Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain Read Free Book Online

of a Buxton young lady:
‘ “ We take all labour for our province! ”

‘From the judge’s seat to the legislator’s chair; from the statesman’s closet to the merchant’s office; from the chemist’s laboratory to the astronomer’s tower, there is no post or form of toil for which it is not our intention to attempt to fit ourselves; and there is no closed door we do not intend to force open; and there is no fruit in the garden of knowledge it is not our determination to eat.’

     
     
    Thus it was in St Monica’s garden, beside a little over-grown pool where the plump goldfish slid idly in and out of the shadows, and the feathered grasses drooped their heavy heads to the water’s edge, that I first visualised in rapt childish ecstasy a world in which women would no longer be the second-rate, unimportant creatures that they were now considered, but the equal and respected companions of men. Indeed, that school garden, now trimly beautiful in its twenty-year-old mellowness, but then recently hewn from the rough surface of the Downs and golden-hedged with tangled gorse and broom, has been for me somehow associated with every past phase of life.
     
    There, at the age of sixteen, I first began to dream how the men and women of my generation - with myself, of course, conspicuous among that galaxy of Leonardos - would inaugurate a new Renaissance on a colossal scale, and incidentally redeem all the foolish mistakes of our forefathers. There, more realistically, I planned my long-desired and constantly postponed career, there sought refuge after the anxiety of college examinations, there waited for news from the War, and felt the sinister shudder of the guns from the Belgian coast shake the Caterham Valley like a subterranean earthquake. There, too, when the War was over, I wandered about after taking the older girls for classes in history and international relations, thinking about relations quite other than international, and wondering whether or not to get married.
     
    But I anticipate. In my last term, as head-girl, I did no examinations and very little work, except for special history and literature classes with a visiting mistress, Miss F., one of those rare teachers who, like Miss Heath Jones, possessed originality and a real talent for inspiring ideas. Her gifts may be judged from the fact that she succeeded in filling me with a tremendous enthusiasm for the works of Carlyle and Ruskin. ‘The most important of all terms so far - as it marked the rising of my Star,’ begins an earnest fragment of sixteen-year-old diary recorded during the holidays after Miss F. first went to Kingswood - though fortunately the reference was not to herself, but to the impetus given by her teaching to the growth of those sentiments which, under the influence of Past and Present , I should then have described as my Ideals.
     
    An elegant, introspective, temperamental creature, Miss F. once spent a few days in Buxton with me and my family - who mildly disapproved of her - and told our fortunes on a dull afternoon. Over Edward, who was then sixteen, she appeared indefinite and uncommunicative, but to me she remarked: ‘I think you’ll be married all right’ (the phrase implying acceptance even on her part of what was still supposed to be the major preoccupation of an intelligent girl), ‘but if you’re not married at twenty-one, you’ll have to wait till you’re thirty. By that time you’ll have some kind of a career; I don’t know quite what it will be, but it will turn out well and your marriage won’t interfere with it.’
     
    Just before I left St Monica’s I played the part of the Madonna in Eager Heart , Miss Buckton’s Christmas mystery play, which gave a peculiarly memorable and emotional quality to my last weeks at school. Temperamentally, at least, I was thoroughly well adapted to the role, and this fact, to anyone who knows the play, with its half-sentimental, half-mystical detachment from the pedestrian