Authors: Juliet Nicolson
The women, among them a young published poet, Dorothy L. Sayers, who had left university in 1916 and now returned to claim her degree, stood in their specially designed caps and oversized gowns. Perhaps the sight was not particularly glamorous but it certainly incorporated, according to Winifred, ‘the visible signs of a profound revolution’. Later that Friday the High Street was filled with the unprecedented sight of women on bicycles, wearing their flimsy female versions of mortarboards with their ‘deplorable habit’ of slipping down over one eye, and trying not to get their unfamiliar gowns caught in the spokes. Male undergraduates responded with courtesy. One newly gowned young woman grasped a young male hand, exclaiming in ecstasy that she had waited decades for this day, only to receive the polite response that she did not look her age.
Winifred’s friend Vera Brittain, who had interrupted her time as an undergraduate at Somerville to become a Voluntary Aid
Detachment (VAD) nurse, had returned to the University, changing her degree course from English to history. There was another reason for her return. With the deaths of her brother, his greatest friend and her own fiancé she found herself deprived of ‘the alternative lives that I might have lived’. She had been absent from Oxford for four years and in the seclusion of her grief found the atmosphere ‘abnormally normal’. The students seemed determined to continue with the gay life that had preceded the war. At the age of only 26 she had become one of the huge number of suspiciously regarded spinsters who, verging on the outer age limit for marriage, were thought, without the fulfilment of children or sex, to be running the risk of going mad. The only thing, she told Winifred later, that held her to life was her own personal ambition to succeed.
One day in her first term after returning to Oxford, Vera had been attending a history tutorial with the Dean of Hertford College when a young woman burst into the room. Her physical appearance, bronzed by the summer sun in contrast to the small pale Vera, was astonishing. Dressed in a striped coat with an emerald green hat sitting on top of golden hair that seemed to illuminate the dull atmosphere of the study ‘like a brilliant lamp irrepressibly shining in a dark corner’, the figure glowed with ‘the vivacity of health and unquenchable spirits’. This was Vera’s first encounter with Winifred. She took an instant and contemptuous dislike to her, behaving with ‘barely concealed hostility’. Soon they clashed fiercely and publicly at the debating society. Vera confused Winifred’s ease with life with superficiality, and in her turn Winifred had been taken aback at Vera’s sense of superiority towards anyone who had not experienced the agony of war at first hand.
Another Somerville undergraduate, Hilda Reid, was struck by the contrast in the two young women. Winifred was full of fun and ‘very good company’ while Vera was prone to melancholy, ‘a very little creature with wet brown eyes’ who found thunder and mice equally terrifying. And Winifred’s all-embracing nature, her open-mindedness towards people, her passion for reading, for writing poetry, meeting men, buying clothes and involving herself in politics had the result of enraging Vera still further. Winifred’s vitality, she found, had the effect ‘of a blow upon my jaded nerves’.
But eventually Winifred’s strength of personality warmed the silent, angry older woman. One day when Vera was ill, an uninvited visit from Winifred to her sickbed brought grapes and gentle sympathy. And Winifred brought more. There was an apology for the argument at the debating society and an exchange of reminiscences about the camp at Abbeville. Vera began to change her mind and lose her distrust of this vibrant and compassionate individual.
On the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1919 the two women had accompanied each other to observe the two minutes’ Great Silence at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford and to remember those they had loved. The pain of the service was eased for both of them by their growing friendship. By the spring of 1920 the two had became inseparable.
This unlikely friendship gave Vera a lifeline, a reason for living. From June 1918 when her brother Edward was killed in Italy until that April of 1920 she had not known anyone ‘to whom I could speak spontaneously or utter one sentence completely expressive of what I really thought or felt’. Winifred had changed that. But even Winifred was ignorant of how profound an effect the war had made on Vera. After a day spent walking in the fields around Box Hill and laughing together at the poets Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and Roy Campbell, who kept a shop and wore red leather slippers and lived on goat’s milk and cheese, Vera would return to her room and to her solitary nightmare. She dreamt that her face was changing and that in the morning she would wake to find that she had been transformed into a witch or that she had grown a full beard overnight. Rushing to the mirror she would see her own hairless face staring back at her in relief and horror combined. Terrified of uncovering a suppressed awareness of the ‘thinness of the barrier between normality and insanity’ she did not even dare tell her friend about the nightmares she suffered. The truth remained a shared secret between her sleeping and her waking self. She drifted ‘to the borderland of craziness’ but was too frightened to admit it.
