The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Despite the boom of AA guns and the drumming of machine-gun fire London remained calm, and thousands at football matches and greyhound races treated the desperate fight being waged in the air as a spectacle: ‘That was a near shave’ was the comment of one man among several hundreds at the greyhound track where 3 bombs fell, one outside the ground, one behind the stand and one right on the track. Four thousand people at a football match had a grandstand view of one air battle. They forgot the risk of falling shrapnel and cheered when one plane fell in flames.4

  The newspapers wrote very circumspectly, but the Germans had succeeded in devastating working-class homes in Stepney. British newspapers stressed the wonderful spirit of the British at war, but some little touches of the real situation leaked out. Of course, the British working class were genuinely defiant, the defiance of bombed-out people, and improvised signs revealed their spirit: ‘Bombed but not Beat’, ‘Hitler may get us up, but he’ll never get us down.’ A woman told how she had been married only two days when their house went up in smoke: ‘Now all I’ve got left is my wedding ring and my cat, and even my cat’s turned grey.’5

  There was a temporary collapse of authority due to the flight of bombed-out people living close to the docks. The Picture Post was almost alone in its willingness to give some indication of how badly the East End was hit: ‘The search for household possessions, the pulling out broken fragments of household treasures. Some leave the East End loading their belongings and leave for the woods – anywhere to get an undisturbed night’s rest and some trek aimlessly away.’ One woman remembered, ‘It was one steady stream. We got to the hopfields and there’s this wonderful sense of peace.’6 Sometimes, the true state of affairs reached print in minor newspapers like A Kentish Independent. The newspaper, speaking of those whose houses had collapsed around them, referred to the state of mind of those bombed: ‘The shock of their experience seemed to have numbed their minds and reduced them to despair.’

  But Londoners survived seventy-six consecutive devastating raids (apart from one clouded evening). Everything, and everybody, was in the ‘front line’: ‘The present ordeal’, the Observer declared, ‘welds London and her people in a unity of feeling like no experience in their history.’7 When the blitz was only thirteen days old, the Spectator admitted that ‘London is deeply scarred. Bombs, explosive and incendiary, cannot be rained on the city day and night without leaving their tragic mark. Blackened or crumbling walls greet the eye in London streets where great business houses or humble dwellings lately stood.’

  The devastation was caught in a film entitled London Can Take It. In it was heard the rich voice of Quentin Reynolds:

  Now it is eight o’clock Jerry’s a little bit late tonight. The guns are ready … Here they come. The heavy broken drone of German engines closer and louder. The guns begin to cough. Now the searchlights are poking long white inquisitive fingers into the blackness of the night. This is the music they play every night in London – the symphony of war.8

  It was through such films, and the American radio programme London After Dark, that great numbers of Americans hearing the recorded sounds of war were deeply moved. Ed Murrow of CBS, suddenly in love with the sheer courage of the British under fire, stood suicidally on rooftops during raids, joined his neighbours in fire-watching duty, and left the studio for the front line of London burning: ‘This … is London. This is Trafalgar Square. The noise you hear at this moment …’ This was the world Greene knew intimately: an empty London with sudden bursts of noise, incessant bombing, an umbrella shop burning at the corner of Oxford Street.

  On seeing his first bombed house, ‘one in Woburn Square neatly sliced in half’, Greene recalled his sense of shock:

  With its sideways exposure it looked like a Swiss chalet: there were a pair of skiing sticks hanging in the attic, and in another room a grand piano cocked one leg over the abyss … In the bathroom the geyser looked odd and twisted seen from the wrong side, and the kitchen impossibly crowded with furniture until one realized one had been given a kind of mouse-eye view from behind the stove and the dresser …9

  In The Ministry of Fear, Greene drew on his experience of what a direct hit was like:

  and then the bomb went off.

  They hadn’t heard the plane this time; destruction had come drifting quietly down on green silk cords: the walls suddenly caved in. They were not even aware of noise.

  Blast is an odd thing; it is just as likely to have the effect of an embarrassing dream as of man’s serious vengeance on man, landing you naked in the street or exposing you in your bed or on your lavatory seat to the neighbours’ gaze. Rowe’s head was singing; he felt as though he had been walking in his sleep; he was lying in a strange position, in a strange place. He got up and saw an enormous quantity of saucepans all over the floor: something like the twisted engine of an old car turned out to be a refrigerator …10

  Greene’s hero Rowe looks up and sees Charles’s Wain (the group of seven bright stars in the Great Bear), below him a water-colour intact at his feet, and he feels as if he were in a strange country, without maps to help him, trying to find his position by the stars.

