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April 2018 April 2018

BERE REGIS BOOK GROUP

Reading Group Book Review:
Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain
Although novels provide the staple fare of our
reading group, occasionally we stray into the realm
of nonfiction. Our choice this month was the first
and best-known volume of Vera Brittain’s memoirs.
Clearly not fiction, this work nevertheless has all the
broad sweep and varied cast of characters of an
epic historical novel.

The central character is of course Vera herself. In the course of the book she
emerges – not through her own if anything modest self-portrayal, but in the
context of events – as a woman of great talent, versatility, determination and
resilience. To break free from the hidebound convention of her hated middle-
class provincial upbringing in Buxton, she successfully applied to study at Oxford,
overcoming the determined resistance of her father, who believed a university
education was wasted on girls. In typically throwaway fashion she informs us that
she learned ancient Greek, required for the entrance examination, in a matter of
a few months. Her studies at Oxford were soon overshadowed by the onset of the
First World War; seeing her young male contemporaries enlist to serve in the
trenches, she decided she could not stand aside herself and enrolled as a VAD
(Voluntary Aid Detachment) auxiliary nurse, in which capacity she served in
military hospitals in England and France for the duration of the War.

In Testament of Youth the horrors of that war are
seen necessarily at second hand, in Vera’s own
account of tending horribly wounded and
mutilated soldiers and in letters from her fiancé,
brother and friends serving at the front, which she
quotes from at length. As a nurse she had to inure
herself to the harrowing sights with which she was
confronted on a daily basis in order to carry on.
As a result her account is sometimes understated,
but no less telling for that. She tells us for instance
almost as an aside that during the first days of the
Battle of the Somme there were not enough
platforms at Charing Cross to unload all the
wounded arriving from France, and trains had to
be sent on to Paddington. Her deeper feelings
are documented in her poems, also quoted
throughout the book.

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