A daytime fear haunted her as well. Her new lodgings in Keble Road that Trinity term of 1920 were overrun with mice. Images of the sights and sounds and smells and fears and cries of pain that had filled the trenches and which she knew so well from Roland and
Edward reverberated around her room. ‘Armies of large fat mice’ transformed a sanctuary into a prison. And what is more the room was filled with five separate mirrors. Dreading a sudden appearance of five identical hags as if on a Macbethian heath, she would cover her eyes to avoid seeing her own reflection. Fearful that the mice would re-emerge in the middle of the night, and desperate to prevent a recurrence of the dreaded visionary hairy growth, she would barely sleep a wink all night.
Vera was unaware that only a few miles away Robert Graves was imagining Beowulf ‘wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet’. Nor was she aware that in the middle of one of the English literature lectures Graves would ‘have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune-La Bassée road’ and that the smell of the French knacker’s yard nearby would rise up from the desks of the lecture theatre and swamp him. Gradually the fear began to recede as her mind concentrated on her own writing and her new life-enhancing friendship. Hope and trust were proving to be the cures for grief.
11 November 1920
No one who had lived through the war and lost someone they loved had been able to ignore the moments of false hope which were still capable of flaring up. The sound of a postman tipping the letterbox flap, the bark of a dog at the click of a garden latch, a knock at the door, the ring of a telephone – the cruel mind-game of false hope flourished in a context where there was no proper evidence of death.
The Lutyens monument, with its coffin-like presence, provided a receptacle in which, in the imagination of those still grieving, a body could be laid. For nearly eighteen months the temporary wooden Cenotaph had been acquiring increasing poignancy and significance not only for all who saw it but for all those denied a body and a coffin in which to place it.
To be in the silent presence of the Cenotaph, the mind paradoxically was free to express anything it chose. Here at last was a tangible object on which to focus personal grief. Lacking any inner substance of its own, it seemed to be the silence of grief made visible, the absence of the missing men made real. For a Christian, the very emptiness of the Cenotaph held a symbolism like that of Christ’s tomb after the Resurrection. Comfort came in many guises and for some the Cenotaph carried with it a suggestion that the dead were perhaps not finally dead, but had risen again to a better life. The
Morning Post
noticed that ‘Near the Memorial there were moments of silence when the dead seemed very near.’
Despite being a construction of wood and plaster, the monument in its colour and size resembled something permanent, substantial. Its presence interrupted the flow of six lanes of traffic, but suggestions that it be moved to Parliament Square were dismissed. Lutyens
had designed the thirty-five foot high Cenotaph to dominate the great sweep of road that is Whitehall and his wish was respected.
Every day since the unveiling, the base of the monument had been concealed by the bouquets, garlands and wreaths heaped upon it. Further armfuls of flowers were continually laid at its foot – flowers brought from country meadows, from allotments, from back gardens and great estates. Here at last was a place where the mourning could begin and the horror recede. Here was a place where four years of pent-up sorrow could at last express itself, and where the bereaved could gather to remember. Passengers on the top deck of passing London buses removed their hats in salute.
But still the sound of tears was rarely heard. The Cenotaph remained a place for quiet reflection, where the manifestation of noisy emotion was, by silent agreement, discouraged. The author J. M. Barrie was one of hundreds of thousands of mourners who found Lutyens’s monument a place of comfort. His adopted son, George Llewellyn Davies, had been killed in 1915, the body never found. Barrie had met Lutyens on the boat to France when searching for George’s grave. He wrote to the architect that ‘The Cenotaph grows in beauty as one strolls alone o’nights to look at it which becomes my habit.’ Finding in the building an echo of Milton’s definition of poetry, ‘thoughts that voluntarily move harmonious numbers’, Barrie applauded his friend for creating such a harmonious number. ‘I feel proud of it and you,’ he wrote.
