conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Vera, France, Roland entitled Testament of Youth.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Testament of Youth (film): The film starts with the image of a cheering crowd, celebrating the end of the war in 1918.\nVera Brittain goes through the crowd, the only one not cheering, and ends up in a church, where several women are praying.\nIn 1914 Vera fights to become a student at Somerville College, Oxford.\nWhile her father is against it, her brother Edward supports her, along with his close friend Roland Leighton, and their friend Victor.\nTogether the "three musketeers" and Vera have a good summer, swimming in a lake together and having long walks in the countryside.\nRoland, who is himself an aspiring poet, supports Vera in writing her own poems and pursuing her dream of becoming a writer someday.\nRoland and Vera start a shy romance.\nWith the support of her brother Vera convinces her father to let her visit Oxford.\nThe First World War breaks out and all three musketeers enlist.\nVera helps convince her father to let Edward join the army.\nWhen she arrives in Oxford she sees, for the first time, two amputees being assisted, presumably early casualties of the fighting.\nIn a newspaper, Vera sees that four of the pages of the paper consist of only the names of the fallen (ie, the dead).\nVera volunteers to join the VAD Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse tending the wounded in a hospital.\nSome of the other nurses know that she is from Oxford and therefore try to "break" Vera.\nFor the first time Vera is confronted with the wounded from the front, when she has to wash a stinking soldier, brought covered in mud and blood from the battlefield in Flanders to the hospital in London.\nRoland comes back on home leave and is traumatised by his experiences at the front.\nAfter a talk with Vera he proposes to her and they decide to get married on his next home leave.\nThey have a good day together after which Roland has to get back to France, this time accompanied by Vera\'s brother Edward.\nVera\'s father has a breakdown after his son leaves.\nIn the hospital an evergrowing stream of wounded soldiers arrive.\nRoland writes that he has been granted a leave at Christmas, and has been sent far behind the lines and is safe.\nJust before Christmas, he is killed and Vera finds this out via a telephone call received on Christmas day.\nVera eventually finds out that Roland did not die "bravely and painlessly", as the letter she receives from the Army states.\nDue to a lack of morphine he suffered a long time at a casualty clearing station in France, shot in the abdomen.\nLater, her friend Victor is blinded by a gas attack and arrives at the hospital.\nThe next night he dies.\nVera decides to go work in France herself.\nHer father is very proud of her.\nIt\'s August 1917 and in France the situation of the wounded is very bad.\nDue to a lack of surgeons often the nurses have to perform amputations.\nVera works in a hospital behind the lines, where she is first tasked with treating wounded Germans.\nAlthough she and her superior at first seem to not care much about the wounded enemy, they later both comfort a dying German soldier.\nAfter a big offensive the hospital is so crowded that the wounded have to lay in the mud outside.\nIn a huge pile of corpses Vera discovers her brother, who is still alive.\nHis infected wound gets treatment and he is saved.\nAfter that he is sent to Italy, which seems to be good news, because the fighting there is lighter.\nEdward wants Vera to proceed her academic career after the war, by visiting Oxford.\nVera\'s mother has a nervous breakdown and Vera goes home.\nThere she takes over the households, by cleaning the house and hiring a maid.\nEdward gets killed at the front in Italy.\nThe day of the truce comes.\nLike in the first minutes of the movie, Vera is shown as she marches stoically through a cheering crowd, to end up in a church where some women are praying.\nHonouring her brother\'s wish Vera finally goes to Oxford, where she has nightmares about Roland\'s and Edward\'s death.\nWinifred Holtby, another student at the college, helps her cope with her trauma and to get back into the everyday world.\nAt a political discussion, about whether to punish or to forgive the Germans, most of the audience is for a "revenge treaty".\nGeorge Catlin, who calls for a "forgiving piece" is booed upon.\nVera gets on the stage and gives a speech about how she held the hand of a dying German soldier and that he was not different from her brother or her fiancé.\nTherefore she calls for a "No more" to war and revenge.\nThe last scenes show Vera swimming in the lake, where she swam with the "three musketeers" in 1914.\nShe promises not to forget the dead and the screen turns to black.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about \nVera, Vera.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Testament of Youth (film): The film starts with the image of a cheering crowd, celebrating the end of the war in 1918. \nVera Brittain goes through the crowd, the only one not cheering, and ends up in a church, where several women are praying. \nIn 1914 Vera fights to become a student at Somerville College, Oxford. \nWhile her father is against it, her brother Edward supports her, along with his close friend Roland Leighton, and their friend Victor. \nTogether the "three musketeers" and Vera have a good summer, swimming in a lake together and having long walks in the countryside. \nRoland, who is himself an aspiring poet, supports Vera in writing her own poems and pursuing her dream of becoming a writer someday. \nRoland and Vera start a shy romance. \nWith the support of her brother Vera convinces her father to let her visit Oxford. \nThe First World War breaks out and all three musketeers enlist. \nVera helps convince her father to let Edward join the army. \nWhen she arrives in Oxford she sees, for the first time, two amputees being assisted, presumably early casualties of the fighting. \nIn a newspaper, Vera sees that four of the pages of the paper consist of only the names