Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (77 page)

The prospects of interesting and suitable work seemed unexpectedly promising; I had already been offered some part-time teaching at a school in South Kensington, my aunt had invited me to give a course of six lectures on ‘International Relations’ at St Monica’s, and two pupils presented themselves to be coached for Oxford examinations while I was still at home. The elder of these, a nervous and propitiatory graduate from the University of Wales, lived in Anerley, completely lacked the most elementary rudiments of a literary style, and had incongruous aspirations after Lady Margaret Hall which, greatly to my own surprise, I actually helped her to fulfil.

‘I do wish her appearance didn’t depress me so,’ I confessed to Winifred. ‘I have only seen the blue velours hat and long tweed coat twice, but am tired of them already. I have the feeling, too, that I shall never see anything else. Next time I will invite her to take the coat off - that will at least make a change . . . I am so glad I used to put on my best clothes for . . . Mr C . . . What a difference it makes to have something nice to look at!’

After speaking often at college debates and hearing a number of Oxford dons lecture in that inimitable fashion which scorns the base vulgarity of mere technical competence, the prospect of becoming a lecturer who could give a tolerable discourse from a platform no longer seemed so wildly unattainable as it had appeared in 1913. Not only, before going to Italy, did I boldly accept the St Monica’s invitation, but I wrote still more daringly to the newly established headquarters of the League of Nations Union in Grosvenor Crescent and offered myself as a speaker on the League of Nations, that international experiment in the maintenance of peace and security which I felt, in common with many other students of modern history, to be the one element of hope and progress contained in the peace treaties. In reply I was asked to come to Grosvenor Crescent and be inspected by the secretary. The interview was arranged for me by Elizabeth Murray, my dazzling Somerville predecessor, now haughtily beautiful with her exquisite, adventurous clothes, her imperious figure and her short, waving dark hair.

When I first saw the secretary, I felt that his handsome, melancholy face and reticent, dreaming eyes would have been more appropriate to a stained-glass window than to that rather turbulent office of emphatic young men and women, who waged a gallant, perpetual battle against shortage of funds, the lethargy of the public, and the well-meaning inefficiency of untrained volunteers. But his gentle courtesy was almost immediately over-shadowed by the startling presence of an anonymous, impressive individual in morning coat, spats, and monocle, who suddenly burst through an adjacent glass door into the middle of my interview, and without ceremony inquired of me in a sceptical drawl: ‘What makes you think you can speak?’

I never learnt this intruder’s name, nor do I recall what explanation I gave for the incongruous juxtaposition of mature claims and an immature appearance, but I left the secretary’s office with a suitcase full of informative literature, and the encouraging impression that I should be invited to take meetings for the Union in the winter if he was satisfied with the specimen lecture that he had asked me to prepare.

Upon this lecture and the series for St Monica’s I spent many hours that autumn, spurred to gigantic efforts by the deliberations of the Washington Conference and the unexpected success of the League in settling the dispute between Serbia and Albania. I felt my responsibility very keenly; already, I thought, I had begun to take part in that campaign for enlightenment which must inevitably lead a bewildered, suffering world into the serene paths of rational understanding.

‘You would have been amused,’ I told Winifred, who was herself preparing a course of lectures on ‘Personalities of Pre-Renaissance Italy’ to succeed my own series at St Monica’s, ‘if you could have seen me last night, dressed up in a hat and a fur, declaiming in front of the looking-glass! I am going to do it every day once, till I know the thing by heart and stop feeling a fool . . . I’m so glad I did “International Relations”, glad I am lecturing on them now, though in ever such a small way, glad to do anything, however small, to make people care for the peace of the world. It may be Utopian, but it’s constructive. It’s better than railing at the present state of Europe, or always weeping in darkness for the dead.’

The half-realised onset of jaundice spoilt my first St Monica’s lecture, making me oppressively aware how trivial this event, so momentous to me, had appeared to everyone else. ‘How good it is for us,’ I recorded disconsolately, ‘to be mere business units . . . people whose colossal edifice of life means nothing more than an interrupted half-hour of preparation.’ But during my convalescence the reading of a newly published selection of internationalist essays, entitled ‘The Evolution of World Peace’, restored to me that sense of the cause’s momentous dignity which for the next few years was to drive me in pursuit of small, reluctant audiences conscientiously shivering in draughty town halls, in dusty clubs, in dimly lighted schoolrooms, or beneath the gaunt roofs of whitewashed Wesleyan chapels which continually eluded my frantic search for them through the wintry darkness of unknown streets. Joyously recognising, clearly and convincingly expressed, the motive which had set me reading History at Oxford, I copied from Mr F. S. Marvin’s editorial Introduction to the essays a paragraph which embodied, and still embodies, the inspiration of hopeful humanity’s quest after international harmony, although the eager confidence which illumined the minds of reason’s post-war exponents was so soon to fade into the dun stoicism of baffled yet persistent endeavour:

‘If we desire peace and co-operation in the world, and can find in history clear indications that co-operation is a growing quantity, then our desires become a reasonable ideal, we are fighting to enlighten mankind as to their true destiny and to hasten its realisation . . . It is the broad view and the long vision which alone can cure our fearfulness and fortify our steps . . . A longer vista lies before us than even anthropology can offer of the past. “
Magis me movet illud longum tempus quum non ero, quam hoc exiguum
.” ’

2

As soon as I had recovered sufficiently to go out again, I sent, with much trepidation, my specimen lecture to the League of Nations Union. It was long, persevering and dogmatic, and my inexperienced rehearsals before the looking-glass had failed to indicate to me the quite important fact that as it stood it would have taken at least three hours to deliver, and was indigestibly packed with enough information to keep a class of graduates busy for twelve or more study circles. My kindest friend could hardly have called it an attractive piece of popular propaganda, but the patient secretary signified his approval, and day after day I nervously anticipated a summons from the Union to address a large, critical and terrifying audience in some unfamiliar and remote part of England.

