Testament of Youth

"To me, Testament of Youth is simply one of the finest, most heart-rending and most moving memoirs – not just of the Great War, but of any conflict. Women often spoke of the war and their losses through the metaphor of dance. Nancy Cooper famously said that “by the end of 1916 every boy that I had ever danced with was dead”. Vera Brittain simply said: “There was no one left to dance with.” Vera Brittain really personified this extraordinary chasm that existed between those who had gone through the experience of the war and those who hadn’t. And she also personifies the agony that Britain in general went through during the war. She had one beloved brother, Edward. When her father was going to send him to university but not her, her brother said he wouldn’t go unless Vera could go too. So they were very close. Her brother had been a star athlete and he, like all of his class, who were overwhelmed by an almost mystic patriotism in 1914, marched off to war. Within months he was writing letters back to Vera outlining in incredibly graphic detail the horror of the trenches. He fought at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, which has been overshadowed by the later debacle of the Somme and the horror of Passchendaele. But the Battle of Loos was horrific. Over the course of the war, Vera becomes a nurse and goes from being this protected middle-class Edwardian girl to dealing with the dead and the dying for months on end. She would lose, one by one, her two best friends from university, her fiancé, and finally her brother. Testament of Youth is really the most powerful account of that transformation from innocence to experience and her transformation, of course, in so many ways echoes that of Britain itself. This is why, to this day, the Great War is a fulcrum of modernity. A single bullet into the breast of a prince in Sarajevo sparked the greatest catastrophe in the history of humanity. People often focus on World War II, but as [Winston] Churchill so eloquently said the Second World War was but the continuation of the first. He called it the 30 years war and famously said that never was a war less necessary to fight than the First and more essential to win than the Second."

"Vera Brittain went on to write 30 novels and wasn’t regarded as a good novelist. I’ve never bothered to read her novels because I’ve always read they weren’t very good. I have read all three of her memoirs and this one is by far the best. She gave validity to what it was like to be a woman in the First World War . That was a very important thing that she did at the time — because this book came out in 1933. Poets and others had written about what it was like to be a man in the trenches and I think there was a feeling, ‘Well, women weren’t in the trenches, so how dare women talk about what it was like?’ Nothing could rival the pain that men suffered. But what she showed is that women suffered their own pain, which was a different sort of pain. What she really puts across is the agony of just waiting, waiting, waiting, and the incredible sense of helplessness that women had. They might be waiting for years and then at the end of four years — which is what happened with her brother — he died. So she had all that agony of worrying all the way through, and then in the end he died. There’s that sense of hopelessness that they are not the ones who have the power: they don’t make the decisions. “So much of our lives were lies” She’s describing the First World War, but a lot of this is true for many women in my lifetime. For lots of women, their husbands went out to work and they didn’t even know what time their husbands were going to come home. Their husbands might come home at 18:00, or they might come home at 23:00, after being in the pub. The woman just had to sit there all day, and then the man would decide if they were going to move to a completely different city because he’d got a job. So I think the helplessness and powerlessness, and the life of waiting, has always been integral to the lives of women. I think she describes that very well. I find it really interesting that in 1910 hardly anybody around her had these views, but she decided for herself that she was a feminist; she wasn’t sure she would want to marry, but if she did, they would be equal and she would always work. And I think the story of her struggle to be educated is really important. It meant something to me, even in my own life. I remember when I said I wanted to be a barrister the careers teacher said, ‘Girls can’t be barristers’ and I went ‘Why not?’ And she said, ‘No, no, you have to become a teacher.’ I said, ‘Why do I have to become a teacher? I don’t want to be a teacher.’ And so I really admired that Vera Brittain fought, and said ‘I am absolutely determined, I’m going to go to university.’ I think it’s very interesting that the book was rediscovered, I believe it was in 1978. That is when I read it, and it had so much to tell me. The lives of the women who went before us have a lot to tell us now."