Shirley Williams: testament to my extraordinary mother Vera Brittain

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/11/shirley-williams-vera-brittain-testament-of-youth

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One of Baroness Williams’s earliest memories is the clacking of her mother’s typewriter. Her mother, Vera Brittain, would retreat to her study in the family’s Chelsea home at 10 each morning, having already dealt with the day’s correspondence and bills. She would then spend the next seven hours writing the book that would make her famous.

“I was firmly told not to interrupt her between 10 and five, unless there was an extreme reason why,” says Williams as she sits at one end of a conference table in her Westminster offices, with a copy of that day’s Guardian and a cup of instant coffee in front of her. “Even as quite a young child, I’d say I sort of understood it.”

Brittain was an avowed pacifist and feminist whose fiancé, brother and two closest male friends had been killed during the first world war. In 1933, when Williams was three, Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth was published. It became an instant hit and went on to sell 120,000 copies over the next six years. It was then republished in the late 1970s and adapted into a popular television series, attracting a whole new audience.

This week, the first film adaptation is set to hit our cinema screens and bring Brittain’s book once more to the fore of public consciousness. It stars Swedish actress Alicia Vikander as Brittain and Game of Thrones star Kit Harington as her fiancé, Roland Leighton, who was killed in the trenches. The film has been called “stunningly good” and “heartfelt and stirring” by critics.

Williams, 84, has already seen it five times and was closely consulted during filming.

“It’s an exceedingly rich film,” she says. “Most films are two-dimensional. This one, I’d say, has four dimensions.”

She says Vikander is superb as her mother, “in terms of catching those dimensions of personality, drive and ambition. We talked to each other quite a bit … Luckily, with her, what mattered was that her personality rather chimed with my mother’s. She does capture her: her candour and her blazing honesty.”

Brittain’s life was permanently scarred by the first world war. At the outbreak, she was 20 and had just started a degree at Oxford. When Leighton, her younger brother Edward and their friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow signed up to fight on the front after leaving school, she abandoned her degree and volunteered as an auxiliary nurse. She witnessed the traumas of battle first hand while tending to wounded soldiers in France.

Leighton was killed in 1915, shortly before he was due to return home at Christmas. When a telephone call came through, Brittain assumed it was to tell her he had arrived safely. Instead, she was informed of his death at the age of 20, killed by a German sniper while repairing barbed wire on a moonlit night in a stretch of no man’s land. It is a scene recounted hauntingly in her memoir and faithfully adapted in the film.

Williams says that, although her mother had always been a “serious-minded” person, it felt as though the war extinguished any ability she might once have had to see the lightness in life. She later poured her energies into pacifist campaigning and was a vociferous opponent of the bombing of Germany during the second world war.

“She didn’t have that capacity to either laugh at oneself or at the world when something very serious was happening in it,” says Williams. At the same time: “She was perfectly capable of being frivolous. She loved things like red leather gloves or a new hairdo or going shopping, which I can’t stand.”

Brittain would not talk about the cataclysmic losses she had suffered during the first world war when her children were little because she did not want to burden them with the weight of her own reminiscence. She chose instead to write. “Not just to chronicle the war,” Williams explains, “but as a serious attempt to recreate the character of the lives she’d lost.”

Occasionally, Brittain could be anxious and over-protective of her children, ever-worried that something dreadful would happen to those she loved. It was only as Williams and her brother John grew older that their mother started to speak of what she had gone through.

Did Williams feel, at times, as if she were surrounded by living ghosts?

“I came to think that as I got to know my mother better. I had the feeling that the white crosses were so deeply embedded in her mind. She could never move out of that sense of them being in the background. They were always there as a kind of stage set and the stage set would never change.”

Williams says that it was particularly hard for her father, the philosopher and political scientist George Catlin. Leighton emerges from the pages of Testament of Youth as a glamorous, heroic figure – an idealistic public schoolboy who was captain of the officers’ training corps at Uppingham School. In truth, Leighton and Brittain had met for a total of only 17 days, often in the presence of a chaperone, and much of their courtship was conducted by letter.

“My father was a lovely man and he adored my mother,” says Williams. “He once said to me: ‘The hardest rival you can have is a ‘ghost’ because your inclination is to idealise someone who died a long time ago.”

The film adaptation brings it home to the viewer how young these men and women were. Williams took her own grandchildren to see it and said they were all moved by the story it told. She says she gets letters from hundreds of people each year who have read her mother’s memoir and the book still seems to strike a chord with modern readers who are living through a renewed era of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Was Williams moved the first time she saw Vikander playing her mother on screen? “Oh, I think so, yes. But I’m a politician so I’m used to being put in situations where something deeply dramatic is happening and you can’t show that in your face,” she says, a touch apologetically.

So what would Brittain have made of the film version of her own life?

“I think she would have been very pleased.” Williams smiles. “She’d have probably gone there [at first] thinking: ‘Oh my God, not a film.’ She called me Poppy and she would have said to me ‘Poppy, I can’t stand this. I don’t want the film to be just about the relationship with Roland built up into a romance.’ But I think [once she’d seen it] she would have liked it a lot. I think she would have liked Vikander for her seriousness –she’d see her as a full human being.”

Brittain died in 1970 at the age of 76 after a long physical decline into motor neurone disease. It would be another eight years before Testament of Youth was republished, so she never lived to see the extraordinary resurgence of her most notable work or the fact that it is still being introduced to new generations.

Williams believes that her mother now belongs to “the writing world of immortality”. And it is true that Brittain’s memories, and the lives of those she loved and lost, live on through her words. That, perhaps, is the most fitting tribute of all.