SHORTLY before midnight on 16 February 1933, Vera Brittain wrote the ultimate sentence of Testament of Youth. It represented the fulfilment of her longstanding resolve to immortalise, in a private memoir, the story of her generation: the men and women who grew up just before 1914 and the Great War. She wanted it to be a truthful and abiding elegy for the dead, and — above all — an indictment of recent warfare and its legacy of suffering and grief.
The book was inscribed with verses from Ecclesiasticus: “And some there be, which don’t have any memorial; who’re perished, as if that they had never been; and are grow to be as if that they had never been born. . . The people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation will show forth their praise” (44.9, 15).
It had taken her three years of toil — disciplined hours, carved out of a crowded day by day schedule that included managing a household, caring for her family, and campaigning vigorously for peace and girls’s rights. At 39, she was married to a political scientist, George Caitlin, and the mother of two children. Her relationship along with her son, John, would at all times prove difficult; her daughter, Shirley (Williams), would eventually grow to be a Labour Cabinet Minister.
THE book accomplished, there remained only the daunting query of how it could be received by her publisher. The reply got here five days later. It read: “Dear Miss Brittain, I even have read Testament of Youth with the best admiration. It is a book of great beauty, and even greater courage, and I shall be very happy to publish it. In places, I confess, it moved me intolerably. . .”
Readers and critics got here to the identical conclusion. Virginia Woolf stayed up all night to complete it. The New York Times reviewer described it as “hauntingly beautiful”. There were a couple of carping critics, but by the top of the last decade it had sold 120,000 copies.
ITS emotional impact owed much to Brittain’s personal history. As war broke out in 1914, she had already gained a spot at Oxford to read English. What appeared at first to be a brief lull in her ambition to pursue a literary profession soon modified her life completely. Unashamedly patriotic, and inspired by a sermon from the Bishop of Oxford urging his listeners to uphold the nation’s “righteous and honourable ideals” in order that soldiers might feel that England was value fighting for, she deferred her studies and dedicated herself to nursing the wounded and dying.
For the subsequent 4 years, she worked at hospitals in London, Malta, and northern France. Routine domestic duties sat alongside 12-hour shifts, often and not using a break, as she coped with the “butcher’s shop” — bodies that had been gassed, burned, and maimed. Grotesque wounds could overwhelm even probably the most experienced and skilled nurses, but there was little time for pity or tears. She was expected to hold on, appearing “punctually on duty looking clean, tidy and cheerful”. During the identical period, the war took from her the 4 people she had loved most: her fiancé, Roland; her brother, Edward; and two of her closest male friends.
BY THE end of the war, Brittain was exhausted, and still consumed by grief. Disillusioned by the terrible human cost of conflict, she was enabled to carry on to life only by her fierce ambition. Returning to Oxford, she pursued her calling to be a author. Graduation was made possible with the help of a big dose of brandy before she faced the examiners. An prolonged holiday in France and Italy proved restorative, after which she returned to England to ascertain a profession as a contract journalist, novelist, and campaigner.
She joined the Labour Party and the increasingly influential League of Nations Union, formed in 1918 to advertise collective security and everlasting peace between countries. She had travelled extensively through Europe, and located distressing evidence of hunger, humiliation, hatred, and fear. Words from Ecclesiastes spoke to her experiences: “So I returned, and regarded all of the oppressions which can be done under the sun: and behold the tears of similar to were oppressed, they usually had no comforter” (4.1).
What Brittain had witnessed marked the start of her journey towards the novel pacifism that might immerse her in international lecture tours, large peace rallies, and fund-raising for food relief on behalf of the Peace Pledge Union. She spoke out uncompromisingly against the saturation bombing of German cities, and was regularly vilified or mocked as giving encouragement to the enemy, or being out of touch with public opinion. She accepted the abuse and derision without grievance, although, with an obsessive fear of insects and dirt, she was distressed on the sight of dog faeces pushed through her door.
In the Nineteen Fifties, she joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, difficult with incredulity the evil of a bomb that “could entail the wholesale destruction of tens of millions”.
BRITTAIN’s moral courage, compassion, and warranted manner of public speaking masked a shy, uncertain, and sensitive disposition. Rarely given to laughter — almost actually as an comprehensible consequence of too many appalling experiences — she contended with bouts of melancholy and, by her own admission, was “difficult to live with”.
As the years passed and the nice explanation for peace which she had championed still remained a dream, her faith in God grew stronger. In November 1963, she wrote a prayer of thanksgiving and hope for all “the wealthy experience of my life in Thy beautiful world, the discipline of sorrow. . . and a world at peace through which to live and serve Thee”. She had come to grasp “that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of labor and conflict and painful resurrection” would necessarily constitute the unfinished task of future generations.
After a protracted illness precipitated by a fall, she died on Easter Day, 29 March 1970, aged 76. Next Friday, 29 December, will mark the one hundred and thirtieth anniversary of her birth.
As Advent ends and we prepare to rejoice the birth of a vulnerable Christ-child “with no language but a cry”, who will summon all those that consider in him to stand up time and again, Brittain reminds us of the scriptural duty to “hope against hope” (Romans 4.18). God’s peaceable Kingdom, nevertheless seemingly unimaginable, is at all times definitely worth the struggle and the associated fee.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, author, and theologian.
