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

to Oxford for a year, and did not seem unduly disconcerted when I returned home with the information - then as much news to me as to him - that if I wanted a Degree I must remain at college not merely for one year but for three.
     
    I went to St Hilda’s in a state of ecstatic entrancement which I do not now know whether to regard as funny or pathetic or incredible; I only wish that I were still capable of feeling it about anything. ‘Oh, when I think of it all,’ I had written in my diary with ingenuous rapture after accepting my aunt’s invitation, ‘I feel as though I were in a dream from which I am afraid to awaken. Oxford! What doesn’t it call up to the mind! The greatest romance of England - the mellowed beauty of time and association, the finest lectures the world can produce, wonderful libraries and fascinating old bookshops, the society of Miss H. J. and Miss B. the best I could desire on earth and the meeting all the interesting intellectual people Miss H. J. knows - oh God, have pity on my fierce excitement and grant that it may come to pass and be even better than I dream!’
     
    When I did arrive at this Earthly Paradise I was not, strangely enough, in the least disappointed. Even the lectures ‘the finest the world can produce’, came up to my expectations - a fact which seems to indicate that few of the usual term-time lecturers can have been included in the Summer School programme. There was a light on my path and a dizzy intoxication in the air; the old buildings in the August sunshine seemed crowned with a golden glory, and I tripped up and down the High Street between St Hilda’s and the Examination Schools on gay feet as airy as my soaring aspirations.
     
    My fellow ‘thirsters’ were the usual Summer Meeting collection of unoccupied spinsters, schoolmistresses on holiday, fatherly chapel-goers and earnest young men in sweaters and soft collars, but I thought them all extremely talented and enormously important. Had anyone told me that less than a decade afterwards I should myself be lecturing to similar gatherings, I should blankly have refused to believe him, for if I was in awe of the audiences, the lecturers seemed to me to be at least on a level with Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven. And perhaps, since they included not only Sir John Marriott on the Monarchy of France, but Dean Inge, grave, scholarly and a little alarming on Old Testament Eschatology, I had some excuse for thinking that I had strayed by accident into the most exclusive circle of a celestial hierarchy.
     
    The fact that Sir John had asked me to dine with him one evening while I was attending the School added the final drop to my cup of excitement. Palpitating with awe and amazement, I presented myself at his house in Northmoor Road, where I met his beautiful wife and elegant, clever daughter, who afterwards became, rather surprisingly, absorbed in the Girls’ Diocesan Association. So remarkably had my prospects changed since the spring, that we talked of my university future as a foregone conclusion. Sir John, no doubt bearing in mind the sheltered life of a Buxton young lady, took for granted that I should try to enter Lady Margaret Hall, for this has always been the politest of the four Oxford women’s colleges, and in those days it invariably wore, like my Buxton academy, ‘a school for the daughters of gentlemen’ air. (Strictly Anglican gentlemen, of course.)
     
    Trembling but determined, in spite of the gratitude and admiration which almost unnerved me, I contradicted his assumption. I had already talked over the four colleges with a business associate of my father’s, Mr Horace Hart, then Controller of the Oxford University Press, who told me that Somerville was undenominational and that it had become, owing to its high examination standards, by far the most difficult of the women’s colleges to enter.
     
    From the University Press windows Mr Hart and I had looked across Walton Street at