Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (27 page)

When telegrams had been sent to Buxton and Lowestoft, and the time for returning to St Pancras arrived with surprising suddenness, the thought of parental reactions on both sides became a little subduing. In those days, as we knew well enough, parents regarded it as a bounden duty to speak their minds at every tentative stage of a developing love-affair; they had none of that slightly intimidated respect which modern fathers and mothers feel for the private preoccupations of their self-possessed and casual children.

During dinner in the train we discussed the still critical attitude of the wartime world towards the relations of young men and women, and railed against society for its rude habit of waking one out of one’s dreams. We foresaw a series of ‘leaves’ in which our meetings would be impeded by suspicion, and our love tormented by ceaseless expectant inquiries. After Derby, for the first time, we had the carriage to ourselves. Almost immediately he came quite close to me and asked, with a queer little smile, half cynical, half shy: ‘Would it make things better if we were properly engaged?’

For the remainder of the journey to Buxton we argued on this topic almost to the point of quarrelling. I even told him, I remember, that he had spoilt everything by being so definite, for we both felt thoroughly bad-tempered over the situation into which an elderly, censorious society appeared to have manœuvred us. We did not want our relationship, with its thrilling, indefinite glamour, shaped and moulded into an acknowledged category; we disliked the possibility of its being labelled with a description regarded as ‘correct’ by the social editor of
The Times
. Most of all, perhaps, we hated the thought of its shy, tender, absorbing progress being ‘up’ for discussion by relatives and acquaintances.

‘A mere boy-and-girl affair between a callow subaltern and a college student! This dreadful War, you know - it makes young people lose their heads so, doesn’t it?’

I could hear some of my critical aunts and uncles revelling in the words; for this is the way in which disapproving middle-age invariably describes those young loves which thrill us most splendidly, hurt us most deeply, and remain in our memories when everything else is forgotten.

Eventually we decided to tell Roland’s mother that we were engaged ‘for three years or the duration of the War’, but to say nothing to my family until Roland’s leave was over. Exhausted and excited as I was, I felt unable to face either conventional congratulations or the raising of equally conventional obstacles. My father, I was convinced, would want to spend precious moments in asking Roland how he proposed to ‘keep’ me - an inquiry which I thought both irrelevant and insulting. I was already determined that, whether married or not, I would support myself, preferably by writing, and never become a financial burden to my husband. I believed even then that personal freedom and dignity in marriage were incompatible with economic dependence; I also laboured under the happy delusion that literature was a profession in which self-support was rapidly attainable.

My parents, who not unnaturally expected some explanation for the series of journeys upon which Roland and I proposed to embark together, were obviously puzzled by our silence and by the casual brusquerie with which we treated both them and one another. When, a few days later, I did tell them that we considered ourselves engaged, they received the news with calmness if not with enthusiasm, and protested only about our failure to mention the fact. This
dénouement
, after all, was hardly unexpected, and the War - as my mother by much unobtrusive co-operation had tried to make clear to me - had already begun to create a change of heart in parents brought up in the Victorian belief that the financial aspect of marriage mattered more than any other. The War has little enough to its credit, but it did break the tradition that venereal disease or sexual brutality in a husband was amply compensated by an elegant bank-balance.

Throughout our few hours in Buxton and again on the way back to London, Roland and I remained cold and rather formal with one another. We did discuss, very earnestly, the relation between love’s spiritual elements and its physical basis, but in 1915 such a conversation was calculated to increase perversity and embarrassment rather than to remove them, and we almost welcomed the interruption provided by a luncheon that we had arranged with Edward and Victor at the St Pancras Hotel.

Dressed in their newest and cleanest uniforms, with sprucely brushed hair and well-polished boots, Victor and Edward, who was still marking time in the southern counties waiting for his final orders, resembled an exceptionally tall Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Roland, with his shabby tunic and worn Sam Browne belt, looked a war-scarred warrior beside them, and over a prolonged meal the two bombarded him with eager, excited questions, which he answered with the calm nonchalance of a professional instructor.

Victor, now almost recovered from the after-effects of his cerebro-spinal meningitis, told us that he, like Roland, had recently been gazetted first lieutenant.

‘In my case, though,’ he observed appreciatively, ‘it was merely for gallant conduct in the hospital.’

Both he and Edward took our engagement entirely for granted - a fact which made their congratulations more tolerable than we had expected. Edward even appeared disappointed that we had not caused a little excitement by a secret and hasty marriage.

‘After all,’ he remarked, ‘you’re only giving a name to what has existed for quite a long time.’

11

As the train drew slowly into Lowestoft that evening, my nervousness at the prospect of meeting Roland’s family was intensified by the grim strangeness of the shrouded east coast. In the vanishing light the sea was visible only as a vast grey shadow, scarcely distinguishable from smaller shadows of floating cloud in a gently wind-blown sky. Far out to sea, the tiny twinkling eyes of buoys and vessels starred the vague dimness. As we drove through the streets, the faint outlines of the buildings and the muffled stillness broken only by the smooth wash of the waves on the shore, gave the curious impression of a town wrapped in fog. Until his parents’ house appeared, a warm refuge from the colourless twilight, all that I could see reminded me of the dreamy, intangible world of Pierre Loti’s
Pêcheur D’Islande
.

Tall and round and turret-like, the house, Heather Cliff, had been built with an immense number of seaward-looking windows. As it stood alone near a machine-gun station at the extreme end of the town, it provided a conspicuous landmark for ships far out to sea; consequently no lights were permitted except in the few back rooms, and the whole family lived in a state of semi-preparation for departure in case Zeppelin raids and possible bombardments should prove too disturbing to literary production.

