Henrietta Hay's Column

Among the programs presented by our local library this year during Visit Your Library month, was one in which we discussed the books that we read as children and their influence on our later lives. I had a lot of trouble with that one, since my childhood was so long ago. I have no idea which of the books I read as a kid is still floating around giving directions to me through my subconscious.

I do know that my parents read to me a great deal and as I learned to read, there were books around all the time. I remember some of the poetry that my dad read to me. I wonder how many people of my generation went to sleep with Eugene Field's "Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night, sailed off in a wooden shoe. Sailed on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew." I suppose my dad was hoping I would be influenced by that each night. Another favorite of his and mine was Wordsworth's Daffodils. "I wandered lonely as a cloud/ that floats on high o'er vales and hills. / When all at once I saw a crowd/ A host of golden daffodils." Now some 70 years later, I think of him when I see the daffodils in spring. It would be hard to find stronger evidence than that, that reading to your children is one of the greatest, most loving gifts you can give them.

I suppose we all wonder what made us what we are - what things influenced us to go in whatever direction we have gone. Certainly books have been a big factor in whoever I am. Most of the ones that really influenced my life, I think, came along in my late teens. In looking over my old notebooks, I find that I was a hard-core romantic and even then loved beautiful language. My copy of the Winged Horse Anthology is dog-eared and taped from reading Keats and Shelley and Byron and, of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

But poetry was only one part of the literary influence. It was in college I really began my life long interest in the political system and an idealistic search for the perfect one. Out of curiosity I waded through most of Mein Kampf, which didn't influence me at all. I simply couldn't believe the little paperhanger was serious. Neither could the rest of the world, to its eternal grief.

Like all the other political science minors I read Karl Marx. He made far more sense than Hitler. Those were the days, in the 1930's, when the Russians were our friends and communism looked glamorous. It made wonderful theoretical sense: no hunger, no want. There was one major problem. It didn't work: no freedom. It took the Russians 60 years to find it out.

I think the one book I read in those formative years, which had the greatest effect on me, was Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, a book that most people today have never heard of. I read it in 1934 when we were well on the road to the Second World War although most of us didn't know it. It started me on the road to feminism. I didn't know that, either.

Vera Brittain began her education at Oxford in 1913. After her lover, her brother and most of her male friends, were killed in the First World War, she became a nurse serving at the front in France. After the war she returned to Oxford and went on to a distinguished career as a writer.

During all these years she had experienced sexual discrimination and she was one of the first modern women to write about it. In 1933 she wrote, "Could marriage and motherhood be combined with real success in an art or profession? If it couldn't, which was to suffer -- the profession or the human race? All the restrictions which forbade professional women to work after marriage were so anti-biological, I felt, as to almost constitute race suicide...The reorganization of society in such a fashion that its best women could be both mothers and professional workers seemed to be one of the most acute problems which my generation - and all subsequent generations - had now to face.

Those words were written sixty years ago and have been rattling around in my brain ever since. Never underestimate the power of the written word. I wonder what Vera Brittain would think if she were alive today.