Guardian Review

There wasn't much encouragement in Buxton for a girl who wanted to go to Oxford, but Vera Brittain ignored the disapproving looks, went to Extension lectures, studied and struggled, almost walked out of her entrance exams, and got herself a place at Somerville in 1914. That's a 20th-century story in itself, but it turned out not to be the central story of Brittain's life. By the start of term, there was a war on. Her brother, Edward, and Roland Leighton, the man she loved, were going into the army rather than to New College and Merton respectively. At first the war looked like a frustrating interruption to her plans for a literary career, but Brittain quickly came to understand it as a complete change in the order of things. Everything she had aimed at now seemed irrelevant. She felt little respect for her peers in the library, or for tutors who carried on as if Latin responsions were still important. The men who went off to be heroes were contemptuous of "scholastic vegetation". Brittain's ambivalence about Oxford, and the admiration she came to feel with hindsight for the principal of Somerville (the classicist Emily Penrose, whose tenacity resulted in the first degrees for women in 1920), are fascinating strands of her story. Brittain could not join Roland at the front, but she could put herself at the service of men like him by joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse. For the next four years, during which she lost, one by one, the people she had ever cared about, she worked with astonishing toughness and skill at hospitals in London, Malta and at the purgatorial clearing station in Etaples in northern France. She had been brought up in a society that insisted on a chaperone being present for a tea date with a man; now she had responsibility for mutilated male bodies. Back in Buxton the Germans were hated, but, under corrugated iron in France, the hand of a dying German soldier felt very much like Roland's hand. Passionately and clear-sightedly, Brittain tried to make sense of these extraordinary situations. "And some there be, which have no memorial": when Brittain eventually published Testament of Youth in 1933, she took her epigraph from Ecclesiastes, dedicated the book to her lost fiance and her brother, and determined that it should stand as a permanent commemoration of their short lives. The words on their tombstones were very few; she had written the bare names and dates over and over in her diaries. In her book, she wanted to make room for extravagant quantities of detail: the small frustrations, misunderstandings and momentary triumphs that make up lives, and which are the constituents of social change. Her instinct had always been to collect these things, hence the urgent flow of her diaries and letters, which dried up only in 1918 when all her correspondents were dead and she had no heart to write to herself. Testament of Youth is, in part, a group biography in the time-honoured life-and-letters style, an anthology of material too precious to redact. It is also, and was meant to be, the symbolic story of a generation. This is testimony in the sense of eye-witness evidence: Brittain is particular about the quality of the mud in France, the lack of washing facilities for nurses covered in blood, the wartime difference in meaning between adieu and au revoir The process of adapting this long book for the cinema might well have left only the central love story intact. The poster for James Kent's new film shows the young couple in yearning farewell (looking made-up and lit), as if we're going to get an imitation of Brief Encounter with heritage sets and added army glamour. But sceptics should go and see it. Through all the recent centennial events I have rarely felt so close to the tangled aspirations and emotions, the vast incalculable horrors and the grinding tiredness of those years. The Swedish actor Alicia Vikander isn't nearly pale and exhausted enough to look English, but it doesn't matter. She is utterly, unshowily convincing, making us feel what it is to be 20 or 21, when everything is most acute, when we are most selfish and most zealously capable of self-denial. She catches precisely the young Brittain's mix of proud rationalism and impulsiveness, stoicism and vociferous grief. She understands the pull between vehemence and uncertainty in a woman trying all the time to work out what she thinks. Kit Harington (Jon Snow in Game of Thrones) is a thoughtful Roland, returning numb from his first months in France to be shaken by Brittain back into feeling. Many kinds of relationship are brought momentarily into focus. The film honours (where it could easily have cut) Brittain's serious intention to marry her blinded friend Victor, whom she does not love. And the portrait of Vera's parents is moving in its very marginality. Brittain's own account of her "provincial young ladyhood" rendered her parents as the embodiments of all those unimaginative, snobbish conventions from which she had to escape. When, during the war, they called her back from nursing to help at home, Vera was justifiably annoyed, and when she arrived to find her mother not even looking very ill, annoyance turned to fury. How dare they take up her time when there were servicemen who needed her? Later, in her 30s, she reflected on what the war had meant for non-combatants who found themselves watching history from a helpless distance. Later still, her father killed himself, having endured since the death of his son, a grief that Dominic West in the film makes palpable in one desperate howl. Mark Bostridge published his authorised biography of Brittain with Paul Berry in 1995. His long, devoted research revealed much about Brittain's difficult course towards pacifism and her attempts to fictionalise her war. But, 20 years on, it is difficult to justify his new book, or at least its full-scale price tag. Vera Brittain and the First World War offers an efficient biographical summary, an essay on the evolution of Brittain's writing and a discussion of adaptations in different media. Though it is fun to read behind-the-scenes anecdotes of how the polished vintage trains at Keighley were artificially weathered, those new to Brittain would do best to read Testament of Youth Bostridge's "Afterword", however, brings one up short, even though he has presented the material before. The official version of Edward Brittain's death was that he bravely went out to mend wire ahead of a counteroffensive on the Asiago plateau. Vera was sure that she had not been told the truth about her brother's last hours. Bostridge shows that he probably went out with the intention of being killed, since the alternative he faced was court martial for homosexual indecency on the evidence of an intercepted letter. It is a haunting addition to the toll of sadness. At least it might remind us that, though Testament of Youth feels startlingly contemporary, some things have changed in the last hundred years. Testament of Youth will open in cinemas on 16 January. Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth is published by Virago. Mark Bostridge's Vera Brittain and the First World War is published by Bloomsbury. - Alexandra Harris Many kinds of relationship are brought momentarily into focus. The film honours (where it could easily have cut) Brittain's serious intention to marry her blinded friend Victor, whom she does not love. And the portrait of [Vera Brittain]'s parents is moving in its very marginality. Brittain's own account of her "provincial young ladyhood" rendered her parents as the embodiments of all those unimaginative, snobbish conventions from which she had to escape. When, during the war, they called her back from nursing to help at home, Vera was justifiably annoyed, and when she arrived to find her mother not even looking very ill, annoyance turned to fury. How dare they take up her time when there were servicemen who needed her? Later, in her 30s, she reflected on what the war had meant for non-combatants who found themselves watching history from a helpless distance. Later still, her father killed himself, having endured since the death of his son, a grief that Dominic West in the film makes palpable in one desperate howl. Mark Bostridge published his authorised biography of Brittain with Paul Berry in 1995. His long, devoted research revealed much about Brittain's difficult course towards pacifism and her attempts to fictionalise her war. But, 20 years on, it is difficult to justify his new book, or at least its full-scale price tag. Vera Brittain and the First World War offers an efficient biographical summary, an essay on the evolution of Brittain's writing and a discussion of adaptations in different media. Though it is fun to read behind-the-scenes anecdotes of how the polished vintage trains at Keighley were artificially weathered, those new to Brittain would do best to read Testament of Youth - Alexandra Harris.