Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (46 page)

‘The new Government is going strong,’ wrote my uncle enthusiastically, ‘and already has effected more in a fortnight than the old one did in two years. We now have control of Shipping, Coal, Wines and Food, and in addition every man between 16 and 60 is now to be taken entirely in hand . . . The German Peace inquiries have left us quite cold; they were so evidently an attempt to get a German (in the strongest sense of the word) peace. But today President Wilson has stepped boldly into the arena and had the consummate effrontery to tell us that both sides are evidently fighting for the protection of small States (what price Belgium and Serbia?) and therefore the Allies should try to discuss peace terms with Germany. The newspaper comments are amusing and very instructive and even the American papers in some cases have taken Mr Wilson to task pretty severely . . .

‘Lloyd George is quite marvellous - his insight and powers of perception of the important features of this most complex situation border upon the uncanny at times and one almost feels afraid when one realises to what an extent the Nation is leaning upon the energy and brains of one man through this awful crisis . . . We are up against it with a vengeance this time but there is no panic and we are all prepared to carry the thing through and damn the consequences. Even though we know they will be hard enough to bear in the very near future . . . I feel a worm of course, and quite naturally, but when I look on and watch my fellow men and women carrying on and doing it with grim determination but withal everlasting cheerfulness and modesty, I cannot help feeling a very proud worm. It is something to know from what a nation one is bred.’

Shortly before Christmas, Geoffrey, who had been very much ‘in the War’ all that autumn, wrote to assure me that he was still alive. He evidently felt less confidence than my uncle in the Nation, and none whatever in himself, and his letters made trench life sound as boring and monotonous as the peace-loving student-temperament invariably found it. Victor, on the contrary, lived in a state of permanent enthusiasm for the military standards of the K.R.R.C. in comparison with those of the ‘old men’ with whom, on account of his prolonged light duty, he had had so much contact for nearly two years. After describing the discovery of a certain happiness in trench warfare through the attainment of a surface efficiency, he wrote to me on December 6th half apologising for his new militaristic mood.

One could not, he said, continually reflect upon the material and spiritual waste involved whenever that highly trained product, a man in the prime of life, was instantaneously killed by a stray bullet, or life at the front would be one long misery. Yet nothing, he curiously concluded, had depressed him so much in France as the Crucifixes which were occasionally to be seen still standing in desolate shell-swept areas. The horror of the one intensified a hundred-fold that of the other, and the image of the tortured Christ struck him as ‘an appalling monument to the personification of Utter Failure’.

Three weeks afterwards he wrote again to tell me that he had ‘not yet seen War’. He was perpetually haunted, he added, by the fear of not coming up to scratch in an emergency. ‘I tell you it is a positive curse to have a temperament out here. The ideal thing to be is a typical Englishman.’

As Christmas approached I was moved from the eye and malaria block, in which I had worked since October amongst semi-convalescent patients, to the Sisters’ quarters, where I became a combination of assistant housekeeper and head parlourmaid. This work, which every V.A.D. had to do for a month, was even less congenial to me than nursing, and I found the supervision of the Maltese maids no light occupation. ‘If you don’t keep
everything
- even half a jug of diluted milk - either locked up or directly under your eyes,’ I recorded, ‘you needn’t inquire where it has gone when you can’t find it.’

There was compensation, however, in the New Year flowers - golden oxalis and white arabis and red campions and miniature celandines - which were already springing up on the patch of rocky ground in front of the Sisters’ quarters. Here, I noticed, the lords-and-ladies were striped brown and terra-cotta, ‘like one curly petal of a tiger lily’. More frequent visits to Valletta, too, were possible, and were always potentially exciting, for Malta, that little dumping-ground of the nations, was full of unexpected meetings. I nearly ran into a boy from Buxton one afternoon as I was hurrying to take the ferry from Valletta back to Sliema, and the very V.A.D. who now shared my room was the daughter of the ‘little’ greengrocer with whom we used to deal in Macclesfield during my childhood.

