Testament of Youth

And she becomes a nurse, volunteer nurse.

And as she loses these men one by one, as her grief intensifies, I mean, it's just a horrific, harrowing story that's in her incredibly beautiful memoir, Testament of Youth.

She volunteers for increasingly dangerous victims.

Position so she starts out as a nurse in London where people are convalescing then she's in Malta where people are in the kind of They're convalescing but they're still fairly gravely injured and then by the end She's in the tents in France nursing wounded German soldiers whom she nurses in their last moments and she has good enough German that she's reciting the Lord's Prayer in German with them as they die and thinking to herself this is absurd and And it's that nursing of the so-called enemy soldier in the First World War that commits her in her life.

Tell us about her and what she did during World War I.

Yeah, Vera Brittain wrote, some of you may know Vera Brittain's wonderful memoir, Testament of Youth.

And it's been kind of my Bible for all of the books that I've written.

In particular, the section of Vera Brittain's life that I've been most interested in is her desire to go to Oxford University, which was strong.