Another Old Book

I picked this up in the local library.

People donate their old books for library funds.

This one was inscribed by its owner with a date of 1970.  I realised immediately that this owner was someone whose tastes I probably shared, and this was confirmed. The only other book I chose to buy that day had the same inscription.

I knew, as soon as I saw the book, that I would most probably buy it.  The reason was, that yellow jacket.


The yellow jacket was the house style of the publishing house Victor Gollancz. Throughout my teens and early twenties, you could still find plenty of yellow-jackets in second-hand book shops.  They are much thinner on the ground these days, hence my instant decision.



The book harks back to my early reading days.  Victor Gollancz was the first publisher of Vera Brittain's masterpiece, "Testament of Youth".  Victor Gollancz was the imprint of the influential Left Book Club,  (If you scroll down the page that this link opens, you will see a book called "The People's History of England - Not for Sale to the Public" I own a copy of this book, and my copy looks exactly like the one in the picture! Will try to find my review and post in due course).

Victor Gollancz was the nephew of Israel Gollancz, who was a founder member of the National Theatre, and a director of the Early English Text Society.

It wouldn't really matter what the book was about at this stage.

I scanned the jacket but it contained nothing about the plot, so I was really buying it "blind".

Have started the book, and am enjoying the sedate, steady old-fashioned pace which suits me very well.  I don't like modern dystopian thrillers (written in threes, almost always to publishers' orders, and often to a formula).

I like realism, and books written in the third person and the past tense.   This one is about a lawyer who encounters ethical problems.

The great thing about a second-hand book stall is that you can pick up a new interest.  I've already put in a request for a collection of Louis Auchincloss's short stories from a county library archive.

After a somewhat turbulent six months so far this year, I feel I am gaining some equilibrium by re-establishing an old custom - buying second-hand books.

Margaret Cole - a forgotten figure

Two weeks ago, I sprained my ankle.  The accident happened in part due to my haste in wishing to visit some new charity shops in a town I haven't visited before.  I've been sitting with my foot up and reading.

So here is a post in homage to my great affection for both books and charity shops.



"Growing Up Into Revolution" by Margaret Cole

This book is a first edition, but only because it was never popular enough to call for a second.  The book was marked by the charity shop as £1, then marked down to half price.  I would have bought it anyway.

 



Did Michael steal, buy or donate the book from/to the Library?

It was written in 1948, published in 1949, and owned by someone called Michael Graham in 1950.

I have touched on Margaret Cole in a post about detective stories, but my interest in her originated in two facts.  Firstly, she was an exact contemporary of Vera Brittain - both born in 1893. I have written several posts about Vera Brittain and her contemporaries. And even male contemporaries.

Secondly, Margaret was a pioneering female writer, socialist and feminist.  Of course, these are among the reasons why Vera interests me, but Margaret differs in one major respect.  She was less involved in World War One.  Margaret's husband, GDH Cole, was exempted on account of vital war work, and her brother, Raymond Postgate, was imprisoned as a conscientious objector.  (Vera is, of course, most famous for her War biography, "Testament of Youth").

Margaret, much less famous altogether, did not write anything so memorable.  Her autobiography is a fairly amateurish and intimate effort, and all the more charming and interesting for that. 

She is brazen about her middle-class upbringing - a family home in which two maids slept in the attic, a father who was an academic at Cambridge, and servants from the first day of her married life.  In this she is no different from Vera Brittain.  Both write without a trace of apology of having a live-in couple to "do" for them, and nursemaids for the children. 

It's hard for someone like me, and my contemporaries, to read this without fury and scorn.  Having had no such luxuries, we struggled to bring up our small families, of two children maximum, and achieve anything at all in professional working life.  A woman had to be truly exceptional in energy, ability, contacts, and confidence to do more than work part-time or anywhere other than a school.  This was in the 1970's before the Equal Pay Act, before free nursery provision and before extensive maternity pay and leave. 