But even in those days that cautious organisation never yielded to the temptation of impetuous action, and it proceeded to forget my existence until the early spring of 1922. My first invitation, therefore, to address an adult audience came not from Grosvenor Crescent, but from a clerical friend of Miss Heath Jones, who wanted to experiment with one or two lectures in his large, poor parish midway between London and Windsor, and had asked her to recommend a speaker. Could I, he inquired, give them addresses on the Russian Revolution and the League of Nations - the former to be as impartial as possible owing to the strength of Socialist influence in the parish?

I didn’t know whether I could, but I said that I would, and plunged into a series of anxious days spent in reading up Bolshevism in the British Museum. To my dismay I discovered that this task was by no means as straightforward as it sounded, for in 1921 the entire resources of the Museum Library seemed unable to yield one document which gave an unbiased account of developments in Russia since 1917.

‘The Russian Revolution is almost driving me mad,’ I complained gloomily to Winifred. ‘Each book one picks up flatly contradicts the last. No one writes about it sanely - in one the Bolsheviks can do no right and in the others no wrong . . . I look wildly for facts and I can only find arguments . . . Some of the works on communal kitchens and nationalisation of women have none of the qualities of historians unless you count fury to be one.’

With my letter I enclosed a list of inquiries about elementary facts to which, after looking through all the available material, I had failed to discover satisfactory replies:

1. What are the main events of the Revolution, with approximate dates, from 1917 till to-day?

2. When did the Allied blockade begin and who led it?

3. Has it ended yet, and if so when did it, and why?

4. What parts of Russia are Red and what parts are White?

5. What has been happening in Russia this year?

6. What is happening at the moment?

These innocent questions led to a furious correspondence between London and Yorkshire which raged for several days on the subject of Bolshevism. At that time Winifred was strongly anti-Bolshevik, for a very close friend of hers, a young Russian who had been left parentless when still a schoolboy and brought up by her family as an adopted son, had been captured by brigands and presumably murdered in Georgia in 1919 while serving as an interpreter to one of the British contingents attached to Deniken’s army. To the numerous details that she sent, in reply to my letter, about the long tale of famine and typhus which was then as much a part of Russian history as its political reorganisation, she added a series of fierce arguments against the growing sympathy with Bolshevism which my reading had unexpectedly given me, until I was moved to protest that ‘if I gave a Socialistic parish a violently anti-Bolshevik lecture I should do as much harm as I should with an equally violent lecture in favour of Bolshevism . . . They are the only body in Russia to-day with any common ideas, any constructive policy, any power of organisation . . . In your notes you keep on saying that so-and-so is “in German pay”. It sounds very damning but that’s not the point . . . Germany did not make the Revolution, she only took advantage with her usual skill (which we call “diabolical” because it is hers, but which we should call “incomparable” if it was our own) of a situation which had already arisen.

‘You will be bored stiff with me and my Russian Revolution,’ I concluded with some reason, ‘but I feel rather oppressively the responsibility of an educated person who has to lecture to and probably influence considerably a whole crowd of the ignorant . . . It will be a desperate matter if the Socialists throw eggs at my new black gabardine and satin frock.’

With my long-established reverence for lectures and their givers, I was still far from realising how many speeches have to be made on any subject before a normal English audience remembers a week later even what it was, let alone anything that has been said about it. Needless to say, my carefully prepared lecture - which I read, word for word, with laborious conscientiousness for fear that I should forget to maintain my determined impartiality - made not a stir upon the lethargic surface of Y——parish; its chief effect was that of clearing my own brain on an acute political topic. ‘It would have been as useful to lecture on a turnip at Y——,’ I remarked ruefully to Winifred, but my disappointment was overshadowed by the B.A. Degrees which had been conferred upon us both in the academic splendour of the Sheldonian Theatre four days earlier, and by the London bazaar in aid of Somerville finances two days later, at which we both assisted with jubilant eagerness at a bookstall presided over by Rose Macaulay.

In January 1921, the Oxford women’s colleges had begun their three years’ special appeal for financial aid. Poorly endowed, and frequented chiefly by students who were obliged to earn their living and had no money to give, the women’s colleges, as I had realised with such dismay in 1914, had none of the resources which made Oxford a comparatively luxurious university for men. After the War, the economic outlook seemed darker than ever, and the funds of Somerville especially were depleted by the return to a building in which everything had deteriorated. The War Office ‘compensation’ by no means compensated in full for the numerous structural alterations that had to be made, and sufficient spare cash was not even available for the cleaning and repairing of the numerous college clocks which had remained untouched during the War.

Reluctantly Somerville was obliged to descend to appeals and bazaars, and immediately after our return from Italy, a letter asking me to help Miss Macaulay to sell books offered that prospect of a temporary acquaintanceship with a really famous writer which had hitherto seemed utterly unattainable by a struggling journalist whose persistent onslaughts on London newspapers remained lamentably fruitless. Enthusiastically I attended one or two of the bazaar committees at the University Women’s Club; ‘the meeting lasted
hours,’ I related to the envious Winifred, whose co-operation had not then been invited; ‘I promised desperately to try and collect books; it’s a great bore, but I think that to run the bookstall with Rose Macaulay is worth the price.’