Life and Hope and Love and You

War is not the answer. As if we didn't already know that.

But I didn't go to the Westhampton Theater to see "Testament of Youth" because it was about World War I. No, I went because I'd never even heard of Vera Brittain, a feminist and pacifist who'd written a memoir by that name, so I was curious. And I wanted buttered popcorn.

The theater was far more crowded than I'd expected for a Monday night, but maybe that's the lingering holiday effect. Or perhaps, like me, they all love a good British period drama with elevated language ("You colluded with him!") and English anachronisms (signs for "Way Out" instead of "exit").

A true story about a young woman with no interest in marriage who wants to go to Oxford (Father instead buys her a piano so she can develop a skill that might land her a husband) and eventually does - at least until WW I breaks out - centered on her awakening to the realities of war as a volunteer nurse behind the front.

But before war comes love when she meets Roland Leighton, one of her brother's friends he's brought home from school and, like Vera, he's an aspiring writer, meaning they exchange letters any time they're apart from then on.

In fact, after that first meeting, he shows his attraction to her by slipping a poem under her bedroom door.
In my book, this is romance of the highest order.

Proving right off that she was my kind of woman, when he asks her about it the next day, she tells him, "It was a little dry. I couldn't find you in it." A brilliant thing to say because he rises to the challenge and begins penning her more heartfelt poetry.

And, truly, what woman doesn't want that?

This being 1914, their romance unfolded slowly and discreetly, so when the moment finally came on the train for him to kiss her, I was none too happy when a cell phone began ringing from the purse of a nearby woman. How many times did the screen instruct you to turn that thing off, lady?

Fashion-wise, the film covered that period just before the Roaring '20s when skirts got short and hats got smaller. But I'm almost certain that good girls were not sporting pierced ears in England in 1914, a glaring error in period detail.

There was even a "Gone With the Wind" homage shot when the camera pulls back to reveal a massive muddy field of wounded and dying soldiers lying on the ground, with Vera careening around the bodies trying to find one person in the moaning masses.

"I have a dust and ashes feeling about it," her beloved Roland had told her when he departed for active duty.

By the end of the war, her fiancee, brother and his two closest friends (plus another three quarters of a million British soldiers) have all been sacrificed on the altar of war. More than a few scenes are made up almost entirely of women as a generation of men were lost to combat. They were labeled the "surplus women," a terrible phrase.

Devastated by her personal losses as well as those of the country, after the war Vera spent 17 years writing this memoir as her way of dealing with the impact WWI had on the lives of women and the middle class, which included her family.

My only question is, how have I never heard of this book considered a classic piece of feminist and World War I literature? For that matter, how have I never heard of Vera Brittain? Hell, it's not like I didn't take Women's Studies classes in college and she hadn't even been dead for long at that point.

This reminds me of the time my friend Leo and I were at the Museum of American Art and I saw a painting of Charlotte Perkins Gilman with a notation that she was a prominent American feminist. Neither of us had ever heard of her and he'd taken the same classes I had.

That time, I'd come home from D.C. and promptly ordered a copy of "The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader" to bring my knowledge base up a notch. Looks like I need to find myself a copy of "Testament of Youth" for another instructive read.

Not about the cost of war, because that much I do know, but about how an educated and intellectual woman dealt with a world that had no use for smart women, much less one scarred by losing the love of her life. Then to make it complete, I'll need to read a collection of Roland's poetry.

Again the shadowed pool shall break
In dimples at your feet,
And when the thrush sings in your wood
Unknowing you may meet
Another stranger, sweet

I have no doubt she was able to find him in that one.