However, we did have washing-machines and vacuum cleaners.  These are, in my view, the top two labour-saving devices.  Later, we had dishwashers, tumble-driers and microwaves.  Disposable nappies came along in time for the second child.  We had fridge-freezers, central heating, electric ovens, indoor plumbing. And our own car, and bank account. 

Without domestic help, (in pre-war days one servant of some kind per actual family member seemed the norm) Margaret and Vera (and all the others) would have had to spend their entire time scrubbing floors, operating mangles and dolly-tubs, boiling water on primitive gas stoves, washing up without rubber gloves, walking to local shops every day for perishable foods, and lighting fires on open hearths which then had to be cleared and emptied daily.

So really, for women without her "standard of living" (Margaret's own words) anything they wrote would be likely to be "Got up at six.  List of chores.  Put children to bed, went to bed, end." Every day for three decades.

Margaret writes about her relationship with Beatrice Webb, who was born a generation earlier.  For that generation, all the above applied, but it was also necessary to have NO children (Beatrice was childless), and ALSO to have a private income.  Because doing any kind of work at all would have been incompatible with achieving something in the realms of thought, social activism, and writing.  Virginia Woolf, born thirty years after Beatrice and ten years before Margaret, wrote about this memorably in her essay "A Room of One's Own".  Life was also tough for any man born without contacts or independent wealth, but it was not nearly as bad for a man.  They did not have to do any domestic work, or bear and nurture children.

So although one's first reaction is fury on learning that Margaret was educated privately at Roedean, (synonymous with "elitist" during my Sussex childhood), one has to accept that for women, certainly, conditions of life were such that nothing could be achieved at all without a certain level of advantage. It does not mean that Margaret was a hypocrite, or insincere in her devotion to liberal socialism.

The work of Beatrice Webb, founder member of the Fabian Society, co-founder of the London School of Economics, and of the New Statesman, provided a platform for efforts a generation later by those who fought for women's rights in the 1920's and 1930's.  People like Margaret Cole continued that work, and she and her Fabian contemporaries helped to build the platform which led to the first truly successful Labour government in 1945.

You have to read a book by Vera Brittain's daughter, Shirley Williams, called "Politics is for People" to realise just how integral the aims of Labour party pioneers have been to the society we take for granted today.  Here's a list of the objectives Baroness Williams noted down in the 1960's, which have since been enacted in law.
(Although such is the pace of change that some of them have been written out again, or they survive under different names).

The Freedom of Information Act
Educational Maintenance Allowances
Parent Governors and School Councils
Traning Allowances for Youth Unemployed
The Scottish Assembly
Devolution and Regional Government generally
Flexitime
Biotechnology and Renewable Fuels
Private Finance Initiatives (PFI)
Regional Small Business Agencies funded by central government
Breaking down social segregation in housing

In fact, the only idea Baroness (sic) Williams listed which has not been pursued to the Statute Book is the abolition of Private Education. 

Margaret Cole, her husband and her contemporaries worked tirelessly to pursue the fundamental aim of improving the lot of the large majority of people born without privilege or advantages.  The fact that all these people were privately educated, and owned homes which even Cabinet Ministers would today find beyond their reach, is not the point.  Although in truth it's taken me a while to get that point in perspective.  And, crucially, Margaret Cole was a mother of three, in a time when mothers were not expected to do anything at all outside the home.

She dedicates her book to her first-born, her elder daughter Jane.

Jane, born in 1921, went to America as a war bride in 1946.  Her mother writes movingly of the normal emotions and reactions of grandparents being strained to the utmost because of the 3,000 mile distance between them.

All in all, this book is a fascinating insight into a lost and forgotten age.  We should pay more attention to history, and facts. Young women today who revel in their freedoms, their careers and their more equal relationships, might be surprised to learn that less than 100 years ago their lot would have been entirely different, were it not for the work of people like Margaret Cole.  Of whom almost no one has ever heard. 