It was somewhat disconcerting to be shown into a pitch-dark house and instantly surrounded by vague, alarming figures - the vital mother, the unknown father, and, perhaps most intimidating of all, the two adolescents, Roland’s seventeen-year-old sister and his fourteen-year-old naval cadet brother. These two, I felt sure, would display either exaggerated tact or youthful imperviousness to ‘atmosphere’. Actually, they exhibited both in turn.

Roland’s mother received me with warmth and generosity, though she was somewhat perturbed by our flippant announcement that we were engaged ‘for three years or the duration of the War’. Love, for her, was something to be gloried in and acknowledged; like so many others, she had not seen enough of the War at first hand to realise how quickly romance was being replaced by bitterness and pessimism in all the young lovers whom 1914 had caught at the end of their teens. But though our sense of love’s glamour seemed to her inadequate, I am still glad to remember the eager sympathy with which she so bravely helped me through months of suspense that without her unhesitating acceptance of me would have been unendurable.

In Roland’s bedroom, where at last we were allowed a light, she took both my hands and kissed me impulsively.

‘Why!’ she exclaimed, ‘what a tiny thing you are! I didn’t realise you were so little. I feel as if I wanted to pick you up and carry you about!’

Roland told me that she said to him afterwards: ‘Traditionally, I suppose, I ought to hate her - but I don’t.’

His father, whose vigorous red hair and individualistic moustache gave him the appearance of a benevolent Swinburne, extended to me an equally kind though less definite welcome; and later I was to listen with rapt fascination to his tales of literary London and the adventurous journalistic world.

This general glowing warmth of acceptance banished in a few moments my suppressed fear of the household, though after the colourless formality of Buxton society I found somewhat embarrassing the family’s habit of frankly discussing personal appearances in front of their owners. But I drank in thirstily the literary gossip which I had never heard before - except in very small snatches from Roland, who, unlike the rest of his family, was not much addicted to this agreeable form of entertainment - and listened spell-bound to his mother’s stories ‘of her and publishers and their annoying habits’. The whole atmosphere of the house thrilled and delighted me, and made me more than ever conscious of Buxton limitations and my young lady’s upbringing.

‘Alas! What I have missed,’ I wrote, with intolerant regret, ‘I who have had to make my spiritual and intellectual way alone! If there is a Law of Compensation perhaps one day I shall find the sweetness I never experienced in giving to a son or daughter of mine that which I myself never received.’

It was a strange week-end. Still inwardly annoyed at having to label ourselves ‘engaged’, Roland and I were a little angry with one another all the time; the belief that demonstrative affection was expected of us made us both reticent, restless and perverse. Roland, indeed, for the first twenty-four hours seemed to hold himself deliberately aloof from me; five months of active service had intensified in him some ruthless, baffling quality which before had only been there in embryo, and his characteristic air of regarding himself as above the ordinary appeared to have grown. Uneasily I recalled my desperate fear lest he should have changed, lest the War should come between us and thrust me out of his consciousness and his life.

Only once, on the Sunday evening, did we recapture for a few moments the lovely enchantment of New Year’s Eve. Sitting together on a heather-covered cliff, looking out at the shadowy sea and the thin veil of sunset mist blotting out the brightness of the sky, we watched twilight deepen into night. Soon the faint, steady gleam of a pale moon blurred the outlines of the cliff and the gorse-bushes, and turned all the world to a luminous grey. Roland discovered that my hands were cold and put his own leather gloves on them; the gloves slipped on without the fastenings having to be undone. Afterwards I remembered so well the feeling of their intimate warmth; ‘it was like having all the satisfaction of his touch without the shyness of touching him,’ I recorded.

During the day, walking among the wire-entanglements and emergency trenches on the calm, sunny shore, we had discussed the callousness engendered by war both at the front and in hospital, and Roland had said that after several months in France the idea of annihilation, of ceasing to be anything at all, had come to have a great attraction for him. But that evening we spoke very little.

‘If I heard you were dead,’ I told him after a while, ‘my first feeling would be one of absolute disbelief. I can’t imagine life without you, now.’

‘You’d soon forget,’ he said abruptly.

I felt a little sore, and asked: ‘Why do you always say that? Do you really think me one of the forgetting sort?’

‘No, I’m afraid you’re not.’

‘I think, Roland,’ I went on, ‘that if you died I should deliberately set out to marry the first reasonable person that asked me.’

He looked at me questioningly, a little puzzled, so I explained more fully.

‘You see, if one goes on obviously mourning someone, other people come along and insist on entering in and pitying and sympathising, and they force one’s recollection into one’s outward life and spoil it all. But if one seems to have forgotten, the world lets one alone and thinks one is just like everyone else, but that doesn’t matter. One lives one’s outer life and they see that, but below it lies the memory, unspoiled and intact. By marrying the first reasonable person that asked me, I should thereby be able to keep
you
; my remembrance would live with me always and be my very own. Do you understand a little?’

‘Yes,’ he replied very gravely, ‘I think I understand what you mean.’

‘But I won’t talk about that now,’ I said. ‘At least, now, I have you here with me; and nothing else matters.’

And indeed nothing else did seem to matter; for the time being each of us remembered neither the past nor the future, but only the individual and the hour.

Some weeks later he wrote to me from the trenches of that evening, and sent me, copied from the
Westminster Gazette
, a poem by Kathleen Coates called ‘A Year and a Day’:

I shall remember miraculous things you said
My whole life through—
Things to go unforgotten till I am dead;
But the hundredfold, adorable ways of you,
The tilt of your chin for laughter, the turn of your head
That I loved, that I knew—
Oh! while I fed on the dreams of them, these have fled!