Testament of Youth

Vera Brittain:
If this word should turn out to be a 'Te moriturum saluto,' perhaps it will brighten the dark moments a little to think how you have meant to someone more than anything ever has or ever will. What you have striven for will not end in nothing, all that you have done and been will not be wasted, for it will be a part of me as long as I live, and I shall remember, always.

Vera Brittain:
At college, more than anywhere else, one was likely to make the friendships that supported one through life.

Vera Brittain:
Like no one else... you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places... The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon... or books that have meant more to me than I can explain... This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world... The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realise you as tangible.

Vera Brittain:
I wondered if he was looking up at that same moon, far away, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him." "'I can scarcely bear to think of him ,' I wrote, 'and yet I cannot bear to think of anything else. For the time being all people, all ideas, all interests have set, and sunk below the horizon of my mind; he alone I can contemplate, whom of all things in heaven and earth it hurts to think about most.'" Perhaps... Perhaps some day the sun will shine again, And I shall see that still the skies are blue, And feel one more I do not live in vain, Although bereft of you.

Vera Brittain:
Her mind was like a spring-tide in full flood; rich, shining, vigorous, and capable of infinite variety.

Vera Brittain:
Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making unearthly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son...

Roland Leighton:
Down the long white road we walked together. Down between the grey hills and the heather. You seemed all brown and soft, just like linnet. Your errant hair had shadowed sunbeams in it. And there shone all April in your eyes.

Vera Brittain:
Please don't keep things back from me, Roland, with an idea of sparing my feelings. I shall never be afraid to confront the real. The imagined holds far greater terror for me.

Edward Brittain:
I'm so glad you were near and saw him so nearly at the end. We share a memory of both of them, dear Vera, that is worth all the rest of the world, and the sun of that memory never sets. And you know that I love you, that I would do anything in the world in my power should you ask it, and that I am your servant as well as your brother.

Winifred Holtby:
All of us are surrounded by ghosts. Now we need to learn how to live with them.