 

 

Reflections on the death of the Dowager Marchioness of Anglesey, died 21st Jan 2017

For four decades I have been a devoted follower of Vera Brittain, as earlier posts in this blog will testify. 

Yesterday, I happened upon the wonderful free archive called Soundcloud, on which is to be found a 90 minute discussion held at The London School of Economics.  The two guests were Vera Brittain's biographer, and her daughter, Baroness Shirley Williams.

Shirley Williams is now 86 years old, (born July 1930), and speaks as forcefully and lucidly as she ever did.  The discussion was wide-ranging, and, as might be expected in a lecture programme which is named after the controversial Marxist philosopher Ralph Miliband (father of David and Ed),  drew some biting questions, the most critical of which had nothing to do with Vera Brittain.  Shirley replied astutely, calmly, and politely to all questions asked of her.

Shirley, now a member of the House of Lords in her own right, was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, then, as now, an elite private institution, and at Oxford.  This was a privileged education, notwithstanding that her father, George Catlin, stood in the 1920's and 1930's again and again as a prospective Labour Member of Parliament, and is acknowledged by Shirley as a greater influence on her political thinking than was her mother.

I find it quite taxing to ponder this question of elites.  Another female who has served the public in many roles and would appear, on the face of it, to be a member of an elite, has died recently.

Today, in The Times, (which unfortunately is behind a paywall), I read the obituary of the Dowager Marchioness of Anglesey. 

Picture credit The Womens' Institute

 

There are many links between these two women. 

Both were christened Shirley.  Vera Brittain wrote that she called her daughter after Charlotte Bronte's "gallant little cavalier". Lady Anglesey was also, according to her obituary, named after CB's heroine.  Both were born to parents who had been deeply, and tragically, involved in the First World War.  Shirley Williams is daughter to the writer of the seminal "Testament of Youth".  Lady Anglesey was the daughter of the novelist Charles Morgan.

I have written extensively about Charles Morgan, and his links with Vera Brittain here.

Both Charles Morgan and Vera Brittain came from solidly middle-class backgrounds.  Charles's father was a President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Vera's a successful manufacturer.  It was their middle-class success that paid for their children's educations, and the confidence of such a background led to first-generation success in letters and public life, and second-generation public honours.  Shirley Williams is a Baroness in her own right.   Lady Anglesey gained her title by marrying into the aristocracy, but was awarded CBE and DBE.  (Her Times obituary claims she was offered a peerage in her own right by all three political parties but turned it down).

So an elite education was a springboard to success.  And also, perhaps less controversially, it seems to have nurtured a devotion to duty, and to public service and to clarity of thinking.  These things are positive attributes which might be found in any member of the population, of course.

However, it is much harder to achieve a position where such attributes may be recognized if your parents and grandparents are from the lower levels of society. One of Baroness Williams' first points in the LSE lecture was about how the whole of the First World War, in the way it was staffed and the way officers and men were selected, was absolutely rigidly controlled by the class structure of the time.  She pointed out, this was far less so in the Second World War and subsequent wars. 

Aside from the Army,  it is still true that if your parents and grandparents were from the working classes, even today you have to really struggle to make a mark in the world.  And if you don't make your mark, your habits of thought will not develop robustly in public debate.  And your contributions will not be used in public debate.  And they need to be. The more people who are thinking clearly and debating rationally, the better.

Lady Anglesey's obituary remarks that her "characteristic acumen, backed by charm, curiosity and assertiveness" soon brought her a number of public appointments, where her devotion to duty and to serving the public eventually brought the honours referred to above.  That's good, and the nation has undoubtedly benefitted.  It could benefit  more. 

Others may have exactly the same personal qualities, but will never be heard of in public life. For example, my cleaning lady, who retired two years ago, held these same qualities but will never be asked to contribute to public debate. Nor would she ever have the confidence to embark on a career in local government, or volunteering, which are ways to start in public service.

There must have been, and still be, many hundreds of thousands of such people who are never heard.