of the fallen (ie, the dead). \nVera volunteers to join the VAD Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse tending the wounded in a hospital. \nSome of the other nurses know that she is from Oxford and therefore try to "break" Vera. \nFor the first time Vera is confronted with the wounded from the front, when she has to wash a stinking soldier, brought covered in mud and blood from the battlefield in Flanders to the hospital in London. \nRoland comes back on home leave and is traumatised by his experiences at the front. \nAfter a talk with Vera he proposes to her and they decide to get married on his next home leave. \nThey have a good day together after which Roland has to get back to France, this time accompanied by Vera\'s brother Edward. \nVera\'s father has a breakdown after his son leaves. \nIn the hospital an evergrowing stream of wounded soldiers arrive. \nRoland writes that he has been granted a leave at Christmas, and has been sent far behind the lines and is safe. \nJust before Christmas, he is killed and Vera finds this out via a telephone call received on Christmas day. \nVera eventually finds out that Roland did not die "bravely and painlessly", as the letter she receives from the Army states. \nDue to a lack of morphine he suffered a long time at a casualty clearing station in France, shot in the abdomen. \nLater, her friend Victor is blinded by a gas attack and arrives at the hospital. \nVera proposes to him, so they "can take care of each other", but he refuses, although he has been in love with Vera for a long time. \nThe next night he dies. \nVera decides to go work in France herself. \nHer father is very proud of her. \nIt\'s August 1917 and in France the situation of the wounded is very bad. \nDue to a lack of surgeons often the nurses have to perform amputations. \nVera works in a hospital behind the lines, where she is first tasked with treating wounded Germans. \nAlthough she and her superior at first seem to not care much about the wounded enemy, they later both comfort a dying German soldier. \nAfter a big offensive the hospital is so crowded that the wounded have to lay in the mud outside. \nIn a huge pile of corpses Vera discovers her brother, who is still alive. \nHis infected wound gets treatment and he is saved. \nAfter that he is sent to Italy, which seems to be good news, because the fighting there is lighter. \nEdward wants Vera to proceed her academic career after the war, by visiting Oxford. \nVera\'s mother has a nervous breakdown and Vera goes home. \nThere she takes over the households, by cleaning the house and hiring a maid. \nEdward gets killed at the front in Italy. \nThe day of the truce comes. \nLike in the first minutes of the movie, Vera is shown as she marches stoically through a cheering crowd, to end up in a church where some women are praying. \nHonouring her brother\'s wish Vera finally goes to Oxford, where she has nightmares about Roland\'s and Edward\'s death. \nWinifred Holtby, another student at the college, helps her cope with her trauma and to get back into the everyday world. \nAt a political discussion, about whether to punish or to forgive the Germans, most of the audience is for a "revenge treaty". \nGeorge Catlin, who calls for a "forgiving piece" is booed upon. \nVera gets on the stage and gives a speech about how she held the hand of a dying German soldier and that he was not different from her brother or her fiancé. \nTherefore she calls for a "No more" to war and revenge. \nThe last scenes show Vera swimming in the lake, where she swam with the "three musketeers" in 1914. \nShe promises not to forget the dead and the screen turns to black.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Testament of Youth
  I remember that July as a dry, bright month, reflecting in its external brassiness the dry, bright-eyed stoicism of those human automata upon whose love life could wreak no more wrong. Above the crisp Cornish turf the milk-blue harebells, hot in the sun, hung unswayed by the windless air. As I sat below two poppy-flecked fields of oats on the rocky coast of West Pentyre, and watched the camouflaged ships gliding across the smooth sea with the unreality of ships in a dream, my reflections grew so painful that I decided to stampede thought by continuing my wild novel of the War in France. But the plot became so lurid, and the characters and places so easily recognisable, that Roland's father, to whom I showed the manuscript after it was completed, advised me to make no attempt to publish it if I wanted to keep out of the Law Courts. I was really quite safe; no publisher would have dreamed of accepting so crude a piece of semi-fiction, but I took his advice and put the manuscript away in a cupboard, where it has remained ever since.
  By mid-September, after Bessie, the hard-working maid, had been engaged, there seemed no longer any real reason why I should remain at home. I couldn't feel much interest now in any kind of military service, but Edward's death had made a wartime return to Oxford more than ever impossible, and the Army had become a habit which only the end of the War could break. Although the Turks in their thousands were surrendering to Allenby in Palestine, and the new British offensive between Arras and Albert had gained ground held by the Germans since 1914, it still did not occur to me that anything unusual was happening, and even the collapse of Bulgaria at the end of September seemed only to have a remote significance.
  So, for the third time, I went like a returning somnambulist to Devonshire House, and was interviewed by Lady Oliver. I had hoped that foreign service might restore me, as it had done twice before, to some kind of clear-headed vitality, but I found that, for me, foreign service was no longer available. There was now, I was told, 'a rule' - Heaven knew in whose bright brain it had originated - that V.A.D.s who had broken their contracts for any reason whatsoever while on active service might not go abroad again until they had been once more through the 'grounding' in home hospitals that they would have required had they never served at all.
