Born 1925

by Vera Brittain

1st trade edition paperback, vg+

Genres: Fiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Vera Mary Brittain was an English writer and pacifist, best remembered as the author of the best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth, recounting her experiences during World War I and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.

Her daughter is Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, who is a British politician and academic who represents the Liberal Democrats.

Reviews

[Janet Bird]

My copy is a turquoise hardback sans dustjacket which I swapped from the 'book library' that summer at the Kensington Hotel Promenade Blackpool 2021 and I'm still reading. MacMillan 1948. I love old books, unfortunately the contents can be as dry as dust and the writing style antiquated. I can only get through them by reading them ultra slowly, a page nightly is the way to go...

[Michael Bully]

Vera Brittain was a superb at social commentary and poetry. But her novels seem suffocated by political polemic .....'Born 1925' is not an exception.

Vera uses Dick Sheppard, the founder of the Peace Pledge Union, and minister at St. Martins in the Fields, by Trafalgar Square, and perhaps one of the most well known pacifists of the 1930's as her main inspiration. Sheppard died before the Second World War took place. in 'Born 1925' Vera's Christian pacifist minister is active in World War 2 and has a large ministry near Soho. His wife is a non-political actress .They have two young children who are sent to the USA during World War 2 , later returning to wartime London as teenagers .Reflecting Vera's own experience.

The trouble is that Vera Brittain was so strident in wanting to use the novel as a channel as means to push her politics. The Christian Pacifist minister becomes a hero, getting great public acclaim at the end of the war . Britain and German bombing of cities seems the same in moral terms. The horrors of Nazism are in danger of being diminished with this 'bad as each other' approach. So blatantly similar to Vera's own world view. And the Minister's son also gets reconciled to his father's views......mirroring Vera's own domestic problems which didn't have such a happy ending.

This novel could have been so much more interesting if there was some ambiguity. If only the reader was simply allowed to draw her or his own conclusions without being preached at by the author. A shame as Vera Brittain wrote some excellent non-fiction, including one of my all time favourite World War 1 memoirs, 'Testament of Youth'

[Arjan]

As my grandmother was born in 1923 I was thinking this might help me understand a bit of in what world she grew up. However, the big difference is that my grandmother is Dutch and the characters are British. This makes a very big difference how you experienced WW II.
Still, it got me thinking how much of this generation born in the '20s had to hear of the threat of war starting around '33, and to find this threat become reality in '39-'40 - there teenage years!
Brittain does a grate job in explaining the gap of generation this caused with their parents, who had lived and grew up mostly in peace, although they did experience the Great War (which now we call WW I). The book is mainly told from the viewpoint of Robert Canterbury and his son Adrian, and their struggles to understand each other, although in the end the son realizes how much he is like his father, but then it is too late to truly reconcile as his father dies of a heart attack on the day of Victory ironically, the War did kill him after all.

[Teaspoon Stories]

I read this book in the week my father would have been a hundred years old. He was born exactly a century ago - just like the main character, Adrian Carbury, in the intriguingly titled novel, “Born 1925”.

But that’s where the similarities ended between my father and his fictional contemporary.

My father didn’t enjoy the gilded life of the highly privileged upper-crust Carbury family. Adrian’s father, Robert, has a country-estate, an Eton and Oxford education, and all the officer-class privileges. He has a classy (though glacially indifferent) actress-wife and access to all the right clubs and people of influence.

He also has a messianic zeal for Christian self-sacrifice and performative pacifism. He masterminds “a national crusade on the largest scale” which involves hundreds of thousands of “Builders of Jerusalem” fervently pledging to “repudiate hatred, injustice, cruelty and war” (p94).

But what happens when repudiating war only results in even greater hatred, injustice and cruelty? When espousing pacifism only empowers tyrants like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin who simply exploit the naivety of the high-minded peace-makers?

Robert’s pacifism is far too lofty to engage with ugly political expediency. Vera Brittain describes this as his “exceptional moral courage, which would have enabled him, if ever his convictions had demanded such a sacrifice, to accept a martyr’s death without hesitation” (p13). Interestingly, I think she means this entirely positively and without irony. For her, the more Robert Carbury refuses to compromise, the purer he becomes.