This is why my thinking is conflicted on the subject of elites.  One can only regret the continued disproportionate influence of a privileged education. However, the existence of at least a few people possessed of robust common sense, a sense of right,  a concept of public duty, and an ability to make themselves heard, are better than none at all. 

Charles Morgan and his contemporaries

After discovering an interesting link to the period of the mid-1920's, a literary epoch which has long fascinated me, I post the following.

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The Fountain, by Charles Morgan

This is a really peculiar book. It won the Hawthornden Prize in 1932.


Charles Morgan was more famous during his lifetime than after his demise. You can find a very brief biography on Wikipedia.

You may well ask, why did you read this book?

The connection derives from my interest in Vera Brittain. Charles Morgan was born in January 1894, a bare month after Vera, and is of the same generation in more ways than by mere accident of birthdate. Like Vera, he was a survivor of the First World War, and like Vera, permanently marked thereby.

Perhaps, like Vera, he would have forever remained a nonentity had it not been for the experiences of the First World War. And that Vera would have, is recorded in her own words, in a letter to her dear friend, Winifred Holtby, in which she decided that, her previous attempts at gaining recognition as a writer having failed, she would give her draft of "Testament of Youth" everything she had. If this failed, she recorded resignedly, "I shall remain silent." Fortunately, the book became an international best-seller, re-read and re-published regularly to this day.

Morgan's book "The Fountain", is not his first novel, but the first to gain important recognition. It draws heavily on his experience of being interned in Holland after capture in the early part of the War. Holland was neutral, and was not invaded, unlike the situation in which it found itself during WWII.

The Fountain does not appear in the book. Perhaps it is an allusion to sex. The book describes a rather spiritual love-affair, but the love-affair is absolutely not the heart of the book. The heart of the book is found in the search of the hero, Lewis Alison, for spiritual fulfilment.

It is impossible to imagine a book even finding a publisher, today, when the opening chapters are replete with such statements as:

"The struggle for some kind of stillness within oneself seems to run right through history........What I want is stillness of spirit....."

The common soldiery, to whom these statements are addressed, would, in today's parlance, be likely to utter imprecations such as "FFS!" if such words were to fall upon their ears.

Whilst shut up in the fortress in which he has been interned, Lewis welcomes the distance from his old life, (running a publishing business forced upon him by the early death of his father, the only means of support of his mother and sister). He looks upon the internment as a holiday, a time of complete peace and freedom from responsibilities, where he can write his book, which is to be "A history of the contemplative life."

After a time, the inmates of the fort are dispersed, and Lewis is placed in a castle, home of a Dutch aristocrat, which happens to be furnished with a magnificant library. The library is a place of seductive power, as well as great beauty, and much of the development of the love affair takes place in this setting.

The love affair itself, is completely incredible. There is no convincing description of how a person who would like most of all to become stiller and stiller until he enters a sort of hypnotic trance of introspection, embarks on a passionate affair. Indeed, as the affair approaches its physical consummation, the lover writes to his beloved a complicated analysis of love which he describes as "hypostasis" and their potential relationship as "a perdurable essence".

The library has a secret stairway to a tower, in which the "princess" sleeps, a tower to which the lover has secret access at night from the library. After a year or so of these nocturnal visitations, the girl's husband, a badly wounded German aristocrat, returns to the castle to convalesce. The affair is suspended, the war ends, the German husband finds out about the affair and dies, Alison is sent away by the girl's mother, to preserve the family honour. The ugly stepsister (who always knew, but found it impossible hitherto to tell about the affair) now finds it possible to tell all, so the girl runs away with a few jewels and a passport to join her lover and the book ends contemplating their embarkation on middle-class married life.

What did the contemporary literay scene find so enthralling, I wonder?

