New film of anti-war memoir Testament of Youth still resonates today

Shirley Williams has stayed true to mother’s Testament.

After 50 years serving with distinction amidst the hurly-burly of the political world, Baroness Shirley Williams is entitled to a treat or two.

And as I arrive at her suite in London’s Corinthia Hotel, overlooking the Houses of Parliament, a waiter bearing trifle enters the room ahead of me.

“I don’t get this sort of treatment in politics,” Shirley smiles, her blue eyes lighting up at the dessert’s arrival. And in true liberal spirit, she offers to share it with me.

The Baroness, who has appeared on Question Time more often than anybody else, is taking a break from the House of Lords to talk about Testament of Youth, the First World War memoir written by her mother, Vera Brittain, which has now been adapted for the big screen.

“The book is immortal,” says the peer, one of the original ‘Gang of Four’ who broke from the Labour Party to set up the SDP in 1981.

“I still get letters about it now, many from young people. My mother thought she’d be forgotten about but I’m glad to say she hasn’t been.”

Displaying something of an immortal quality herself her face can best be described as being 84 years young Shirley says she first read Testament of Youth when she was 14.

She hadn’t long arrived back in Britain having been evacuated to America at the outset of the Second World War.

Learning of the castigation her mother endured for her pacifist stance during the war, including a public rebuke from President Roosevelt following her condemnation of the mass bombing of Germany, Shirley says gave her a greater admiration for her mother than she had when she first returned.

“My life with my parents was complicated by having a three-year gap away from them between the ages of 10 and 13,” tells Shirley, whose father, Sir George Catlin, was a political scientist and philosopher who failed three times to enter the House of Commons as a Labour Party candidate.

“My brother and I were evacuated to Minnesota.

“A fan of my mother’s had written to her at the beginning of the war and said, ‘Send us your children,’ so she did. By the time I returned in 1943, once the threat of invasion had passed, I was already much more independently minded than most girls my age.

“The ship carrying me home had been diverted to Portugal due to a storm and because they were a neutral country they held us in an internment camp for two months.

“I wasn’t accompanied by anyone so I was left to fend for myself. By the time I got home to England I thought I was quite capable of running my own life and didn’t need parents very much.

“But my mother’s unpopularity following her criticism of the bombing of civilians in places like Dresden hit me very hard.

“I had always thought of her as a popular, bestselling author and suddenly she was loathed. People who had known her for years would walk away from her in the street.”

Shirley, who was Labour Minister of Education during the introduction of the comprehensive school system, says her politics have most been influenced by her father.

However, she kept the spirit of her mother’s pacifist beliefs alive by being one of the most outspoken critics of the American-led invasion of Iraq, which has led to 12 years of instability in the region and, as this week’s tragic events in France remind us, the world as a whole.

“I never had any doubt, the more I researched the Iraq story, that it was a wildly silly thing to do. In that way I kept the tryst with my mother.”

Shirley doesn’t take pleasure from being vindicated by events but retribution for her parents came in a rather sweet fashion.

“My parents sent us away because they had been told by friends in the Foreign Office their names were on a Gestapo blacklist and, should Britain be invaded, they would be shot.

“The Nazis hated my mother for her pacifism, which challenged their whole belief in the glorification of war, and they had burnt her books at Nuremberg.

“My father was on the list because he was actively working to get America to come into the war. I think they were the only non-Jewish married couple to be on the list.

“After the war, this blacklist was printed in a prominent newspaper of the time, which had been a staunch critic of my mother in particular, but it was in alphabetical order and because my father’s name was Catlin and my mother’s name was Brittain, they were on the same page as Winston Churchill.

“So all the people who swore they would never speak to my mother ever again suddenly decided they would.

“My parents basked in that for quite a while afterwards and I still have the page from the newspaper hanging in a frame at my home.”

Testament of Youth is at cinemas from Friday.