Vera and the boys

Paul Berry & Mark Bostridge, : Vera Brittain: A Life, Virago, £12

Vera Brittain is best remembered today as mother of Shirley Williams (Labour’s shopping-basket lady in the 1974 general election) and author of Testament of Youth, her tragic First World War memoir.  A memorable television version some twenty years ago had Vera ably impersonated by cute little Cheryl Campbell.

She struggled to be allowed to go to Oxford (as a student), entering Somerville College in 1914.  Seven years were to pass before she completed her degree during which time her brother, fiancé and two closest friends were killed.  Vera herself was a nurse in France and Malta.

The Brittains were Staffordshire paper manufacturers, her mother’s family, the Bervons, impoverished theatre folk, perhaps partly Jewish.  Vera had a isolated childhood with her younger brother Edward her closest companion.

Her love for Roland Leighton (“the boy you used to know”) was somehow insubstantial, mostly confined to letters.  When they met he was cool, reserved while her interest in “masculine functioning” quickened with nursing experience.  He was killed by a German sniper just before Christmas 1915.

She was suspicious about Edward’s death in a skirmish in Italy in June 1918.  Years later she discovered he died facing court martial for misusing his position as acting company commander to secure homosexual favours from subordinates.

Vera’s first novel The Dark Tide mocked the conventlike atmosphere in which women students were kept at Somerville.  Among cruel pen-portraits, was one of closest friend and collaborator, Winifred Holtby.

No great stylist, succeeding as a writer was more important to Vera than anything.  The Brittain-Holtby partnership produced two great bestsellers of the Thirties, Testament of Youth and South Riding.

An ardent feminist throughout her life Vera Brittain had an extraordinary capacity for putting other women’s backs up.  Few of her friendships survived.

Angry charges followed Winifred Holtby’s death in 1935, aged just 37, that Vera had exploited her; that Winifred had spent her life fetching and carrying for a lesser writer.

Her desire for children led to a strange ‘semi-detached’ marriage to the academic George Catlin.

The late Paul Berry was a close friend of Vera Brittain for nearly thirty years; Mark Bostridge edited and adapted Testament of Youth and the letters on which it was based. This proves ideal preparation for writing a thorough, sympathetic account of her life.

The book’s tone seems reverent but perhaps this is just as well.  In the space of five hundred pages they leave the reader to realise how easily a hostile biography could have been carved out of the same material.

This is a fascinating, even compelling biography precisely because Vera Brittain is oddly hard to pin down.  Was she a manipulative egotist, were her politics just shrill emotionalism?

She manages to keep the reader guessing throughout her story.

Oxford Times,  9 February 2001