In Whitehall Sir Alfred Mond, head of the Board of Works, had become increasingly irritated by the ever mounting and rotten-smelling hillock of flowers that smothered the foot of the Cenotaph. The summer temperatures of 1919 had on occasion beaten the records set in 1911 and the flowers soon wilted. ‘A mass of decaying flowers needs almost daily attention,’ he grumbled; he was thinking of suggesting that perhaps it would be more hygienic and tidier if flowers were permitted on only two days a year, the anniversary of the Peace Treaty in June and perhaps at Easter.
But the temporary monument, a construction that had started out as a stage prop for the Victory Parade, had assumed a significance that the people were not ready to surrender. The building of monuments became infectious. Memorials founded by money
raised in individual towns and villages were being built all over the country – in high streets, at road junctions, on village greens. Each one was different. The proposal to erect an identical headstone for the millions of bodies that awaited burial abroad in the colossal cemeteries that Kipling called ‘the silent cities’ was causing debate in the letters columns of
The Times
. Some felt that this ‘was a camouflaged effort to do things on the cheap’; others argued that visual uniformity and the sense of fellowship with colleagues, officer and soldier alike, would dignify the look of the stone.
For more than a year, ever since Sir Alfred Mond had given him the agreement to proceed, Lutyens had been working on refinements and alterations to his temporary structure. He was worried that London’s rain and smog would destroy the fragile fabric of the fluttering silk flags that hung down the sides of the Cenotaph and that ‘anything less calculated to inspire reverence or emotion than a petrified and raddled imitation of free and living bunting’ was hard to imagine. As he found in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, Lutyens felt it was the half said and the half complete that proved to be the most eloquent expression of the gaping hole made by death.
Mond had tried to convince Lutyens that stone ensigns would do the job better. Knowing that the artistic demands for creating new faces at the Tin Noses Shop had diminished, Lutyens had initially invited his old colleague Francis Derwent Wood to make the new flags as well as to sculpt the stone wreath that would be placed halfway up the stone sides. But in May 1920 Lutyens’s wish to retain his original design was accepted: the silk flags remained, the sculptor reassuring Wood that he would find a place for the redundant work in one of his many other war memorial commissions.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the Armistice, when the new monument had been completed and before the sheets had been thrown over it in preparation for the unveiling, the casual passer-by strolling down Whitehall noticed little if any change. Lutyens explained that the subtle differences in the curves were almost imperceptible ‘yet sufficient to give it a sculpturesque quality and a life that cannot pertain to rectangular blocks of stone’. Lutyens refused to be paid for this particular piece of work.
*
But there was something that continued to feel incomplete about the celebrations for the observance of the second anniversary of the Armistice. The coffin-like Cenotaph was of course empty. There were no plans to fill it and yet its very emptiness emphasised a void.
During the war an army padre called David Railton, guiding an itinerant wartime parish through the middle of the body-thick mud of France, had been deeply moved, one still, unusually silent evening, by the sight of a small fenced garden which contained in one corner a grave marked by a simple wooden cross. Someone had taken a black pencil and written on the crosspiece the words ‘An Unknown British Soldier’. Could not one of these unidentified men, Railton wondered, serve as a symbol of comfort and courage to the whole armies of people who had no body to bury? The lack of a funeral had denied hundreds of thousands the chance to accept the finality of death. Perhaps one single body could be brought out of the mud of France, never to be identified but to fill the gap left by a father, brother, husband, son, fiancé, lover, uncle, grandfather, friend – a loved one who could be made to symbolise and fill that void. His invisible face could be invested with thousands of familiar faces, all much missed and much loved. The suggestion seemed to offer a retreat from the terrifying emptiness of the tomb, with its attendant silence, and instead an emphasis on the continuing vitality of the common man.