The beautiful girl, who is only 20, married far too young by her mother for social standing and to preserve a way of life, has no voice of her own. She is portrayed through the prism of men who find her beautiful: her stepfather, the Dutch baron, (who buys her jewels as a way of expressing affection) her lover's two interned friends, (who would do anything for her, so besotted are they by her beauty), her dying husband, (a very sympathetically drawn picture of a remnant of a now extinct German social class), who loves her and realizes that his love is not returned. What she saw in Alison is apparently his noble mind, and there is, conveniently, no accidental pregnancy to worry about. None of this is realistic to a full-blooded married woman of the late twentieth century and the new millenium.

I can only conclude that the book is the expression of a dying class system and that the people who read at all in the early thirties, who would have been the remnants of the dying upper middle class before it faced the final onslought of WWII, recognized themselves. And of course, that did not include women, who still had little or no voice in public life at the time. Vera Brittain's book was published the following year, 1933.

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Other writers who were active during this time and all knew each other and referred to each other in their letters and autobiographies include:

Winifred Holtby
Storm Jameson
Phyllis Bentley
May Sinclair
Rose Macaulay


I have books by all these ladies on my shelves.  All were born within the same ten years (1888 to 1898).  All were indelibly marked by the First World War.  Three  of them saw active service in that war (although poor May Sinclair was shipped home from Belgium almost immediately as being completely unsuitable, even as an ambulance driver).

All the five listed above remained single, although Rose Macaulay had in interesting 25-year affair with an unfrocked, married Catholic priest.  All their lives were fascinating.

I will post more in due course.

 

A Perfect Afternoon

Started at the Oxfam shop, where I was due to meet my friend after her Saturday morning volunteer shift ended at 1.00pm.  Any excuse to visit a charity shop is most delightful, and to add to the pleasure there was an Age Concern shop right next door.  I bought "My Dear, I Wanted toTell You" by Louisa Young, in the Age Concern shop.  This is a novel set in the First World War, by the grand-daughter of Robert Falcon Scott's widow, Kathleen, (from her second marriage), and was serialised on Woman's Hour on publication, so I am looking forward to reading it.

Passing next door to the Oxfam shop, I was delighted to find there a set of two cassette tapes of Shirley Williams giving talks to Woman's Hour (didn't realise the common link until this afternoon), in 1996.  She is talking about her childhood, about being the daughter of one of my favourite authors of all time, Vera Brittain, and then moving on to her life in politics.  Great listening- thank goodness we didn't throw out our last ghetto blaster in a recent clear-out, as it is the only machine in the house which I can play the tapes on.

Next I picked up a copy of "The Mitfords, Letters between Six Sisters" (published 2007), edited by Charlotte Mosley, a Mitford daughter-in-law (the surname tells you which one).  This, I nearly said, would add to my collection of Mitford books, but I don't actually have this collection.  I have passed every book on to elder daughter, and she has enjoyed them just as much as I have. Jessica Mitford's famous "Hons and Rebels", two novels by Nancy, a biography of all six sisters by Mary Lovell, and lastly, Debo Devonshire's memoir, "Wait for Me".

The last is very recent, and I purchased it following a visit by elder daughter and me to Chatsworth, which we both enjoyed very much.

I was about to leave with my friend, when I spotted  W Somerset Maugham's "Cakes and Ale", a very old book first published in 1930.  I don't find WSM interesting in himself, but having just read some biographical works about Thomas Hardy, I have come across a reference to this book several times.  Apparently it contains a descriptive parody of TH, which caused great offence to the latter's widow, Florence.

To my surprise, my friend told me her book group  had read this book.  As she is thinking of leaving her book group because they persist in picking boring books, this was not a great advertisement.  However, as I said, I have a particular motive for buying this, and may not read all of it.

My friend and I then went for lunch and spent the next three and a half hours talking non-stop.  This was most enjoyable.

Later, after I returned home. I was still in non-stop talk mode, and this annoyed hubby during "Strictly".  He put up with it for so long, and then could stand it no longer. "Will you PLEASE stop talking!"  He is, as I have said before, a man of few words.