But people who see the world in absolute terms sometimes seem to have a blind-spot when it comes to their own personal affairs. And so I might have been more convinced by the moral purity of Robert Carbury’s principles if he weren’t an entitled “trust-fund activist” using his wealth, connections and privilege to sermonise (literally) to the less privileged on how they should live. After all, here’s a self-proclaimed socialist committed to “elementary state school” education for everyone - apart from his own son, Adrian, who he sends to Eton in the family tradition. Hum.

Vera Brittain doesn’t pursue in any depth the many contradictions - some might call them hypocrisies - in the behaviour of her pacifist hero. This makes his character rather two-dimensional and unsatisfying. In fact, I didn’t find anyone in the novel particularly sympathetic. They emit speeches rather than human warmth.

Nor does Vera Brittain call out the numerous dodgy practices that would seem distinctly at odds with the high-minded principles of Robert Carbury’s crusade, for example:

- Robert traveling first class on the luxury liner Aquitania, to lecture in America on fairness and injustice (resulting in “dollar cheques flowing steadily across the Atlantic into the ever-extending offices” p112).

- Committees of lords, ladies and bishops taking over a grass roots movement that was meant to be all about the downtrodden and dispossessed (p95).

- Robert relying on his well-connected chums to get his children out to America for the duration - in safe, smart New England - rather than evacuation with the hoi polloi to some grubby British province (p165).

And so one of the growing disappointments as I progressed through the novel was its lack of subtlety in its political messaging. Vera Brittain seems to judge everyone through tight lips who hasn’t fully signed up to her own ideology.

This means that anyone who fights is a warmonger (and Churchill’s just as bad as Hitler), that any bombing is categorically evil, that anyone who compromises is a traitor, and that even civil servants just getting on with their job are morally equivalent to “Gestapo-minded” apparatchiks (p96).

It’s not just the politics that sometimes lack subtlety. The prose also has a few purple patches that surprised me for a writer of Vera Britain’s standing. Some sentences felt like entries for the “bad sex in fiction” awards, for example:

- “Tightly locked in his urgent arms, she pressed her impatient young body against his in the abandonment of despair” (p29).

- “Occasionally she found herself wishing that there was more unrestrained lust and less tender reverence in Robert’s caresses; she longed for him just sometimes to take her inconsiderately” (p48).

- “His dreams were haunted by her graceful body, which he had longed to possess with a passion that surprised himself” (p113).

Having said all this, there are some lighter moments amidst all the heavy-handed ideology. In particular I enjoyed:

- Adrian’s little sister Josephine horrifying the stiff and refined Mrs Collingham with her naughty song about monkeys: “They had no drums / So they beat their bums” (p85).

- Languidly indifferent Sylvia Carbury noting that her husband’s motley pacifist followers all share the same taste in dodgy hats and green trousers of “all shades from olive to peacock” (p98).

- People who pray with a list of specific personal requests and “treat the Deity as a kind of celestial Woolworth’s” (p59).

- The vast appetites of ration-starved Adrian and Josephine that amuses Damon Sullivan (famous writer, womaniser and long-term admirer of their actress mother) when they first arrive in America (p186).

And despite my struggle with some of the rather tedious religious and political content, there were many elegantly phrased and poignant passages that still made this novel enjoyable and intriguing to read as a novel of its time.

Who couldn’t be moved, for example, by the description of the now middle-aged and care-worn Robert Carbury, grieving over the inter-generational antagonism that has blighted his family and forlornly doubting “what he, revolutionary to his father and reactionary to his children, had really achieved by those years of effort … “ p247).

Or by Robert’s son, Adrian - who just like my own father was born in the troubled years after the First World War and grew up during the Second World War - as he painfully realises “with growing clarity that the phase of history which had coincided with his brief existence made everyone, and especially his own generation, live too intensely … “ (p292).

And I found the closing words of the novel especially resonant, as I thought about my own father’s life as an exact contemporary of Adrian Carbury: “To know that transcendent joy might turn to sorrow, disappointment, disillusion, and yet be ready to accept these things because they were the price of experience - this was life” (p379).