Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Read Online Free
Author: Vera Brittain
bridges over noisy streams, of the end of the world and of the devil waiting to catch me round the corner (this last being due to a nursemaid who overheard me, at the age of five or six, calling Edward ‘Little fool!’ and immediately commented: ‘There, you’ve done it! Now you’ll go to hell!’).
Parents and nurses had by that time outgrown the stage of putting children into dark cupboards as a ‘cure’ for this type of ‘tiresomeness’ - an atrocity once perpetrated on my mother which adversely affected her psychology for ever afterwards - but such terrors did appear to them to have no other origin than a perverse unreasonableness, and I was expostulated with and even scolded for thus ‘giving way’. There seemed to be no one to whom I could appeal for understanding of such humiliating cowardice, nobody whom I instinctively felt to be on my side against the mysterious phenomena which so alarmed me. Since I thus grew up without having my fears rationalised by explanation, I carried them with me, thrust inward but very little transformed, into adulthood, and was later to have only too good reason to regret that I never learnt to conquer them while still a child.
On the whole, in spite of these intermittent terrors, the years in which life is taken for granted were pleasant enough, if not conspicuously reassuring. For as long as I could remember, our house had always been full of music, never first-rate, but tuneful, and strangely persistent in its ability to survive more significant recollections. To the perturbation of my father, who never really cared for music in spite of the early singing lessons, there was always much practising of songs, or pianoforte solos, and later of violin exercises, and in Macclesfield my mother gave periodic ‘musical evenings’, for which Edward and I, at the ages of about seven and nine, used to sit up in order to play tinkling duets together, or innocuous trios with our governess.
My mother, who had an agreeable soprano voice, took singing lessons in Manchester; at musical parties, she sang ‘When the Heart is Young’, ‘Whisper and I Shall Hear’ or ‘The Distant Shore’ - a typical example of Victorian pathos which always reduced me to tears at the point where ‘the mai-den - drooped - and - DIED’. I was much more stimulated by ‘Robert the Devil’, and whenever my mother, her back safely turned towards me, trilled ‘Mercy! Mercy! Mer-russy!’ in her ardent soprano, I flung myself up and down upon the hearthrug in an ecstasy of masochistic fervour.
My first acquaintance with literature was less inspiring, for in Macclesfield the parental library consisted solely of a few yellow-back novels, two or three manuals on paper-making, and a large tome entitled Household Medicine , in which the instructions were moral rather than hygienic. Lest anyone should suspect the family of being literary, these volumes were concealed beneath a heavy curtain in the chill, gloomy dining-room. My father was once told by a publisher’s traveller that the Pottery towns held the lowest record for book-buying in England. Being a true son of his district, which has an immense respect for ‘brass’ but none whatever for the uncommercial products of a poetic imagination, he remained faithful in Cheshire as in Staffordshire to his neighbourhood’s reputation.
When I had exhausted my own nursery literature - a few volumes of Andrew Lang’s fairy-tales, one of which was punctiliously presented to me on each birthday, and some of the more saccharine children’s stories of L. T. Meade - I turned surreptitiously to the yellow-back novels. These were mostly by Wilkie Collins, Besant and Rice, and Mrs Henry Wood, and many were the maudlin tears that I wept over the sorrows of Poor Miss Finch and Lady Isabel Vane.
It was not till later, at the age of ten, that I discovered the manifold attractions of Household Medicine . The treatment of infectious diseases left me
Parents and nurses had by that time outgrown the stage of putting children into dark cupboards as a ‘cure’ for this type of ‘tiresomeness’ - an atrocity once perpetrated on my mother which adversely affected her psychology for ever afterwards - but such terrors did appear to them to have no other origin than a perverse unreasonableness, and I was expostulated with and even scolded for thus ‘giving way’. There seemed to be no one to whom I could appeal for understanding of such humiliating cowardice, nobody whom I instinctively felt to be on my side against the mysterious phenomena which so alarmed me. Since I thus grew up without having my fears rationalised by explanation, I carried them with me, thrust inward but very little transformed, into adulthood, and was later to have only too good reason to regret that I never learnt to conquer them while still a child.
On the whole, in spite of these intermittent terrors, the years in which life is taken for granted were pleasant enough, if not conspicuously reassuring. For as long as I could remember, our house had always been full of music, never first-rate, but tuneful, and strangely persistent in its ability to survive more significant recollections. To the perturbation of my father, who never really cared for music in spite of the early singing lessons, there was always much practising of songs, or pianoforte solos, and later of violin exercises, and in Macclesfield my mother gave periodic ‘musical evenings’, for which Edward and I, at the ages of about seven and nine, used to sit up in order to play tinkling duets together, or innocuous trios with our governess.
My mother, who had an agreeable soprano voice, took singing lessons in Manchester; at musical parties, she sang ‘When the Heart is Young’, ‘Whisper and I Shall Hear’ or ‘The Distant Shore’ - a typical example of Victorian pathos which always reduced me to tears at the point where ‘the mai-den - drooped - and - DIED’. I was much more stimulated by ‘Robert the Devil’, and whenever my mother, her back safely turned towards me, trilled ‘Mercy! Mercy! Mer-russy!’ in her ardent soprano, I flung myself up and down upon the hearthrug in an ecstasy of masochistic fervour.
My first acquaintance with literature was less inspiring, for in Macclesfield the parental library consisted solely of a few yellow-back novels, two or three manuals on paper-making, and a large tome entitled Household Medicine , in which the instructions were moral rather than hygienic. Lest anyone should suspect the family of being literary, these volumes were concealed beneath a heavy curtain in the chill, gloomy dining-room. My father was once told by a publisher’s traveller that the Pottery towns held the lowest record for book-buying in England. Being a true son of his district, which has an immense respect for ‘brass’ but none whatever for the uncommercial products of a poetic imagination, he remained faithful in Cheshire as in Staffordshire to his neighbourhood’s reputation.
When I had exhausted my own nursery literature - a few volumes of Andrew Lang’s fairy-tales, one of which was punctiliously presented to me on each birthday, and some of the more saccharine children’s stories of L. T. Meade - I turned surreptitiously to the yellow-back novels. These were mostly by Wilkie Collins, Besant and Rice, and Mrs Henry Wood, and many were the maudlin tears that I wept over the sorrows of Poor Miss Finch and Lady Isabel Vane.
It was not till later, at the age of ten, that I discovered the manifold attractions of Household Medicine . The treatment of infectious diseases left me
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