The Indian and Egyptian markets in Valletta, with their silk shawls, embroidered kimonos, Maltese lace, grass-lawn tablecloths, rich crêpe-de-Chines, Chinese embroideries, sandalwood boxes, painted fans and black cigarette-cases inlaid with gold, had already tempted me to spend all the pay and allowances that I could rake together upon Christmas presents of every kind, and with these I sent home two small water-colours purchased in Naples.

‘They are for my study at Oxford if ever I get there again,’ I told my mother, ‘and even if I don’t I can’t imagine myself without a study if I am alive. I would rather do without a bedroom and sleep on the sofa in the drawing-room than without a room to myself where I can have a fire of my own and not be interrupted by anyone . . . Your remark about the War lasting five (more) years makes me wonder if I shall ever go there at all. If it really does . . . I should think we should all be dead by then, but if I am not I shall only be twenty-seven, and it would still be worth while . . . It seems very hard that we should be the generation to suffer the War, though I suppose it is very splendid too, and is making us better and wiser and deeper men and women than our ancestors ever were or our descendants ever will be. It seems to me that the War will make a big division of “before” and “after” in the history of the world, almost if not quite as big as the “B.C.” and “A.D.” division made by the birth of Christ . . . Sorry you see me in spirit in my V.A.D. hat; can’t you try to think of me in something more becoming? I am always glad Roland never saw me in it, so that if he has taken any memory of me into the next world, it isn’t of me in that hat . . . Tell me more about Oliver Lodge’s
Raymond
.’

When Christmas preparations began in earnest, and I was set to decorate the mess-tent with palms and streamers, and to make jellies and huge fruit salads for the men’s special teas, the memory of the previous year, with its similar activities so blindly and cheerfully performed in the very hour of Roland’s death, came back like the dull ache of an old shattering wound. In the middle of the bright, noisy kitchen, with the Home Sister issuing orders in her harsh, melancholy voice, and the Maltese maids around her chattering like monkeys, it was sometimes difficult to prevent an inconvenient tear from falling into the pail of fruit salad.

‘I wonder where he is - and if he is at all,’ I soliloquised in my diary, for there was now no one within several hundred miles to whom such personal speculations could be expressed. ‘I wonder if he sees me writing this now. It’s absurd to say time makes one forget; I miss him as much as ever I did. One recovers from the shock, just as one gradually would get used to managing with one’s left hand if one had lost one’s right, but one never gets over the loss, for one is never the same after it. I have got used to facing the long empty years ahead of me if I survive the War, but I have always before me the realisation of how empty they are and will be, since he will never be there again.’

A letter from Edward which came just after Christmas told me that I had not really been alone during those days of recollection; as usual, he had shared my thoughts with that peculiar intimacy which is supposed to exist only between twins. He began, however, by describing his investiture at Buckingham Palace on December 17th.

‘There were 3 C.M.G.s, about 72 D.S.O.s and about 30 M.C.s, so it was a fairly small investiture. We were instructed what to do by a colonel who I believe is the King’s special private secretary and then the show started. One by one we walked into an adjoining room about 6 paces - halt - left turn - bow - 2 paces forward - King pins on Cross - shake hands - pace back - bow - right turn and slope off by another door . . . The King spoke to a few of us, including me; he said, “I hope you have quite recovered from your wound,” to which I replied “Very nearly, thank you, Sir” and then went out with the Cross in my pocket in a case. I met Mother just outside and we went off towards Victoria thinking we had quite escaped all the photographers, but unfortunately one beast from the
Daily Mirror
saw us and took us.’

He concluded with a paragraph which showed that no Military Cross, no Royal congratulations, no uproarious welcome from his successors at Uppingham, could alter his estimate of Roland as a lost leader whose value to the world was so far in excess of his own.