  My surgical experience might just as well have been taken to the Devonshire Hospital in Buxton; it would have been quite as useful there, and some awareness might even have emerged of the fact that I possessed it. At St Jude's I came across nothing, and no one, that could have restored in any wounded spirit the will to do and endure. 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here', might appropriately have been inscribed for me above its grim, gloomy doors. Even today I cannot pass without a shudder those uninviting acres of brown brick with their Victorian elaborations of worn grey stone.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When, as soon as we had settled in Bloomsbury, I began my one-morning-a-week expedition to the fashionable little South Kensington school with which I had been in negotiation the previous autumn, I realised clearly enough that this comfortable money-making expedient had no relation to the gruelling experiences in which some of my fellow Somervillians were so miserably immersed. I had only to give one lecture or class to each of the three higher forms in this polite, unexacting academy for wealthy Society girls, and the headmistress, a small humane woman with a sense of humour who always treated me with respect and kindness, realised at least as keenly as I did the intellectual limitations of her pupils.
  Each Tuesday morning began with a quiet and reasonably intelligent Sixth Form, continued with an uproarious and unmanageable Fifth which exhibited at their worst the characteristics of pampered, uncontrolled adolescence, and concluded in the cheerful company of a pleasantly naughty Fourth to which I taught Greek and Roman history, incidentally learning it myself in the process. To this class of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds came an earl's daughter of fifteen, accompanied by an elderly, spectacled governess who looked as though she had walked straight out of Miss Pinkerton's Female Academy.
  My ex-pupil is now one of the much-photographed Bright Young Things of London Society, but in those days it was difficult to believe that she would ever be bright, or even young; her large, timid eyes blinked at me behind her shining, old-fashioned glasses, and I wrestled perpetually with the problem of finding some truthful criticism for her smudgy, infantile essays which would not get my kind employer into trouble with the parental earl and countess. Why this aristocratic little rabbit was sent to my classes I could never understand, but perhaps her parents thought it would be an 'experience' for her (as indeed it was, and judging from her worried expression, a very painful experience) to be taught a safe minimum of history by an Oxford graduate. She never appeared at my classes without the governess, who clung to her like a burr - presumably as a safeguard against the risk that I might mention the Hetairai, or discuss the less repeatable irregularities of Alcibiades.
  The term after I began this visiting work in South Kensington, my St Monica's aunt invited me to spend a similar weekly day at Kingswood, where one of the forms was taking the Higher Certificate examination and wanted some special coaching in history. I agreed to undertake this coaching, and on the same day to give four or five classes to other forms, as well as correcting a large number of essays and exercises. The standard of scholarship in the school had improved beyond recognition since my own day; public examinations in both English and French were now taken and passed in triumph, and although, in too many cases, I still felt that it would all end at St Paul's, Knightsbridge, or Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, I enjoyed the endeavours that I made for nearly three years to interest my youthful successors in the idea of self-supporting professional work which would not necessarily terminate with marriage.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was, as I learnt later, the last of the three boat-trains, and there didn't seem to be much chance of finding G. on it even though he was not one of those elevated beings whose class entitled them to arrive in London at the earliest possible moment. But at least, I thought, I might get to Waterloo by it before he had collected his luggage, and thus mitigate the bewildered distress that he must certainly have felt when I apparently broke, without warning, my promise to meet him. So I ordered the taxi to stop as near to the line as it could go, and the driver, appreciating our change of plan, drew up immediately below the lofty carriages.
  Just as we reached it the train began gently to move, and with Winifred propelling me vigorously from behind I scrambled, regardless of the dove-coloured coat-frock and new terra-cotta hat, up the steep step from the dirty siding. Completely ruining my pale sue'de gloves with the coal-dust on the grimy handle, I opened the nearest door and fell into the corridor, while Winifred, panting at my heels, was herself pushed up by the taxi-driver - to whom, with great presence of mind, she flung a ten-shilling note from the window as we were wafted away. A scandalised porter shouted at us, but I waved my ticket and harbour permit, and as the wheels were now moving quite fast, he relinquished his conscientious endeavour to prevent this unorthodox method of boarding a boat-train. I gave one swift glance round to see that Winifred was safe, and then, climbing desperately over trunks and packing-cases and junctions of carriages, I began a frantic and none too confident search for G.
  I was half-way up the train and had almost abandoned hope, when I came upon him in the process, like myself, of exploring the corridor - very tall, very thin, a little dishevelled, and forgetful, in his urgent seeking, of the haughty air worn by young dons who deliberately go steerage. Quite suddenly he saw me and started eagerly forward, his hands outstretched and his face a radiance of recognition beneath his wide-brimmed hat. And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistake; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning. 
  The certificate showing Vera's success in the Oxford Senior exhibition, only weeks before the outbreak of war.
  Vera (front row, middle) with her father, Thomas Arthur Brittain, and her mother Edith (back row, first right), Derbyshire, circa 1911.