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

yet, looking back upon the London girls with whom I went to school, I do not think that the difference was very great. One of them I well remember saying to me, just after she ‘came out’, that she was always afraid of going too far with men, because she really didn’t know what ‘too far’ was. I was quite unable to enlighten her, though an incident that had happened to me two or three years earlier made me certain that the vague peril was something extremely embarrassing and profoundly uncomfortable.
     
    At the end of one school term, I had been as usual shepherded by a mistress into the train at St Pancras for the long journey to Buxton. Carefully observing the rule, which originated in contemporary White Slave Traffic alarms, that we were never to travel in carriages alone with men, she selected a compartment in which the one male passenger was safely accompanied by a respectable elderly female. Unfortunately at Kettering, the first stop after we left St Pancras, the elderly female got out, and immediately the train started again the strange man, a swarthy, black-haired individual of the commercial-traveller class, with rolling eyes and large hairy hands, came over from his corner and sat down beside me.
     
    ‘I was waiting for that old cat to get out so that we could have a nice little talk,’ he promisingly began.
     
    More alarmed than I allowed myself to appear, I looked helplessly at the closed door leading to the corridor, but though its very existence protected me better than I realised, it was completely cut off by my companion’s insinuating bulk.
     
    ‘I see you’re going to Buxton,’ he continued, looking at my initialled suitcase. ‘How I wish I hadn’t got to get out at Leicester! Now won’t you just tell me your name?’
     
    Encouraged by the mention of Leicester, which was only another half-hour’s journey, I responded inventively that my name was Violet Brown and that I didn’t live in Buxton but was only going there for a week to stay with friends - a fabrication inspired by the nightmarish fear that this apparition might suddenly appear in search of me on our own front doorstep.
     
    ‘And how old are you?’ he inquired, pressing closer, and looked disappointed when I answered truthfully that I was fourteen.
     
    ‘Why,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’re such a pretty little girl - I thought you must be quite seventeen! When you get home you must send me your photograph—’ and he squeezed me still further into the corner.
     
    It was then that I realised that the train, upon which I was depending to convey me to Leicester and salvation, had suddenly come to a standstill. Some shouts were raised along the line; my enemy heard them, and informed me with satisfaction that we had broken down, and could not possibly get to Leicester for over an hour.
     
    ‘Now what a lucky thing we’re together!’ he said softly, and took my hand - a grubby enough schoolgirl’s fist, with ink-stained nails chipped by games and amateur gardening. ‘Pretty little girls like you shouldn’t bite their nails,’ he murmured playfully, examining my fingers. ‘You’ll stop biting them to please me, won’t you? - and give me a kiss to show that we’re pals?’
     
    The leering black eyes, the pawing hands and the alcoholic breath combined with the train’s delay to drive me into a panic. Suddenly desperate, and probably more muscular than my tormentor had anticipated, I flung myself with an immense effort out of his encroaching arms, and dashed frantically into the corridor. The subdued middle-aged woman into whose compartment I blindly stumbled, flushed and hatless, regarded me with amazement, but she accepted my incoherent tale of an ‘awful man’, and pacified my agitation by giving me a share of her luncheon sandwiches. When, after quite an hour’s breakdown, we did at last pass Leicester, she went with me to retrieve my suitcase from the compartment in which I still feared to see my swarthy