Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain
Authors: Vera Brittain
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assailant, but he had gone.
I never related this incident to my family - the thought of the hullabaloo that would follow, of the fuss that would be made both at home and at school whenever I had to travel alone, filled me with too great a distaste - but so deep was the repugnance aroused in me that I remember it as clearly as though it had happened last week. It was not, however, until the summer of 1922, when from an open-air platform in Hyde Park I supported the Six Point Group in urging the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill by the House of Commons, that I realised the existence, as legal conceptions, of indecent assault and the age of consent.
So far as I can now judge, at eighteen I was at least as interested in social problems and in what were then always referred to as ‘the facts of life’ as most of my contemporaries, though my sexual curiosity was always a bad second to my literary ambition. Yet when the War broke out, I did not clearly understand what was meant by homosexuality, incest or sodomy, and was puzzled by the shadow that clung to the name of Oscar Wilde, whose plays I discovered in 1913 and read with a rapturous delight in their epigrams.
Nearly all the older girls with whom I went to school had been addicted to surreptitious conversations about the advent of babies; periodic discovery by parents or teachers thrust these intriguing speculations still further underground, and led to that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation. Thanks to this composite enlightenment in addition to the decorous elucidations of Household Medicine , I had a fairly comprehensive though somewhat Victorian idea of the primitive fashion in which the offspring of even the most civilised parents make their appearance, but of how to rear infants and train small children I had not the slightest notion either in theory or in practice, since the influence of married women in the education of girls mostly destined for wifehood and maternity was then considered even less desirable than it is to-day. I was also, despite my stock of physiological information, still extremely hazy with regard to the precise nature of the sexual act.
This half-knowledge engendered in me so fierce an antipathy to the idea of physical relationship in so far as this happened to be separable from romance, that when, soon after I left school, I was proposed to by a neighbour of ours - a large, athletic young man with limited brains and evangelical principles, who strongly disapproved of my ‘unwomanly’ ambitions, and could not possibly have been attracted by anything more substantial than my childish pretty-prettiness - my immediate and only reaction was a sense of intolerable humiliation and disgust.
When first I had to nurse a case of venereal disease - which I had hitherto seen referred to in the Press only under the mysterious title of ‘the hidden plague’ - I did not know exactly what it was; I was fully enlightened only in 1917, when in a Malta hospital I watched a syphilitic orderly die in convulsions after an injection of salvarsan. Finally, my pre-war knowledge of Army doctors and nurses was derived entirely from the more idealistic poems of Kipling, which by no means helped me to understand the suggestive words and movements, the desperate secret manœuvrings, of men and women tormented by unnecessary segregation.
It should now be clear that - easy victims as I and the boys and girls similarly reared provided, with our naïve, uninformed generosities and enthusiasms, for the war propagandist in a non-conscription country - few young women could have been less forewarned and forearmed than I was against war in general, and Army Hospital Service in particular.
2
Provincial Young-Ladyhood
IN THE ROSE-GARDEN
Dew on the
I never related this incident to my family - the thought of the hullabaloo that would follow, of the fuss that would be made both at home and at school whenever I had to travel alone, filled me with too great a distaste - but so deep was the repugnance aroused in me that I remember it as clearly as though it had happened last week. It was not, however, until the summer of 1922, when from an open-air platform in Hyde Park I supported the Six Point Group in urging the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill by the House of Commons, that I realised the existence, as legal conceptions, of indecent assault and the age of consent.
So far as I can now judge, at eighteen I was at least as interested in social problems and in what were then always referred to as ‘the facts of life’ as most of my contemporaries, though my sexual curiosity was always a bad second to my literary ambition. Yet when the War broke out, I did not clearly understand what was meant by homosexuality, incest or sodomy, and was puzzled by the shadow that clung to the name of Oscar Wilde, whose plays I discovered in 1913 and read with a rapturous delight in their epigrams.
Nearly all the older girls with whom I went to school had been addicted to surreptitious conversations about the advent of babies; periodic discovery by parents or teachers thrust these intriguing speculations still further underground, and led to that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation. Thanks to this composite enlightenment in addition to the decorous elucidations of Household Medicine , I had a fairly comprehensive though somewhat Victorian idea of the primitive fashion in which the offspring of even the most civilised parents make their appearance, but of how to rear infants and train small children I had not the slightest notion either in theory or in practice, since the influence of married women in the education of girls mostly destined for wifehood and maternity was then considered even less desirable than it is to-day. I was also, despite my stock of physiological information, still extremely hazy with regard to the precise nature of the sexual act.
This half-knowledge engendered in me so fierce an antipathy to the idea of physical relationship in so far as this happened to be separable from romance, that when, soon after I left school, I was proposed to by a neighbour of ours - a large, athletic young man with limited brains and evangelical principles, who strongly disapproved of my ‘unwomanly’ ambitions, and could not possibly have been attracted by anything more substantial than my childish pretty-prettiness - my immediate and only reaction was a sense of intolerable humiliation and disgust.
When first I had to nurse a case of venereal disease - which I had hitherto seen referred to in the Press only under the mysterious title of ‘the hidden plague’ - I did not know exactly what it was; I was fully enlightened only in 1917, when in a Malta hospital I watched a syphilitic orderly die in convulsions after an injection of salvarsan. Finally, my pre-war knowledge of Army doctors and nurses was derived entirely from the more idealistic poems of Kipling, which by no means helped me to understand the suggestive words and movements, the desperate secret manœuvrings, of men and women tormented by unnecessary segregation.
It should now be clear that - easy victims as I and the boys and girls similarly reared provided, with our naïve, uninformed generosities and enthusiasms, for the war propagandist in a non-conscription country - few young women could have been less forewarned and forearmed than I was against war in general, and Army Hospital Service in particular.
2
Provincial Young-Ladyhood
IN THE ROSE-GARDEN
Dew on the
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