Free Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain Page A

repay.
     
    The most optimistic enthusiast for adult education could hardly have described that Buxton course of Extension Lectures on the Problems of Wealth and Poverty as a conspicuous success. I stayed away from the first to go to a dance (this far had I already fallen from grace!) but I attended and wrote - the sole regular essayist out of the whole town - for all the five others.
     
    Sir John gave of his vigorous and popular best, but a prophet from heaven could not have impressed his listless and dwindling audience, of which the older and somnolent half had come out of consideration for the feelings of the local secretary, and the younger and fidgety half under compulsion from its parents. It was, I think, at the fourth or fifth lecture that he was moved to tell his yawning listeners that Buxton did not strike him as particularly inquisitive - a remark which led to a good deal of adverse criticism of the lectures at subsequent tea-parties. I even heard one voluminous lady (whose husband had launched out upon an essay answering all three alternative questions, instead of selecting one as he had been told to do) remark to sympathetic acquaintances that she never had liked ‘the man’s’ manner, and that she had heard he only came to Buxton because they wouldn’t have him in Oxford!
     
    My own persevering essays on the Industrial Revolution, the Problem of Distribution, the History of Trade Unionism and the Rise of the Socialist Movement must have been crude and superficial in the extreme, since neither the local Free Library nor the little collection of schoolbooks on my bedroom shelves contained any relevant works on either history or economics, but the reports that they received from Sir John were sufficiently encouraging to be described by my father as ‘a great honour from an Oxford man’.
     
    No doubt - as indeed I have since discovered when lecturing myself - one wheat-ear of enthusiasm was worth a good many tares of indifference. I signed my first tentative effort with initials only, and when I nervously went up to claim it Sir John showed considerable surprise - as well indeed he might have done, for no one could have looked more immature, or less capable of formulating a coherent idea, than I did in those days. For all my long skirts and elaborate Empire curls, I never succeeded up to the time that the War broke out in appearing older than an unfledged fifteen.
     
    At the request of the local secretary - a cultured woman who was, needless to say, only on the fringe of ‘the set’ - my family agreed to put Sir John up for his last Buxton lecture. On this occasion he returned my weekly essay at home after we came back from the now almost empty Town Hall. His praise moved me to speak, in my parents’ presence, of my longing to go to Oxford, and I asked his advice with regard to the first steps to be taken. The genial matter-of-factness with which he gave it seemed to dispel all doubts, and made the customary objections look so trivial that they were hardly ever mentioned again.
     
    The next morning he departed, leaving a singular feeling of emptiness where his stimulating presence, his tweed coat and his golf clubs had been. I do not suppose that he ever thought again of our household, or realised in the least how completely his flying visit had altered the atmosphere.
     

4
     
    After Sir John had gone changes seemed, in comparison with the utter stagnation of the previous year, to happen very quickly. I went in for, and won, an essay competition which he had advised me to attempt in connection with that year’s Oxford Summer Meeting; I also received, and accepted, an invitation to stay at St Hilda’s Hall for the meeting itself with my aunt and Miss Heath Jones.
     
    The result of the essay competition further gratified the dawning pride in my modest achievements which Sir John’s encouragement had aroused in my father. Before I went to the Summer School he told me that he had decided to send me