Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20914, 20 September 1939, Page 5

Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

THEIR EFFORTS TOWARDS PEACE The part that Englishwomen played in the last war has been vividly described by two who afterwards became famous novelists and journalists. They were Vera Brittain, who nursed as a V.A.D. from 1915 to 1918, and Winifred Holtby, who served with the W.A.A.G. in France. Both of them were so young that after the war they returned to Oxford to finish their education. Yet their war experiences remained the strongest influence in their lives. They felt themselves a generation apart, both because of what they had suffered and because of the obligation that seemed to fall upon them of preventing a repetition of the tragedy. The W.A.A.C. Unit at Muchennville Winifred Holtby is known chiefly by her letters to the W.A.A.C. administrator under whom she served in France. Although these were written after the war, from 1920 until her death in 1935, they contain frequent references to the W.A.A.C. camp at the French village of Huchennville. “It had been moved there from Abbeville when Abbeville was badly bombed. The women were in tents and it rained every day, but in the gardener’s cottage we had a mess room and a little kitchen. . . . There were about 50 of us, one hostel forewoman, 28 telegraphists, eight telephonists, two stenographers, two typists, one forewoman waitress, three cooks, and five or six general domestics,” writes the administrator in her introduction to the letters. Winifred seldom recalled the hardships of these months, but. often wrote of the spring flowers that grew in the wood near the old chateau and the trees in their “green and gracious ease” whose poignant beauty contrasted so strangely with the grim devastation of the battlefields nearby. It was not until they had returned to Oxford that Winifred Holtby came to know Vera Brittain. In 1923 she wrote of Vera, “the war has left her with a real sickness of apprehension that makes a life of publicity and action extraordinarily tiring; but never for a moment does she give way.” The mental and physical strain on a young, intelligent, and highly-strung girl ol three and a half years V.A.D. work is vividly described in “Testament of Youth,” which is Vera Brittain’s autobiography. Lecturing for the League of Nations Union "For five years after they had graduated, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby lived together in London. Both had small private incomes which influenced their decision to take only part-time jobs so that they should have leisure for writing and voluntary work. This enabled them to live extraordinarily full and useful lives, although it often meant “doing for themselves” in uncomfortable lodgings. So it was that when Winifred was asked to stay with a friend in 1925 she wrote urgently asking whether she would be expected to change every night for dinner. “I have exactly one evening dress. It has been dyed and twice renovated. It is already in pieces, and I’m spending my autumn dress money on going to the assembly at Geneva again. I thought it might be more useful. Do write and reassure me or I shall paint myself with woad. . . It was expected that lecturers for the League of Nations Union should xisit Geneva for the League Assembly, and both women had made lecturing for the union their chief voluntary work. To other generations the conversion of the heathen, abolition of slavery, or slum clearance has seemed the crying need of humanity. To those who went through the war the world’s most urgent need seemed the establishment of international peace. Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain were only two‘of the many young men and women who worked for world peace during the last 20 years. That they failed to achieve this ideal is one more tragedy in their lives; but this does not mean that their work is ended. “If the League should break tomorrow,” wrote Winifred Holtby. “there will be no time for fruitless regret or bitterness. We shall simply realise that we did not dig deep enough . . . that if we believe, as I believe, that human personality has the power to triumph over the heritage of its own folly, we must go back to our own countries and teach to the sons and daughters that are born to us the lessons that our own mistakes have taught us.”