If you’ve all been together for the festive season, you’ll know the pain of parting.

It’s been so good to gather – at home, in the pub, at a relative’s house, out for a bracing winter walk. There’s been gift giving and receiving – and a good deal of tolerance and give and take.

Imagine those you love most walking out of the door – not back to their chosen lives, but to the uncertainties and dangers of war. You’d do anything to protect them – but you have no words to express your fears, and no one wants to hear them.

A new BBC film adaptation to be shown in Oxford on Monday seeks to bridge the gap between the lost WWI generation and the way we live now.

Oxford is both an ideal and a backdrop. Many of its most beautiful vistas will be on show, but it is also an inspiration and a refuge which bookends the action which devastated an unwary generation.

Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth is a searing account of WWI, seen through a woman’s eyes. This was an almost unique viewpoint. Women’s stories were not told.

According to Brittain’s biographer Mark Bostridge, when the BBC ran 20 hours of their Great War series in 1964/5 they devoted “10 minutes to women’s war time experience”.

Brittain’s story is intensely personal. In four short years, she endured and witnessed more suffering than her youthful naivete could imagine. Against fierce parental opposition, but encouraged by her beloved brother and his sparkling, brilliant friends, Brittain had won a place at Oxford University. Women students were few. Two months before term started, WWI broke out. Within a year of arriving at Somerville College, she had abandoned her studies to train as a nurse in London.

In a three-month period, she lost both her brother Edward and his best friend, her fiancé Roland Leighton, at the Battle of the Somme. Their brilliant friend Victor – destined for medicine at Cambridge – was blinded. His life choices, like so many, were profoundly changed. Moving from London to Etapes she nursed both British and German wounded. Caring for an injured German officer, she comforted him until he died. Rather than an enemy, Brittain finds this young soldier is no different from her brother and his friends – yet they are fighting each other. Trusting and innocent, they have all entered into a collective sacrifice.

On her return to Oxford after the war, Brittain found her voice.

It was passionate, political and pacifist.

Her recognition of the common humanity of the wounded, and hard won understanding of the universality of what it means to face death, changed her.

Suffering opened her eyes.

Brittain’s daughter Baroness Shirley Williams consulted on the film.

“My mother would have been thrilled,” she told the producer.

n Testament of Youth will be screened, with a live question and answer satellite link up with director James Kent, cast members and Baroness Williams, at the Phoenix Picturehouse, Walton Street, Oxford, on January 12.

The film is out on general release on January 16.

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