However, nothing could detract from the pure pleasure of an afternoon spent with a very old friend, which included two charity shops, a kitchen shop, and much talk about books, our daughters, our holidays, families and a long shared history.

War Horse

I saw the film.

Lately, I've been seeing films because it's easier and quicker than reading the book. Sacrilege,  I know.

This is due to job changes I've posted about here from time to time.

The film left me feeling extremely cross.  I tried to analyse the reasons.

1.  I would rather have seen it with someone else, in order to share.  Because of my extreme working conditions I go to bed before 9.00 pm six nights out of seven, so if I want to see a film, I have to take an afternoon off.  Not many people I know are in this position, so increasingly I am seeing films alone (unless it is a Saturday, when Mr BB often gallantly accompanies me).

1.(a) I digress, but it annoys me that I am subject to these extreme working conditions, due to the whims of an all-female board who cut the staff budget by 50%, yes, by half. So much for female solidarity.

 I am doing the work of my ex-deputy, who worked a five-day week, as well as about a fifth of the work of my ex-boss, who worked a five day week.  I am doing all this in three days a week, because I have two jobs, and this is only one of them. Yes, work that out.  How many hundred per cent extra am I trying to do? 200%, so no wonder I am completely exhausted.

1.(b)     "Not many people I know are in this position" (ie able to take an afternoon off to see a film).
 I digress again, but check this out.   Mr BB, an old man of 57, who was brought up by the model 1950's stay-at-home mum, still believes that all women choose their husbands on the basis of looking for a meal ticket (god, that term is so offensive it is bringing me out in hives).  He believes, against all the evidence, that most women are enjoying a life of luxury while their husbands are out slaving away to provide.  Actually, the only women I know who are not working full-time are EITHER retired, because they have final salary pension schemes (whch they worked for themselves) OR are single and never had  children, so accumulated their money over a life of frugal work. Everyone else is working away, often supporting a husband who is either ill, has had a breakdown, a business collapse, or just doesn't earn much (often due to lifestyle choices, eg wishing to "escape to the country").  So it annoys me that the perception is so far from the reality.

1.(c) All this makes me cross.  Now back to the actual film.

2. I felt that the film was a poor compromise.  If you saw the play, you were enchanted and moved by the unusual premise of the puppets, and the enormous skill involved. The film just showed real horses.

If you read the book, you were taken right inside the minds of the horses, seeing things from their point of view.  A film can't do this.  You saw the horses, carefully trained to pretend emotion (eg, greeting each other, and showing affection by bumping noses), but in no way did it take you inside their minds and hearts.

3. Mr Spielberg, whilst a master of cinematic art, does tend to manipulate the emotions.  This started from the opening frames, and went on throughout. OK, this is why the guy is so successful, but from time to time a little subtlety would have provided variety and contrast.

Throughout, it was like

"See the horse show affection, show fear, show nerves and overcome them".

"See the nasty toff and his whey-faced weakling son.  Contrast that with the good-hearted sons of the soil."

"See the sweet French peasant family, and see the noble, kind-hearted upper-crust type who idealistically charges machine guns on horseback and is killed on his first day in the field."

 The music overdid manupulation as well.  It was non-stop brainwashing.

Then there was the cinematic cliche.

Do you remember this scene in Doctor Zhivago?  I mean the 1970's classic, David Lean version.  A group of young boys charge through a beautiful golden corn field and are mown down by machine gun fire.  We had this, but on horseback.  The corn was extremely high (to hide the horses). Perhaps it came from Oklahoma.

Tolstoy's classic story, in which a young man rides at a gallop up a blind summit, only to find a nest of enemies on the other side, was referenced also, by the young French peasant girl, temporarily owner of the horse, who does exactly that,  thus losing the horse to the Germans.

Then we had the horses recognizing each other in the heat of battle (Elizabeth Jane Howard used this motif in her "Cazalet" series, reputedly based on the experiences of her own family).

