Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain Page B
Authors: Vera Brittain
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a state of exultation! It is wonderful to be able to purchase so much rapture for 2 s . 6 d .! . . . It makes me wonder when in my life will come the moments of supreme emotion in which all lesser feelings are merged, and which leave one’s spirit different for evermore.’
Throughout those months which witnessed the outbreak of the first Balkan War, the renewal of the Triple Alliance, and a great deal of intermittent agitation over German spies, I never ceased - though often now with a failing heart, since the possibilities had begun to seem so small and the obstacles to be overcome so great - to pester my parents to send me to college. These importunities were invariably received by my father with the statement that he had already spent quite as much on my education as was necessary, and that ‘little girls’ must allow their elders to know what was best for them. I found this attitude of good-natured scepticism peculiarly exasperating, since in my own eyes I was not, of course, a ‘little girl’ at all, but a twentieth-century evangelist entrusted with the task of leading a benighted universe from darkness to light.
The apparent objects of my upbringing being what they were, some of my acquaintances have been surprised that I was never sent to Paris to be ‘finished’ - i.e. to be shaped yet more definitely in the trivial feminine mould which every youthful instinct and ambition prompted me to repudiate. Despairing of Oxford, and defensively smitten with the idea of postponing the dreaded isolation of Buxton, I had even, in my last term at school, misguidedly pleaded for a few months in Paris or Brussels. But my father was almost as much opposed to Paris as to college, on the ground that as soon as I got over there I should probably be seized with appendicitis - a not unnatural fear on his part, though I had never been threatened with the disease, and up to the present have escaped it.
Baulked of the minor alleviation, I returned again and again to the major attack; the desire for a more eventful existence and a less restricted horizon had become an obsession, and it never occurred to me to count on marriage as a possible road to freedom. From what I already knew of men, it seemed only too probable that a husband would yet further limit my opportunities - a conclusion fully warranted by the fact that nearly all the men I knew not only lived in Buxton, but regarded it as the most desirable place of residence in England.
Each fresh refusal to spend another penny on my education (though the cost of my music lessons, and of the expensive new piano which was ungrudgingly bought for me to practise on, would have paid for nearly a year at Oxford) plunged me into further depths of gloom; I felt trammelled and trapped, and after a few months at home I hated Buxton, in spite of the austere beauty of its peaks and dales and the health-giving air which induced so many rheumatic invalids to live hopefully in its hotels and take its waters, with a detestation that I have never since felt for any set of circumstances. Nearly two hundred miles from London, and therefore completely cut off - in days when a conscientious provincial mother would almost as soon have submitted her adolescent daughter to seduction as allow her to spend a few unaccompanied hours in town or entrust her with the Baby Austin type of freedom - from the groups of ambitious, intelligent boys and girls who naturally gravitate together in university towns and capital cities, I was wholly at the mercy of local conditions and family standards. I had nothing to do and no one to talk to; Edward for most of the year was at Uppingham, and with Mina and Betty I became more and more out of touch as the months went by.
Even at eighteen, a mentally voracious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery. Two things alone prevented me, during Edward’s school terms, from dying of spontaneous combustion - my diary, which I kept in a voluminous detail
Throughout those months which witnessed the outbreak of the first Balkan War, the renewal of the Triple Alliance, and a great deal of intermittent agitation over German spies, I never ceased - though often now with a failing heart, since the possibilities had begun to seem so small and the obstacles to be overcome so great - to pester my parents to send me to college. These importunities were invariably received by my father with the statement that he had already spent quite as much on my education as was necessary, and that ‘little girls’ must allow their elders to know what was best for them. I found this attitude of good-natured scepticism peculiarly exasperating, since in my own eyes I was not, of course, a ‘little girl’ at all, but a twentieth-century evangelist entrusted with the task of leading a benighted universe from darkness to light.
The apparent objects of my upbringing being what they were, some of my acquaintances have been surprised that I was never sent to Paris to be ‘finished’ - i.e. to be shaped yet more definitely in the trivial feminine mould which every youthful instinct and ambition prompted me to repudiate. Despairing of Oxford, and defensively smitten with the idea of postponing the dreaded isolation of Buxton, I had even, in my last term at school, misguidedly pleaded for a few months in Paris or Brussels. But my father was almost as much opposed to Paris as to college, on the ground that as soon as I got over there I should probably be seized with appendicitis - a not unnatural fear on his part, though I had never been threatened with the disease, and up to the present have escaped it.
Baulked of the minor alleviation, I returned again and again to the major attack; the desire for a more eventful existence and a less restricted horizon had become an obsession, and it never occurred to me to count on marriage as a possible road to freedom. From what I already knew of men, it seemed only too probable that a husband would yet further limit my opportunities - a conclusion fully warranted by the fact that nearly all the men I knew not only lived in Buxton, but regarded it as the most desirable place of residence in England.
Each fresh refusal to spend another penny on my education (though the cost of my music lessons, and of the expensive new piano which was ungrudgingly bought for me to practise on, would have paid for nearly a year at Oxford) plunged me into further depths of gloom; I felt trammelled and trapped, and after a few months at home I hated Buxton, in spite of the austere beauty of its peaks and dales and the health-giving air which induced so many rheumatic invalids to live hopefully in its hotels and take its waters, with a detestation that I have never since felt for any set of circumstances. Nearly two hundred miles from London, and therefore completely cut off - in days when a conscientious provincial mother would almost as soon have submitted her adolescent daughter to seduction as allow her to spend a few unaccompanied hours in town or entrust her with the Baby Austin type of freedom - from the groups of ambitious, intelligent boys and girls who naturally gravitate together in university towns and capital cities, I was wholly at the mercy of local conditions and family standards. I had nothing to do and no one to talk to; Edward for most of the year was at Uppingham, and with Mina and Betty I became more and more out of touch as the months went by.
Even at eighteen, a mentally voracious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery. Two things alone prevented me, during Edward’s school terms, from dying of spontaneous combustion - my diary, which I kept in a voluminous detail
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