91Èȱ¬ One - A Woman In Love And War: Vera Brittain
Jo Brand retraces Vera Brittain's tragic wartime story in a heart-rending and vivid film that captures the confusion, hope, agony and suspense of war as told through a woman's eyes as the men she loved were fighting in the trenches.
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During the course of the war, Vera lost all the men who had ever meant anything to her and her world was torn apart by the grief of losing what she felt to be her entire generation.
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Vera and Edward Brittain came from a wealthy Staffordshire family and enjoyed a happy childhood. Edward attended Uppingham School, where he met Roland Leighton and Victor Richardson. Their strong friendship soon earned them the nickname 'The Three Musketeers'.
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It was at an Uppingham summer party just before the declaration of war in 1914 that Vera started to fall in love with Roland. She was attracted by his brilliance, his maturity, and by the fact that he, like her, nurtured ambitions to be a writer.
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By the end of 1914 they had begun a courtship that would culminate in their wartime engagement.
The same year, Vera had won an Exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford University, putting her in the vanguard of the women of her generation.
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But no sooner had Vera Brittain settled into her first year at Somerville College than World War One broke out.
Unable to concentrate on studies, Vera left to become a volunteer nurse (VAD), first in her home town of Buxton, Derbyshire, and later at the 1st London General, a Military hospital in Camberwell, south-east London.
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Her life as a nurse took her both to Malta and eventually close to the front in France, and she found herself nursing both British and German casualties.
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Meanwhile, the boys of Uppingham had sacrificed their university places in order to serve their country and do their duty.
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Roland was the first to get to the Front, his regiment reaching the Franco-Belgian border in March 1915.
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For Vera the first year of the War was grim and terrifying, but characterised by hope, and the belief in the possibility of heroism.
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The sacrifice that the young men of her generation were making, however, was rammed home at Christmas 1915 when Vera, waiting for Roland to return on leave, received devastating news.
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In August 1918 Vera published her first book, Verses Of A V.A.D., and her poems of the war containing elegies to Roland, Edward, Victor and their wartime friend, Geoffrey.
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She was nursing at Queen Alexandra's Hospital, in London, when Armistice was finally declared on 11 November 1918. It was not until that moment Vera realised fully for the first time that a new age was beginning, but that "the dead were dead and would never return".
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This one-off documentary follows not only on the emotional experiences of a young woman suffering at home, while those she loved were at the Front, but also looks into the conditions nurses faced both at home and abroad, and the contribution they made to the War effort.
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Visiting key locations in Britain and France and drawing on Vera's own letters and memoirs, Jo Brand discovers the story of how Vera and her contemporaries were tragically caught up in The Great War.
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In her first television interview of any substance on the subject, Vera's daughter, the politician Shirley Williams, will feature alongside other contributors to bring Vera's story to life, revealing the huge emotional price Vera paid for losing all her male friends and lovers – in what is one of the saddest and most moving stories ever told of the Great War.
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Jo builds a picture of Vera's privileged Edwardian childhood by visiting her home in Buxton, and her Oxford College. She investigates how Vera's world of comfort and class were put to one side as she took on the menial and often distressing tasks of a VAD nurse, as part of the war effort.
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Jo rediscovers some of the places Vera nursed, from the hospital in Camberwell to which she was attached as well as the site of the field hospital in Etaples in France, where Vera came face to face with war at the Front, and she talks to nursing experts about the conditions under which Vera worked.
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What initially attracted you to the project?
I read Testament Of Youth as a teenager and have always thought it was a fascinating book. Vera lived in a time in which women's horizons were incredibly narrow, even if they were middle class.
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One experiences with Vera the first realisation that must have occurred to many young women of her generation, that there were better things to do than get married or be the handmaidens of men in some other way.
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The history of the First World War also had an impact on me - as the most appalling tragedy on an inconceivably enormous scale - marrying the ineptitude of the government and senior military staff with the touching naiveté of thousands of young soldiers who seemed to go willingly to their deaths without a backward glance.
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Why is Vera's story important?
I think it gives an incredible insight into the life of a middle class young woman such as Vera in the years leading up to and during the war and also as war progresses, we see things from a totally different perspective.
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The nursing that Vera took part in as a VAD (VADs were mainly middle class girls) was grinding, thankless and depressing and probably a shock to all these young women from privileged families.
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And this first hand account is also a very impressive document charting Vera's growing feminist ideals at a time when women were expected to take a back seat.
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What was the most surprising thing you encountered whilst making the film?
I suppose the most surprising thing that happened was the pleasure I had in meeting Shirley Williams, Vera's daughter, just from the point of view of physically being in the presence of such a close blood relative of Vera and because Shirley Williams is a formidable person in her own right.
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Did you find that you had anything in common with Vera?
I would like to think we both have very strong feminist ideals. Vera seems to have been quite a serious person which I am not. I was always very rubbish at keeping a diary whereas her diary is absolutely stuffed with words. She certainly was a slogger too and I hope I was when I was a nurse.
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