Testament of Youth

“That night I prayed earnestly to God to make the dear King better and let him live. The fact that he actually did recover established in me a touching faith in the efficacy of prayer, which superstitiously survived until the Great War proved to me, once for all, that there was nothing in it.”

As a young child, Brittain prayed for King Edward VII to survive a bout of appendicitis that delayed his coronation in June of 1902. The state of mourning that engulfed Brittain’s community at the time of Queen Victoria’s death and the anxiety provoked by the King’s illness inspires her, like many others in Britain, to find solace in faith, a faith that she will lose during the disillusionment of wartime. 

“‘You never really cared for Roland; you only wanted to marry him out of ambition! If you’d really loved him you couldn’t possibly have behaved in the way you’ve done the past few weeks!’”

This harsh accusation from Mina, one of Brittain’s closest friends from her time at St. Monica’s, a private girls’ boarding school in Surrey, takes place in 1916. They are the last words Brittain recalls ever hearing from Mina as well as the first mention to the reader of Roland Leighton, Brittain’s fiancé. These words foreshadow the difficulty Brittain experienced upon losing her fiancé, as well as the challenges presented by living in a society marred by wartime grief and confusion. As well, they reflect the importance most women gave to marriage, a notion to which Brittain, whose ambitions were academic in nature, did not subscribe.

“It is, and always has been, difficult to estimate what manner of person Edward really was at the close of his Uppingham years, and it becomes harder as time marches on.”

Here, Brittain writes about her younger brother Edward, introducing him to the reader by way of his school experiences at Uppingham School.