Shirley Williams: Saving my mother from the scriptwriters

Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this year’s election. It’s one of the reasons she never made it to see the Tower of London poppies. Too busy. She also had to dash to Russia where she is on the board of the Moscow School of Political Studies. ‘It is all about teaching people about democracy and has fallen under the frown of Mr Putin, which is why I had to go.’

What we’re here to talk about is her mother Vera Brittain, and the lives of the four young men Brittain chronicled in Testament of Youth, an unimprovable account of living through the Great War.

Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow: the names will chime for anyone who has devoured Brittain’s memoir. As an undergraduate who suspended her studies in Somerville to take up nursing, Brittain told of surviving while all those she cared about — including her fiancé Roland and her brother Edward — did not. Published in 1933, it drew heavily on letters, diaries and poems to portray with heartstopping immediacy what it was like for a generation to be doomed to death by their elders. It reported not from the trenches but from the homes and the bedsides of the inconsolably bereaved. The young men of her acquaintance, with the burden of history dumped on their shoulders, bloomed back into life at the stroke of her pen.

More than 50 years on, and well after Brittain’s death in 1970, Testament of Youth enjoyed a flurry of exhumations. Virago’s popular new edition of the book came in 1978, then in the following year there was a Bafta-winning BBC drama, and in 1980 a ballet by Kenneth MacMillan.