Vera Brittain
1. Testament of Experience
2. One Voice – Pacifist Writings from the Second World War
3. Vera Brittain (1893 – 1979) – A Life
Testament of Experience
By Vera Brittain
Published 1979 by Virago
Would the real Vera Brittain stand up?
That is what I feel like asking after reading Paul Berry & Mark Bostridge's biography and this Vera Brittain's autobiography of the years 1925-1950.
Is it that we never see ourselves the same as other people do or is it rather that we can never feel able to express our full feelings about those close to us in the fear that they may be hurt.
In this epic of a book of 480 pages we are shown a marriage, which although very different from the norm, nevertheless is experienced by Vera as being a close one of an equal partnership. Probably her husband George Catlin, is depicted as being the more respected of the two, certainly not the inferior partner in any way. He comes across as a leading political thinker of his time, lecturing in America and other countries in the world.
Having written the Testament of Friendship earlier, I suppose she felt little need to go into great detail of her close friendship with Winifred as all had been written there.
The majority of the book is given over to the years immediately before the Second World War, through the war and just after. Vera's pain at being considered with suspicion by the authorities in the UK comes over clearly. It was difficult enough for her to part with her children, Shirley and John, as they went to friends in America to remain safe during the war, but even more difficult to find she could not leave the country to visit them or George, who was lecturing in the USA.
No mention is made of John's confrontational behaviour towards Vera as he grew up, beyond the usual adolescent phase of growing up.
It is certainly different to return to the writing of this time, but in many ways it is to be regretted that we have lost the beauty of the language usage of that era with its greater use of adjectives and less sparse expression. Her writing style brings the surroundings alive to the senses. I found this particularly so when she writes of her visit to Germany after the war. It was as if the smell and taste of the war jumped from the pages of the book. I felt the sense of desolation and hopelessness from her word paintings of the bombed cities with orphaned children and bereft mothers. Whole families were gone and others with nowhere to live and no food to eat. The scenes that met her more than confirmed her worse fears that she had warned against before and during the war and continued to write against as developments of nuclear weapons continued unabated.
In hindsight it is very difficult to see why nationally and globally lessons about the need to change our approach to the way we live together haven't been learned. How many more wars do we need to fight before they are? How long before we understand that peace and compassion must be the underlying values by which we live as a species? How many Vera Brittain's do there have to be?
One Voice – Pacifist Writings from the Second World War
By Vera Brittain and Foreword by Shirley Williams
(Includes: Humiliation With Honour & Seeds of Chaos
First Published By Continuum 2005: ISBN 0-8264-8534-0
Humiliation With Honour consists of Vera Brittain's pacifist beliefs. The form took that of addressing her adolescent son although it is unlikely that he ever read them as rather than being sent to him they were distributed regularly to other pacifists, particularly those belonging to the PPU, i.e. Peace Pledge Union founded by Canon Dick Sheppard in 1937.
The letters present Vera's beliefs about all wars and the cause of them, particularly those of World War Two. She uses as an illustration the failure of the peace following World War One. Violence and repressive policy never creates peace but rather causes of wars which follow. The peace must be a genuine peace with respect for the so-called 'losers of a war'. The message, I feel remains relevant as we look at the sufferings of the Palestinians because they have not been allowed to live freely in the so-called cease fires and peace. The underlying problems were not addressed and still are not being addressed properly. The seeds of further wars are continually being sown.
The author addresses the abomination of blanket bombing of 1943-4 in Seeds of Chaos. She uses rational arguments to show just how morally bankrupt we had become in destroying those cities which had few or no crucial factories supporting the German war effort. The indiscriminate bombing of civilians was accepted during 1943/4 and even those cities who were against the Nazi regime suffered equally from this indiscriminate bombing. Numbers, sizes and weights of the bombs which were being used by America and Great Britain far outnumbered those which had been used by the Germans and these are analysed to prove her arguments and can become tedious for the narrative but important as supportive evidence for what she writes. There was no comparison. She shows the political situation along with the propaganda of the media and also points out those few MPs and churchmen who did speak against this. An interesting poll was taken showing that it was those in areas of the country which hadn't been bombed that overwhelmingly supported the policy whereas the populations of cities that had suffered did not, in the majority, support it. They felt it to be immoral to act in a way which caused the suffering to civilians as they had experienced it. There was no justification to sink to the level of everything that had earlier been condemned by those in government.
There is a short foreword by the author's daughter, Shirley Williams and an introduction by Y. Aleksandra Bennett.
The main text ends with the following poem written by the author and published in 'The Friend' in 1942.
Lament for Cologne
You stood so proudly on the flowing Rhine,
Your history mankind's, your climbing spires
Crowned with the living light that man desires
To gild his path from bestial to divine.
Today, consumed by war's unpitying fires,
You lie in ruins, weeping for your dead,
Your shattered monuments the funeral pyres
Of humble men whose days and dreams are fled.
Perhaps, when passions die and slaughters cease,
The mothers on whose homes destructions fell,
Who wailing sought their children through the hell
Of London, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade,
Will seek Cologne's sad women, unafraid,
And cry: 'God's cause is ours. Let there be peace!'
Vera Brittain (1893 – 1979) – A Life
By Paul Berry & Mark Bostridge
Published by Pimlico 1996
Vera Brittain, being born in 1893 and dying in 1970 lived through two world wars and a society going through rapid change.
