage: lilac, tiny irises and the violets Roland sent from the Western Front.
Accounts of the Great War by the men who were there describe scenes of almost unimaginable horror and heroism.
But Testament Of Youth is a vivid, intimate description of the private face of war, seen through the eyes of a young woman who overcame her personal tragedies to tend the wounded and vowed to build a new world from the wreckage of the old.