Vera became a penpal of her brother’s new friend too, but nothing could sever Vera’s bond with Edward – and there are hints in the letters they exchanged that she strongly suspected the true nature of his sexual orientation. To judge from the nature of their correspondence, it might ‘have gone beyond the bounds of a chaste friendship’, says Bostridge. While training for the trenches, Edward had met and formed an intimate relationship with Geoffrey Thurlow, a sensitive scholar who wanted to become a priest, but had returned to the front despite being badly shell-shocked. Recovering from his injuries in England, he was awarded the Military Cross, which was pinned to his chest by King George V at Buckingham Palace. The experience, he later told his sister, had made his patriotism ‘wear rather threadbare’.įinally, they were together again. In agony, he crawled back to the British trenches, through corpses turning yellow and green in the summer heat. He was hit in the thigh and arm attempting to rally his troops. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme, almost 20,000 British soldiers died and twice that number were wounded within a few appalling minutes. In December 1915, Roland was killed, shot in the stomach by a sniper while repairing barbed wire in no man’s land. By then, Roland had won the battle for her heart, and they were engaged. Vera began to read for an English literature degree at Oxford’s Somerville College, but as the conflict continued and her suitors Roland and Victor also joined up, Vera decided that she had to do her bit too, and became an Army nurse. Like thousands of others, Edward, who had served in Uppingham’s Officer Training Corps, deferred his studies, and enlisted, gaining an officer’s commission in the Sherwood Foresters regiment. They, like many other upper middle-class couples, only saw a future for their daughter in terms of her finding a suitable husband.īut the year was 1914, and the likelihood of war cast its shadow over the Brittain siblings.
![quiet fire memoirs of older gay men quiet fire memoirs of older gay men](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/416DA247VBL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
Pictured, Alicia Vikander (Vera) and Kit Harington (fiancee Roland) in the new filmĮdward won a place to study at New College, Oxford, and played a major part in persuading his reluctant parents to let his sister study at the same university. What does not appear in either Vera’s book or in a new blockbuster film based on it – and which until now has never been revealed is the story of what truly became of her beloved brother. Thanks to the movie, released on January 16 and starring Swedish actress Alicia Vikander as Vera, it is about to reach millions more.Īn Army nurse during the war, Vera later became a leading pacifist author and was the mother of the Labour-turned-Liberal Democrat politician Baroness Shirley Williams.
#Quiet fire memoirs of older gay men serial
It reached a vast new audience with the acclaimed BBC serial starring Cheryl Campbell in 1979. Testament Of Youth has become a major part in the way the Great War, which started 100 years ago, is remembered and understood.
![quiet fire memoirs of older gay men quiet fire memoirs of older gay men](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b8769af50a54f4ddbcfc2c7/9b9820ba-8cdc-4b9d-97c3-fa46c9d6f26a/51y7s5sxDmL._SX339_BO1%2C204%2C203%2C200_.jpg)
According to Vera’s famous memoir, her brother was killed by a sniper, but Bostridge believes it is more likely that, maddened by despair, he threw himself on enemy fire. Unearthing private and previously unpublished memoirs, Bostridge has constructed an intriguing new theory about Brittain’s secret life and about his death that says much about the social and sexual mores of the time. The discovery was made by author and historian Mark Bostridge, whose new account has cast an already tragic death in an even more poignant light. To add to his shame, Edward – an officer – had been conducting affairs with ordinary soldiers men, in other words, from a lower social class. Vera Brittain, right, never got over the death of her brother Edward Brittain, left. According to Vera’s memoir, her brother was killed by a sniper but a historian believes it is more likely he threw himself on enemy fire And that is the story of what truly became of her beloved brother, a decorated hero, on the Western Front.įor aside from the appalling privations of the trenches, Edward Brittain MC also carried a very private burden, according to a new biography of Vera: the dangerous secret that Edward was homosexual – which was at the time illegal – that he had been found out, and that he faced the imminent prospect of court martial and imprisonment.
![quiet fire memoirs of older gay men quiet fire memoirs of older gay men](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-wd2hegc1u5/products/460492/images/432271/9781913193942__62124.1644184582.386.513.jpg)
Yet there is one overpowering sadness that does not appear in either Vera’s book or in a new blockbuster film based on it – and which until now has never been revealed. The memoir, suffused with loss, tells how the slaughter successively stole Vera’s fiance, her best friends and finally her younger brother Edward. Vera Brittain’s Testament Of Youth became a lodestone for a bereaved generation determined that such a massacre should never happen again. It was an instant bestseller, a compelling portrayal of the Great War which helped change British life for ever.