Berry and Bostridge, capture the changes and tensions within this one woman's life and keep the reader's attention for the 523 pages of written text. Although following her life chronologically there are some specific features of Vera's life which are worth drawing out and which run throughout her life and demonstrating the social issues which bring the social and political history of the time accessible through this well written biography.
In her formative years Vera lived in Buxton where the family had moved, demonstrating their climb up into the genteel world of provincial well-to-do families – an expression of success. The expectations that she would make a 'good marriage' couldn't be met by a young woman who questioned everything and continued to do so to the very end of her life. She recognised her own intellectual ability in her teens and won a scholarship to Somerfield College, Oxford. However, she was only a part way through the degree course when she cut short her studies, contributing to the war effort through nursing. It is difficult for us to realise that at this time, if she had completed the degree course, she would still not have been awarded a degree. In fact following her returning from the war, and by the time she took up and completed the course, women were awarded the degree along with their male counterparts. Instead of returning home she began her adult life with the conviction that it was right, as a feminist to use that degree and be economically independent. Throughout her life she wrote over 50 books, both in non-fiction and fiction as well as being a journalist and lecturer both in the UK and America.
Her feminist convictions created tensions in family relationships, with parents, with husband and even with children. She wished to have children, and did, but the difficulties for George Catlin, who she married, were almost insurmountable. Although entering the marriage knowing that Vera's work would always take priority he never really understood what this would mean. His personal ambitions as a political lecturer and writer were never really met. She could never be the wife who entertained, which was expected of her. In spite of working much of the time on different continents, and having to accept without criticism George's lady friends, their marriage did last until she died. Her honesty and commitment to the causes she espoused did mean that personal relationships and friendships were never easy.
Vera's pacifism didn't develop until after the experiences of the First World War when she lost her dear brother Edward, her fiancé Rowland and two of their friends, who Vera had become close to. In her immaturity she had been caught up in the nationalism along with so many young men of her generation. Her disillusionment began with her hands on experience, none more so than nursing young German men and after the war when travelling in Europe lecturing for the League of Nations Union. Most people now remember Vera Brittain mainly for her autobiographical Testament of Youth 1933. But as her pacifism became central to her thinking and the next war loomed near she became less popular and during the war her reputation plummeted to the point of being hated by many. The book treats her lived tensions against an excellent insight into the war and particularly the horrors of being out of step with the nation in speaking out against the blanket bombing of German cities. The difficulties for Vera about whether to send her two children to American friends or whether to keep them in England was one of hardest decisions she faced. They did go but she never reconciled this within herself as to whether it was the right thing to do. She was always hard on herself in tackling impossible dilemmas where there can be no right answer.
As years wore on nothing she did was without facing the dilemmas and differences her feminism and pacifism brought her. She increasingly turned down accepting prominent roles in pacifist groups, marching and sitting with the leaders at CND demonstrations but taking part as just one of the many as well as turning down many invitations to speak if it might damage George or Shirley. This did not mean that she stopped finding ways to write and speak in public when she felt able, often taking no money for it. Even when accepting an invitation to speak in South Africa on literature, towards the end of her life, she couldn't but fail to identify with those supporting the anti-apartheid cause. Her earlier link through Winifred Holtby, who had probably been the closest she ever got to experiencing a true friendship, and who had died all too young, had ensured that Winifred's passions for justice for the black population in South Africa, would have been transmitted and not forgotten by Vera. She never stopped being called on to give of herself by those groups and causes to which she had always been committed.
When her daughter Shirley Williams was making her way in politics Vera could not avoid difficult choices. She was always proud of Shirley, her independence of mind and the way she questioned everything and lived a life of integrity. Vera would have wished to campaign and help in campaigns but knew the likelihood of Shirley being smeared by her reputation. Vera could not even share in the final success of election. Perhaps the relationship between Vera and Shirley was the best of Vera's life. Although Shirley and Vera were close the most distressing part of the biography was the anguish caused to Vera by her son. He continued to treat her with derision, bordering on contempt, right to the end. However, this was only the half of it as the demands for money never stopped. The tension of loving this son but not really being able to believe that he was really so cruel to her, continuing taking more insults from him right through to the end without reconciliation, gives us a prime example of mental cruelty within families.
It is interesting that it was through her pacifism that she was drawn back to her religious faith in middle age – a mature faith grown out of a life of integrity and love for humanity. She was able to appreciate her grandchildren and would always give them time and towards the end she became increasingly dependent on George, recognising just how much she had grown to love him over the years. This was no demanding love but a discovery of mutuality not possible at the height of her strength and working output. Whether he would have fulfilled his seeming potential of being one of the great political thinkers of his time, had he not lived in Vera's shadow, we shall never know. As it is he sometimes seemed to be just one on a long list who was supported from the hard earned money of his working writer/lecturer/activist wife. One is left wondering whether the gradual shut down of her brain and final descent into dementure was a result of pushing herself and her intellectual and emotional abilities to the extremes over a lifetime of commitment to 'doing the right thing'.
Certainly this is a book, which gives us an insight into one of the most remarkable women of the last century, a complex, passionate and not always a likeable one, but one which this world would be the poorer for not having produced. Her words continue relevant to all generations.