  Three flares came sailing slowly, beautifully, down, clusters of spangles off a Christmas tree: his shadow shot out in front of him and he felt exposed, like a gaolbreaker caught in a searchlight beam … They were machine-gunning the flares: two broke with a sound like cracking plates and the third came to earth in Russell Square; the darkness returned coldly and comfortingly.

  But in the light of the flares Rowe had seen several things; he had discovered where he was – in the basement kitchen: the chair above his head was in his own room on the first floor, the front wall had gone and all the roof, and the cripple lay beside the chair, one arm swinging loosely down at him. A warden called from the street, ‘Is anyone hurt in there?’ and Rowe said aloud in a sudden return of his rage, ‘It’s beyond a joke: it’s beyond a joke.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ the warden called down to him from the shattered street as yet another raider came up from the south-east muttering to them both like a witch in a child’s dream, ‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’11

  Greene remembered another incident of seeing ‘a man laughing outside his house where his wife and children were buried’.

  Night after night, people invaded the tube stations seeking shelter from the raids above. The nightly exodus was recounted by Tom Hopkinson, one-time editor of Picture Post:

  The platform lights are dim, and what they reveal looks like the result of some terrible catastrophe – a battlefield, or a city stricken by the plague. A path barely a yard wide allows passengers to leave the train, but all the rest of the platform is a mass of bodies. Sleepers of both sexes and all ages lie or sprawl around on coverlets or rugs. Most appear to be awake, not talking but gazing mutely up at the curved ceiling. The men are mainly in shirt-sleeves, having folded their coats for pillows, but most of the women are fully-dressed. Two or three in a group are pouring tea out of a Thermos flask … The children are mostly asleep, with arms flung out … in the dismal light even their fresh faces appear grey and hollow.

  The heat was terrific and the smell appalling, the smell coming partly from the sheer crowd of bodies in so confined a space, but mainly from the lavatory buckets, one for men and one for women, hidden from view by two hessian screens.

  Like the Morlocks, the people of London lived out their nights underground. Greene’s hero, Rowe, on the run finds himself an air-raid shelter: ‘somebody had tied a red silk scarf over the bare globe to shield it. All along the walls the bodies lay two deep, while outside the raid rumbled and receded. An old man snored across the aisle and at the end of the shelter two lovers lay on a mattress with their hands and knees touching.’12

  In an undated letter to his mother, Greene speaks of the massive raids and nights spent in a shelter: ‘I can’t get back to Clapham [14 North Side], and spend the night with friends [Dorothy, who was a shelter warden] in
a public shelter off Gower St.’ In that shelter there were always the same two dozen inhabitants. ‘Occasionally one gets shaken as when the landmine went off in Tottenham Court Road – the night they got University College and St. Pancras and Oetzmann’s. I’ve never seen such fires. Montagu Square has lost a tooth, and most of those lovely Marble Arch squares.’13 It is this public shelter that Greene (using the pseudonym Henry Trench) describes in an article, ‘The Strays’.14

  After a month of aerial war, the group had coalesced like a platoon. Indeed, it was this solidarity rather than the ‘bunks and free earplugs’ that made life underground bearable: ‘A routine grows naturally like a plant; in the first week tea was always made after a particularly close explosion; later the close explosions didn’t matter so much, so we had tea and biscuits at 9 (everyone paid a penny and took it in turns to supply tea and sugar); lights were shaded at 10, and snorers ceased to rouse angry feelings – toleration developed.’15

  Sometimes chance-comers were made welcome: an old philosopher with a white beard spent the night, ‘he had a little birdlime on his hat … and handed round picture postcards of himself with sparrows nibbling the food from his lips’; a drunk, scandalised at the sight of husbands and wives sharing mattresses: ‘If I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed. Disgusting, it’s disgusting.’ Between the thuds of the barrage a young man explained to a girl the secret of contentment and a Czech told fortunes in a teacup. ‘“A bomb will fall,” he said, and everyone laughed.’

  But this small, tightly knit group themselves became strays: ‘There was no warning whistle when the bombs exploded; they tore the air like calico. The fourth bomb wiped away the house next door. There wasn’t time to be afraid; only the silence afterwards was a little shocking, and the smell of hot metal’, before they found refuge in another shelter.