The horses worked to death pulling gun carriages was lifted from "Black Beauty".

The fraternization of German and English over the wire of No-Man's Land, one of the most enduring images of trench warfare actually took place at Christmas 1914 (before things got really nasty).  In the film,  Tommy and Fritz (Colin and Peter) bonded over cutting the wires in which the horse was terminally entangled, thus saving its life.

Actually, the depiction of the Germans is one of the outstandingly non-cliched aspects of the film.  The two young German brothers, shot at dawn for desertion, are movingly played against the type of the German trench soldier.  The German peasant, (honest-faced and stout) who later takes charge of the horses and tries to save them from being worked to death, convinces without sentimentality.

The final scenes trump everything, of course, as horse and boy are reunited at last.  However, this annoyed me more than anything else.  To work the plot, the boy needs to be blind, and to recognize his horse intuitively, calling him with a signal he trained the horse to recognize before the war in pretty rural Devon.

The blindness comes as a result of a direct gas attack in the trench. 

Wilfred Owen (died in the final days of the war, 1918), wrote the definitive first hand description of a gas attack, which has become a synonym and epithet for the hypocrisy and waste of war.  "Dulce and Decorum Est" is the title of the poem.  The Latin words hark back to an earlier era of heroism and nationalism when people really did believe that "It is Sweet and Fitting"   ....to die for your native land ... "Pro Patria Mori"

He recalls seeing someone who did not get the gas mask on in time.

 "I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,  -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro Patria Mori."

I have read that poem dozens of times, and it still has the power to bring tears to my eyes.

Albert, the boy, rosy-cheeked and breathing normally under the eye-bandages after the gas attack, soon recovers his sight and walks around normally, after the miraculous reunion with the horse.  This infuriated me more than any other aspect of the film.

Vera Brittain, nursing gas victims in a field hospital near the front line, wrote a similar description and indictment of war and old men's incitement of it. She wrote the following words at the time, long before the poems of Wilfrid Owen were widely available.

"I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war, and the orators who talk so much about going on and on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case, to say nothing of 10 cases - of mustard gas in its early stages - could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes - sometimes temporally , sometimes permanently - all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closed and they know they will choke...."  Albert, however, without a mark on him, uses his unharmed lungs to whistle for the horse.

Above all, this was the Spielburgian euphemism and sanitisation which infuriated me.

Barbara Wootton "In a World I Never Made"

So, back to my book that almost no-one else has heard of.   I picked this book up in a National Trust second-hand bookshop on my holiday in Norfolk.  When my friend arrived to join me, complete with Kindle, I showed her my trophy.  She thinks second hand books are tacky and doesn't like to touch them.  Later on, she asked me if I'd heard of Barbara Wootton.  Seems my husband isn't the only one who doesn't listen to me!

Her question arose from the Ilkley Literature Festival.  Seems someone has written a biography of Barbara Wootton and was due to attend the Festival for a talk and book-signing.  Someone else then, has seen interest in this hitherto forgotten person. Maybe she will develop a following.

Barbara Wootton was born in 1898, to upper-middle class parents. Against her mother's wishes, she fought for the right to study a subject of her choice at University.  She lost her husband (of a day and a half's standing) in the First World War.  Are you following the drift of this?  Yes, it is because of my interest in Vera Brittain that I was first drawn to look up BW.

At that point most similarities come to a full stop.  Barbara was a very different person from Vera.

Barbara led, to all intents and purposes, the life of a single woman, even though she had in fact married her first love.  She also married a second time, although she eventually left George and they never had children.  The latter fact was because of the unsatisfactory character of George. 

BW led an exemplary life in public service, and was a career woman throughout.  This, in fact, was probably due to her mother's influence.  Her mother, a classics don, instructed young Barbara on her wartime engagement, at 19, that she must continue her education.  "My mother was ....adamant that the engagement should make no difference to my academic career.  No one knew what might be ahead, or when I might need to earn my own living, so I must at all costs equip myself with that essential prerequisite to independence, a university degree."