‘I know it is just a year and you are thinking of him and his terrible death, and of what might have been, even as I am too. This year has, I think, made him seem very far off but yet all the more unforgettable. His life was like a guiding star which left this firmament when he died and went to some other one where it still shines as brightly, but so very far away. I know you will in a way live through last year’s tragedy again, but may it bring still greater hopes for “the last and brightest Easter day” which you and I can barely conceive, let alone understand . . . How happy I could be to see you meet again.’

In my reply, just after the New Year, I told him, alone amongst my correspondents, of a small but strange happening that occurred just after I had written my diary on the anniversary of Roland’s death.

‘It seems rather curious that on the night of December 23rd I was kneeling by my bed in the dark thinking about him and that night last year when suddenly, just before 11.0, at the very hour of his death, the whole sky was lighted up and everything outside became queerly and startlingly visible. At first I thought it was just lightning, which is very frequent at night here, but when the light remained and did not flash away again I felt quite uncanny and afraid and hid my face in my hands for two or three minutes. When I looked up again the light had gone; I went to the window but could see nothing at all to account for the sudden brilliant glow. A day or two after I heard that there had been a most extraordinary shooting star, which had lit up the whole sky for two or three minutes before it had fallen . . . (Someone suggested it was the Star of Bethlehem fallen to earth because it could no longer shine in the dark hour of War.) Just coincidence, of course, but strange from my point of view that it should have happened at that hour. I remember one day last winter how Clare pointed out to me a star, which shone very brightly among the others, and said “Wouldn’t it be strange if that star were Roland ?” ’

7

As 1917 came in, bringing warmer winds to Malta and a riot of brilliant flowers to the rocks, I realised that, for the time being, I was certainly having the best of things. One after another, my mails from home emphasised the shortage of food, of money, of domestic help, the cost of eggs and butter and the difficulty of buying them, the struggle to disregard minor illnesses and keep on at work. Each letter was grey with growing depression, but grim with the determination to ‘carry on’, ‘keep a stiff upper lip’, or whatever special aphorism appealed to the writer. The winter, too, was excessively cold in England and France, and its bitter discomforts added to the general gloom and the sense of endurance strained beyond its limit.

‘My work in town is daily getting heavier,’ wrote my uncle in the midst of an attack of bronchitis, ‘and last weekend and this I have felt more like a beaten dog than anything else. Just at present of course the War Loan is giving us an enormous amount of work . . . The past fortnight has been intensely cold, 18 and 20 degrees of frost in Purley and as much as 36 degrees in other parts of England. Coal is of course very short and very expensive but there is some to be had at round about 40
s
. a ton and gas is plentiful though the price of that has gone up 50 per cent since the War.’

In his first letter after January 19th, he dropped the sombre tale of domestic misery to give me an account of the Silver-town explosion.

‘On Friday evening we were working quietly away in the office when there was a most appalling bang, and the whole building shook visibly and windows were shattered. We first thought a Zeppelin was overhead and had just missed us, but there was no repetition so we went out to investigate. There was not much news that evening - but we since learnt it was a great explosion about 10-12 miles way east of London . . . I should think it is the worst accident we have had at all on munitions work.’

Years afterwards a journalist friend told me that on the evening of this disaster she was working in her room in Bayswater when the drawn blind suddenly lifted without a sound, remained horizontal in the air for a moment or two, and then slowly dropped. There was no wind and she had heard no noise. She said it was the most terrifying experience that she had ever been through.

In Malta the nursing was now very light; most of our patients were convalescent, and off-duty time was plentiful. Many of the V.A.D.s and the younger Sisters, whose work on the blocks no longer exhausted their vitality, began to find scope for superfluous energy in circumventing the Army regulations which, even in the atmosphere of comparative reasonableness that prevailed on the island, forbade the nursing and medical staffs to mix except after elaborate permission had been obtained, and chaperonage, which was hopefully supposed to be effective, provided. Whispered conversations and outbursts of giggling all over the Sisters’ quarters proclaimed the existence of numerous minor intrigues. At many of these I could guess, but I did not join them, for my one experience, so far, of mixed parties had not tempted me to desire a repetition.