Heroine haunted by the kiss of her doomed lover
Of all the Great War books written by women, Vera Brittain’s classic memoir stands supreme. Reissued to coincide with the new film adaptation, it not only depicts the horrors of trench warfare, but also details the knock-on effects inflicted upon parents, siblings and the many tragic women destined for spinsterhood as their young men were slaughtered in battle.
Born in 1893, Brittain was a privileged, brainy girl fed up with the stultifying snobbery of small-town life in Buxton. Her dream was to be educated at Oxford.
Desperate to escape from servants, hunt balls, tennis parties and the obligation to hook a suitable husband, she persuaded her reluctant father to hire private tutors and managed, by sheer hard graft, to win an impressive scholarship.
So, in 1914, as rumours of war rumbled in the background and jumpy people began knitting khaki balaclavas and stockpiling food, she went up to Oxford. feisty and full of hope and youthful sparkle, she was living her dream at last. She was also falling in love with a promising young poet and lofty idealist called Roland.
But as he and a generation of male students began military training, learning to fire rifles and fix bayonets, Brittain’s hunger for academic excellence waned. The cocoa- parties, Greek verbs, punting and picnics seemed incongruous and insulting to the boys heading for the trenches.
‘It will all be over by Christmas’ everyone said, little anticipating the impending cataclysm. Over the next two years Brittain was to lose Roland (by then her fiance), her brother and two close male family friends.
In early 1915, to feel closer to Roland as he fought for King and country, Brittain abandoned Oxford and intellectual ambition. She joined the Voluntary aid Detachment (VAD) nursing unit, reasoning that Roland ‘had to face far worse things than any sight or act I could come across: he can bear it — and so can I’.
Imagine it, this ridiculously naive, innocent girl who had never seen a naked male or been alone with a man — not even her fiance — without a chaperone, being suddenly plunged into the world of bedpans and suppurating wounds. Bullied by harsh matrons, working exhausting ten- hour days, she coped with the sounds and stench of the dying.
It is amazing for modern women to learn that, at 21, Brittain had only the haziest of ideas ‘ with regard to the precise nature of the sexual act’. assigned the job of nursing a man dying from venereal disease, Brittain had to ask what caused it. The psychological shock upon someone so pure in heart and chaste must have been shattering.
Brittain’s most heartbreaking pages detail her desperate longing to see Roland, to be alone with him and to experience physical love. Memories of a nervous kiss on the cheek and several intense, chaperoned, brief encounters are all she had, plus his poignant letters from the front.
UNBEARABLY moving are the events on the day she was going at last to meet him again after one whole year apart. She obtains leave, buys a blouse and travels to the hotel where her parents are living temporarily.
Roland’s boat i s delayed. Brittain, almost hysterical with suspense and anticipation, paces the room wearing her best clothes. Hours pass. eventually she is called to the hotel phone. She knows it’s Roland to say he’s on his way. In fact, it’s a message to say he had died of wounds the previous evening. I defy anyone not to blub over this page.
and so Brittain flings herself into dangerous VAD work. She survives an appalling journey to Malta aboard a hospital ship, through torpedoed lanes, packed Poignant: Vera Brittain in her nurse’s uniform in 1917. Right: Her fiance Roland into the fetid, fly-infested hold. There’s a five-seated, tin WC with neither partitions nor privacy. She notes: ‘If a torpedo had struck we should have been trapped as surely as rats in a sealed sewer.’
She coped with a serious infection, depression, despair and the ordeal of sorting through her dead brother’s returned kit — the torn, mud-caked tunic with bullet holes and bloodstains. She survived, and came through the protracted nightmare to take hold of life again.
aged 30 she married, campaigned tirelessly for socialist and feminist causes, had two children (one of whom is Shirley Williams) and in 1933 published this dazzling elegy for a lost generation. It became an instant best-seller.
Her skill was to depict, with harrowing intensity, both the suffering of men at war and the agonies endured by families left behind to weep, worry and wait, and eventually to readjust to an england whose old rules, certainties and rural idyll had vanished for ever.