Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (39 page)

I had not been allowed to bring my own clothes to the hospital, so as soon as I became convalescent I was presented with a selection of institution garments, and sent to take the air with the other municipal paupers. After getting into a pair of unbleached calico knickers, thick woollen socks, a bulky grey and white striped petticoat, a sage-green flannel blouse, and a huge pleated navy-blue skirt made for an old charlady six times my size, which I had to attach to my voluminous underclothes with half a dozen large safety-pins, I successfully accomplished several perambulations round the scrubby square of hospital grass without my costume disintegrating in the process. I was also permitted to take a bath, with unlocked door, in a bathroom used by patients recovering from various diseases. A dank, stuffy odour prevailed there, and enormous black beetles slithered perpetually in and out of the pipes.

During my three weeks’ captivity, Victor and Geoffrey wrote to me constantly, and sent flowers and fruit which caused some of my fellow-sufferers to christen me ‘the plutocrat of the workhouse table’. Edward, whose experience in the trenches had so far been uneventful, wrote also from Albert, describing the Golden Virgin of the Basilica, which had just been knocked horizontal - still holding the Child with its tiny arms outspread in benediction - by the first enemy bombardment. The French, he told me afterwards, believed that so long as the statue remained on the steeple they would never lose Albert. It actually fell in 1918 as the Germans entered the town.

When they first went to France, wrote Edward, the 11th Sherwood Foresters had been in trenches some distance from Louvencourt, but now they were not far from Roland’s grave. ‘The sun set last night in a red glow over him as I looked from here, giving a sense of the most perfect and enduring peace.’

Three weeks later he wrote to tell me that he had been to Louvencourt. Very carefully he described his journey, knowing how much each detail would mean to me, and drew a little diagram showing the arrangement of the graves in the cemetery.

‘I walked up along the path,’ he concluded, ‘and stood in front of the grave . . . And I took off my cap and prayed to whatever God there may be that I might live to be worthy of the friendship of the man whose grave was before me . . . But I did not stay there long because it was so very clear that he could not come back, and though it may be that he could see me looking at his grave, yet I did not feel that he was there . . . So I went away, and first I went on into the little town; it was crowded with troops and I did not go far and did not find the hospital. There were some Worcesters about but they were not the 7th or 8th; and so I went back the way I had come.’

After the first few days at the Fever Hospital I felt perfectly well, and was kept there only by the length of the infection period. Although, during those noisy, monotonous weeks, I had at last time to read the newspapers, with their perturbing accounts of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, and Townshend’s surrender at Kut, and the first stages of Roger Casement’s progress towards his execution in August, there was still more than enough opportunity for thoughts about the past. At the beginning of May a
Times
paragraph describing the ceremony on Magdalen Bridge brought back to me the cool, sweet ride through Marston just after dawn a year ago, and all at once the impulse to put what I felt into verse - a new impulse which had recently begun both to fascinate and torment me - sprang up with overwhelming compulsion. Seizing my notebook and a pencil, I retired to the beetle-infested bathroom, which, owing to the persistent loquacity of the V.A.D. who shared my room, was the only place in the building where I could be certain of peace.

Later I polished up the poem, ‘May Morning’, and sent it to the
Oxford Magazine
. It appeared in the next number, and was afterwards included in
Verses of a V.A.D
.:

The rising sun shone warmly on the tower;
Into the clear pure heaven the hymn aspired,
Piercingly sweet. This was the morning hour
When life awoke with spring’s creative power,
And the old city’s grey to gold was fired.

Silently reverent stood the noisy throng;
Under the bridge the boats in long array
Lay motionless. The choristers’ far song
Faded upon the breeze in echoes long.
Swiftly I left the bridge and rode away.

Straight to a little wood’s green heart I sped,
Where cowslips grew, beneath whose gold withdrawn
The fragrant earth peeped warm and richly red;
All trace of winter’s chilling touch had fled,
And song-birds ushered in the year’s bright morn.

I had met Love not many days before,
And as in blissful mood I listening lay,
None ever had of joy so full a store.
I thought that spring must last for evermore,
For I was young and loved, and it was May.

Now it is May again, and sweetly clear
Perhaps once more aspires the Latin hymn
From Magdalen tower, but not for me to hear.
I toil far distant, for a darker year
Shadows the century with menace grim.

I walk in ways where pain and sorrow dwell,
And ruin such as only War can bring,
Where each lives through his individual hell,
Fraught with remembered horror none can tell,
And no more is there glory in the spring.

And I am worn with tears, for he I loved
Lies cold beneath the stricken sod of France;
Hope has forsaken me, by death removed,
And Love that seemed so strong and gay has proved
A poor crushed thing, the toy of cruel chance.

Often I wonder, as I grieve in vain,
If when the long, long future years creep slow,
And War and tears alike have ceased to reign,
I ever shall recapture, once again,
The mood of that May Morning, long ago.

The concluding speculation is answered now - not only for me but for all my generation. We never have recaptured that mood; and we never shall.

9

After the Fever Hospital came a blessed fortnight of sick leave in Macclesfield.