After taking an exceptional first-class degree, BW continued to be an academic and to serve as a magistrate, a BBC Governor, and on many public committees.  She was honoured to be one of the first four women admitted to the House of Lords. Her work pioneered the "Social Sciences".

You read a book of autobiography, not just to find out the dates and the facts.  You long for the emotion, and the nuggets.

Here are the nuggets.

BW wrote scornfully in Chapter 2 of the difference between her own reaction to multiple bereavements by the time she was 21, and the reaction of VB.

"Indeed, what infuriated many of us, when Vera Brittain published her "Testament of Youth" was the impression she conveyed that she alone of the nurses with whom she worked had to endure the anxiety of knowing that her beloved was at the front." 

Sorry, BW, impressive though your credentials, you are completely wrong.  VB conveyed no such thing.  What she DID do, incomparably well, was to convey every nuance of emotion, every stage of apprehension, bereavement and grief, in such a way that millions the world over could understand.  This is because she is a writer.  BW, an academic and social scientist, stated a few bald facts and, shocking though they were, never touched a nerve, in me at least.

Later on in the book BW comments on the journey of all those women born in the 1890's, who were brought up without any expectation of ever getting the vote, and lived to see women enter Parliament and begin to influence far-reaching changes in the law which would eventually lead to the Womens' Movement of the 1970's.  A further nugget is related below.

Her close associate in the journey towards independence, a school-friend called Dorothy, became a leading doctor, "renowned throughout the world for her medical researches.  When she was about to receive an honorary degree from an overseas university, a newspaper man, looking down the list of honorary graduands, was heard to remark that he had not previously realised that Dorothy could be a man's Christian name."    I still laugh when I re-read this.

Finally, though, BW will be remembered, not for her writing, but for her contribution to society and her place in the pivotal years between the First World War and the 1960's

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

One of my favourite books, if not my all-time favourite book, since I was 21. Recently I bought the DVD of the BBC adaptation first broadcast in 1979.  I couldn't believe it - 1979!  That means I first saw the series only four years after I discovered the book, a second-hand hardback copy passed on by my university flatmate.  I was then the same age as Vera was when she learnt of the death of her fiance in the trenches of WW 1.

I am patient.  I have waited 32 years, until 2011, to see the final episode.  I missed it the first time round, which was before there was any such thing as recording equipment.  The repeat was broadcast sometime in the early 80's, when video cassette recording was the only option, and pretty primitive.  The clocks changed the day of the final episode, and it ended after two minutes of recording.  This was the occasion of one of the really furious, marriage-damaging rows in our life together.

I am patient.  I waited 32 years.  I bought the DVD online, and watched the last episode first.  It was moving, but I was disappointed not to see more of "G", the husband, the "Daisy" who replaced the dead "Passion Flower" in Vera's life, always to seem second-best, both to himself, seemingly, and to the discerning reader.

Then I started again from the beginning.  I still cry when these scenes are played out before me.  The story has the power to move me even now.  Vera lost her fiance, two close male friends, and her only brother in the First World War.  Her father later committed suicide.  Her best female friend, the writer Winifred Holtby (author of "South Riding" recently produced with Anna Maxwell Martin in the lead role, on BBC1) died in her thirties of a kidney complaint, unseasonably young and in great pain.

Recently I heard Vera's daughter, Liberal Democrat peer Shirley Williams, interviewed by Mariella Frostrup on BBC Radio 4's Book Programme.  Shirley had an interesting insight about her mother, and why she wrote.

"It was her reaction to loss.  Her whole life was about loss.  Writing was an attempt to bring them back to life...." 

TV does an even better job.  As far as I am aware, the 1979 BBC production  is the only adaptation of "Tof Y" that has ever been made.  Even in my own lifetime, "South Riding" has been aired twice. The last one about 25 years ago with Dorothy Tutin in the lead.

Surely it is time someone went back to the life story of VB?