Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain Page A
Authors: Vera Brittain
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pink-flushed petals,
Roseate wings unfurled;
What can, I thought, be fairer
In all the world?
Steps that were fain but faltered
(What could she else have done?)
Passed from the arbour’s shadow
Into the sun.
Noon and a scented glory,
Golden and pink and red;
‘What after all are roses
To me?’ I said.
R. A. L. July 11th, 1914.
1
But when I became, in 1912, a provincial debutante, decked out in London-bought garments that I did not know how to wear, the War was still two years away and my hospital service more than three. That unparalleled age of rich materialism and tranquil comfort, which we who grew up at its close will never see again, appeared to us to have gone on from time immemorial, and to be securely destined to continue for ever.
At my first dance, the High Peak Hunt Ball, I appeared modestly attired in the conventional white satin and pearls; this ingenuous uniform entitled me to spend the greater part of the next few weeks gyrating to the strains of ‘Dreaming’ and ‘The Vision of Salome’ in the arms of physically boisterous and conversationally inept young men. Those dances were by no means the mere gay functions that they seemed; they were supposed to test out the marriageable qualities of the young women on the basis of their popularity as dancing partners, and were therefore attended by numerous competitive chaperones who watched the proceedings with every symptom of apprehension and anxiety. Judging from the inferiority-complex permanently implanted in one or two of my contemporaries who did not come out of the test with flying colours, I am inclined to believe that provincial dances are responsible for more misery than any other commonplace experience.
Three years afterwards, as I was clearing my desk before going as a V.A.D. to London - I was quitting Buxton for ever, though I did not then realise it - I came across a ribbon-tied heap of my early dance-programmes carefully put away in a drawer. By that time so many of the fatuous young men had acquired dignity through death in France and the Dardanelles, that these records of my dances with them seemed like the incongruous souvenirs of a long-vanished and half-forgotten world - a world in which only the sinking of the Titanic had suddenly but quite temporarily reminded its inhabitants of the vanity of human calculations. I put the programmes back with the half-sorrowful, half-scornful indulgence that a middle-aged woman might feel when coming upon the relics of some youthful folly.
For the rest of 1912 and the first half of 1913, I went to more dances, paid calls, skated and tobogganed, played a good deal of Bridge and a great deal of tennis and golf, had music lessons and acted in amateur theatricals; in fact I passed my days in all those conventional pursuits with which the leisured young woman of every generation has endeavoured to fill the time that she is not qualified to use. Even my persevering attempts to follow, in accordance with St Monican tradition, the intricacies of Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment through the columns of The Times gradually slackened and ceased for lack of external encouragement. My only concession to the social conscience uncomfortably developed in me at school consisted of reluctant visits to my mother’s ‘district’ in the village of Burbage, near the limekilns below the sickle-like curve of Axe Edge. Here I made myself ‘useful’ by distributing copies of Mothers in Council , the official organ of that curious Union which believes the compulsory association of antagonistic partners to be somehow conducive to the sanctity of marriage.
My desultory and totally unorganised reading of George Eliot, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell, Carlyle, Emerson and Merejkowski made little impression upon this routine, though their writings offered occasional compensation for its utter futility. ‘The reading of Romola ,’ enthusiastically records my diary for April 27th, 1913, ‘has left me in
Roseate wings unfurled;
What can, I thought, be fairer
In all the world?
Steps that were fain but faltered
(What could she else have done?)
Passed from the arbour’s shadow
Into the sun.
Noon and a scented glory,
Golden and pink and red;
‘What after all are roses
To me?’ I said.
R. A. L. July 11th, 1914.
1
But when I became, in 1912, a provincial debutante, decked out in London-bought garments that I did not know how to wear, the War was still two years away and my hospital service more than three. That unparalleled age of rich materialism and tranquil comfort, which we who grew up at its close will never see again, appeared to us to have gone on from time immemorial, and to be securely destined to continue for ever.
At my first dance, the High Peak Hunt Ball, I appeared modestly attired in the conventional white satin and pearls; this ingenuous uniform entitled me to spend the greater part of the next few weeks gyrating to the strains of ‘Dreaming’ and ‘The Vision of Salome’ in the arms of physically boisterous and conversationally inept young men. Those dances were by no means the mere gay functions that they seemed; they were supposed to test out the marriageable qualities of the young women on the basis of their popularity as dancing partners, and were therefore attended by numerous competitive chaperones who watched the proceedings with every symptom of apprehension and anxiety. Judging from the inferiority-complex permanently implanted in one or two of my contemporaries who did not come out of the test with flying colours, I am inclined to believe that provincial dances are responsible for more misery than any other commonplace experience.
Three years afterwards, as I was clearing my desk before going as a V.A.D. to London - I was quitting Buxton for ever, though I did not then realise it - I came across a ribbon-tied heap of my early dance-programmes carefully put away in a drawer. By that time so many of the fatuous young men had acquired dignity through death in France and the Dardanelles, that these records of my dances with them seemed like the incongruous souvenirs of a long-vanished and half-forgotten world - a world in which only the sinking of the Titanic had suddenly but quite temporarily reminded its inhabitants of the vanity of human calculations. I put the programmes back with the half-sorrowful, half-scornful indulgence that a middle-aged woman might feel when coming upon the relics of some youthful folly.
For the rest of 1912 and the first half of 1913, I went to more dances, paid calls, skated and tobogganed, played a good deal of Bridge and a great deal of tennis and golf, had music lessons and acted in amateur theatricals; in fact I passed my days in all those conventional pursuits with which the leisured young woman of every generation has endeavoured to fill the time that she is not qualified to use. Even my persevering attempts to follow, in accordance with St Monican tradition, the intricacies of Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment through the columns of The Times gradually slackened and ceased for lack of external encouragement. My only concession to the social conscience uncomfortably developed in me at school consisted of reluctant visits to my mother’s ‘district’ in the village of Burbage, near the limekilns below the sickle-like curve of Axe Edge. Here I made myself ‘useful’ by distributing copies of Mothers in Council , the official organ of that curious Union which believes the compulsory association of antagonistic partners to be somehow conducive to the sanctity of marriage.
My desultory and totally unorganised reading of George Eliot, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell, Carlyle, Emerson and Merejkowski made little impression upon this routine, though their writings offered occasional compensation for its utter futility. ‘The reading of Romola ,’ enthusiastically records my diary for April 27th, 1913, ‘has left me in
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