"Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain

I loved this. Definitely one of the reading highlights of the year.

It is a book I had been intending to read for years. And each November when Remembrance Sunday comes along I think I will finally plunge in, but never have until this year, a century after the events described in the final chapters took place.

Vera Brittain was born in 1893 into a prosperous middle class family who lived in Cheshire. The book deals quite briefly with her childhood, except to point out that from quite an early age she decided to rebel somewhat against the expectations of her class in terms of what girls were supposed to do with their lives. She had to fight for her opportunities, but got herself to Oxford where she planned to 'astonish my fellows by unprecedented triumphs, to lay the foundations of a reputation that would grow ever greater and last me through life'. That is exactly what happened, but only after a four year delay during which she served as a nurse throughout the First World War working in London, Malta and France.

The tragedies that she had to bear are well known, and this memoir is seeringly honest about her bereavements and the way she recovered from the experience to become both a novelist and a campaigning journalist in the 1920s, proselytising in favour of women's rights and the ill-fated League of Nations which ultimately failed abysmally to ensure that the 1914-18 conflict would indeed be the 'war to end all wars'.

The final sections are inevitably less interesting to read than those covering her wartime experiences, but I have to say that I was pretty highly engaged throughout all 660 pages. The writing is wonderful, as she quotes liberally from diaries and letters both sent and received. There is plenty of poetry incorporated too and endless fascinating insight into the extraordinary and terrible experiences her generation had to live through.

Reading this had a profound impact on me and it was one of those books that I didn't really want to end. But of course it is not the end. Vera Brittain went on to write two further memoirs that are equally huge in the form of 'Testament of Friendship' and 'Testament of Experience'. I doubt that they will not be quite so interesting and moving as this one, but they are in print, and one day fairly soon I intend to give them a go.