The year was now on the high road to summer, and, whenever I could forget for a few moments that warmth and fine weather meant great campaigns and peril for Edward, I was conscious of a quiet pleasure in my surroundings such as I had not known since leaving Oxford. For nearly twelve months I had had no holiday in its true sense of an interval of tranquillity, and those two weeks did a great deal to hasten the process of psychological recuperation which had begun on Easter Sunday.

The house, which my parents had taken from a local family, had a gracious little garden where lilac and laburnum and pink hawthorn were already in flower. Beneath the hot, scented bushes I read for many hours my neglected books, and, in a warm, semi-furnished loft attached to the house, compiled a small volume of favourite quotations. When the long spring evenings grew too cold for the garden, a very tolerable piano in the drawing-room helped me both to forget and to remember.

‘This afternoon,’ I wrote to Edward, ‘I have been playing over the slow movement from Beethoven’s No. 7 Sonata, and some of the Macdowell Sea Songs which you used to play. Whenever I sit down to the piano now I can always see you playing away, absolutely unconcerned by other people’s requests to you to come out, or listen a moment! If you were to die I think I should have to give up music altogether, for there would be so many things I could never bear to hear or play - just as now I cannot bear to play “
L’Envoi
”, or the “
Liber scriptus proferitur
” part of Verdi’s Requiem, which for some reason or other I always connected with Roland’s going to the front . . .

‘I am a little amused by the tone of the Uppingham magazine sent on to you. The Editorial has certainly greatly deteriorated since Roland’s day. Both it and the entire magazine seem chiefly concerned with football. Exploits on the football field are related in detail, while the exploits of those on another field across the sea pass unnoticed, and such names of those who met their death there as R. A. Leighton and S. L. Mansel-Carey are hidden in a little corner marked “Died of Wounds”. But one consoles one’s self with the thought that their names will live on the Chapel walls long after the zealous footballers have passed out of remembrance. I noticed also that people who distinguished themselves at football while at school get biographies in the magazine, though he who surpassed the school record for prizes had no special mention at all.
Sic transit gloria mundi
.’

I returned to a London seething with bewildered excitement over the Battle of Jutland. Were we celebrating a glorious naval victory or lamenting an ignominious defeat? We hardly knew; and each fresh edition of the newspapers obscured rather than illuminated this really quite important distinction. The one indisputable fact was that hundreds of young men, many of them midshipmen only just in their teens, had gone down without hope of rescue or understanding of the issue to a cold, anonymous grave.

‘I have just been to St Paul’s where they closed the service by singing a hymn of thanksgiving for our “Moral” Victory! That seems to me to be going just a little too far,’ a letter of mine commented to Edward on June 11th. ‘We couldn’t do more than that if we had given the German navy a smashing blow, instead of having ended the battle in a draw which we say was a victory to us, and they say was a victory to them.’

But before this letter was written, Edward had been home on a short, unexpected leave.

As soon as he arrived he went up to Macclesfield, with Geoffrey, for the week-end, but he and my mother came back to London for the last two days, and I was given forty-eight hours off duty to stay with them at the Grafton Hotel. Except for an intense antipathy to noise - noise in trains, in ’buses, in the street, in restaurants - he seemed unchanged.

The afternoon of his return to London stands out very clearly in my recollection, for on that day the news came through of Kitchener’s death in the
Hampshire
. The words ‘KITCHENER DROWNED’ seemed more startling, more dreadful, than the tidings of Jutland; their incredibility may still be measured by the rumours, which so long persisted, that he was not dead, that he had escaped in another ship to Russia, that he was organising a great campaign in France, that the wreck of the
Hampshire
was only a ‘blind’ to conceal his real intentions, that he would return in his own good time to deliver the final blow of the War.

For a few moments during that day, almost everyone in England must have dropped his occupation to stare, blank and incredulous, into the shocked eyes of his neighbour. In the evening, Edward and our mother and I walked up and down, almost without a word, beside the river at Westminster. Sad and subdued, we stood on the terrace below St Thomas’s Hospital and looked at the black silhouette of the Union Jack on the War Office, flying half-mast against the darkening red of an angry June sky. So great had been the authority over our imagination of that half-legendary figure, that we felt as dismayed as though the ship of state itself had foundered in the raging North Sea.

Edward’s leave, like all short leaves, vanished in a whirl-wind of activities. Somehow he crowded into it an afternoon at Keymer, a visit to Victor, who was now at Purfleet, a concert, and one or two theatres, which inevitably included
Romance
, with Doris Keane and Owen Nares, and
Chu Chin Chow
. I seemed hardly to have seen him when it was time for him to return, but in a quiet interval, when we were alone together, he spoke in veiled but significant language of a great battle impending. It would start, he told me, somewhere near Albert, and he knew that he would be in it.

Before his train left for Folkestone, I had to go back to Camberwell, and he went with me to get my ’bus from the bottom of Regent Street. I climbed the steps of the ’bus with a sinking heart, for I knew very well how many were the chances against our meeting again. When I turned and waved to him from the upper deck, I noticed with impotent grief the sad wistfulness of his eyes as he stood where Roland had stood to watch the advent of 1915, and saluted me beside the fountain in Piccadilly Circus.