  It was in this shelter that there had been complaints about the ‘goings on’. An official came down and asked Chief Warden Jacobs to accompany him on a tour of the shelters. ‘Just look at that pair,’ said the official in disgust at a couple entirely engrossed in embracing. ‘But,’ responded the Chief Warden, ‘that is Mr. Greene, one of our best wardens, and his nice wife.’ Mr Greene’s ‘nice wife’ was Dorothy.16

  One of Greene’s great enjoyments after a raid was coming above ground when the all clear went at 5.45 and seeing the latest damage and the early morning sky:17 ‘Along the … roads men and women [were] emerging from underground; neat elderly men carrying attaché-cases and rolled umbrellas appeared from public shelters.’18 London had changed. It had become a ‘strange torn landscape where … shops were reduced to a stone ground-plan like those of Pompeii …’19 In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass and the buildings smoked into the new day.20 There were ‘the tank-traps by the roadside, fields bristling with stakes, blacked-out place names – and the first bombed houses, the shelter signs, the diversions, the paper labels, each bearing the new address of a bank or a shop, dangling from a rope which bars off a devastated street, the first black-out – the dramatic change from the day-world to the night-world, peace or war separated by a short twilight.’21 Walking through the streets meant avoiding piles of rubble. Greene would see craters in the street, obscure tangles of wires and cables normally hidden from view. ‘Wet hoses would still be spread around like giant spaghetti,’22 buses overturned, gas mains broken, burst sandbags littering the streets, houses now only heaps of brick and stone.

  The air war was made more terrible by its domestic familiarity: ‘It happens in the kitchen, on landings, beside washing baskets; it comes to us without us stirring a yard from our own doorsteps to meet it.’23 It was a London known since August, people emerging from a bombed block ‘covered with that peculiar cement-like dust that seems to be the accompaniment of all bomb debris’, people sleeping in the crypt of St Martin’s, the Thames inky black as it ran by the burning buildings; the patience of the poor and the maddening inertia of the Civil Service; the sense of freedom from anxiety among those who had lost their homes; the growth of a routine so that very soon the nightly raid was just an uncomfortable part of life like Monday morning.24

  Greene and Muggeridge found something curiously compelling about the nightly blitz. It was the great fires in the City and Fleet Street, a great illumination, a mighty holocaust, the end of everything, that led Muggeridge to feel a joy and exaltation at the ‘sight and sound and taste and smell of all this destruction’.25

  Greene appeared to relish destruction and death: indeed, he seemed to believe that the world deserved it. He was at home in the London blitz (as the article entitled ‘At Home’ stresses), and to him it was not odd to wake up on a cement floor among strangers in an air-raid shelter. The collapse of a whole way of life was, for Greene, inevitable: ‘Violence comes to us more easily because it was so long expected – not only by the political sense but by the moral sense. The world we live in could not have ended any other way.’26

  So Greene felt at home in the nightly air-raid shelter: ‘some beast in [us] has prepared each man for this life’:

  That … is why one feels at home in London … or any of the bombed cities – because life there is what it ought to be. If a cracked cup is put in boiling water it breaks, and an old dog-toothed civilization is breaking now. The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine, the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm. We are not quite happy when we take a few days off. There is something just a little unsavoury about a safe area – as if a corpse were to keep alive in some of its members, the fingers fumbling or the tongue seeking to taste. So we go hurrying back to our shelter, to the nightly uneasiness and then the ‘All Clear’ sounding happily like New Year’s bells and the first dawn look at the world to see what has gone: green glass strewn on the pavement … and sometimes flames … lapping at the early sky.27

  As for the victims, ‘if they have suffered pain it will be nearly over by this time. Life has become just and poetic, and if we believe this is the right end to the muddled thought, the sentimentality and selfishness of generations, we can also believe that justice doesn’t end there. The innocent will be given their peace, and the unhappy will know more happiness than they have ever dreamt about, and poor muddled people will be given an answer they have to accept.’28 In his journal Muggeridge described Greene at the time of the blitz: ‘a sinner manqué. In the Blitz we used to spend a good many evenings together, and I remember the longing he had for a bomb to fall on him …’29

  There is a tremendous feeling that these were Greene’s best years. The world for him was ‘all much of a piece engaged everywhere in the same subterranean struggle … there is no peace anywhere where there is life; but there are quiet and active sectors of the line’. He was now living in the active sector, was excited at such an existence and happily engaged in a life seen as a continuous battlefield.

  In a letter written to Anthony Powell in December 1940, he seemed on a high, in manic phase, as he summed up his ‘chequered and rather disreputable life’. His stint with the Ministry of Information is described as ‘an absurd hilarious time I shouldn’t have had the vitality to break’. Here is the happy Londoner during the blitz:

  Luckily Pick axed me at the end of September, and I am now literary editing this rag [the Spectator] … which isn’t quite as I pictured war. However London is extraordinarily pleasant these days with all the new open spaces, and the rather Mexican effect of ruined churches … All my family are parked in Trinity: and I sleep on a sofa in Gower Mews. As I’m under a skylight I go into a basement when the barrage is heavy. A direct hit next door and escaping gas and a midnight flight has been the most exciting evening yet. I find it impossible to write anything except reviews and middles, but there’s nothing to spend money on and I find one can live admirably on about 500 … which I suppose is a fortune to a soldier.30

  And in the shelter, dreaming of his life before the war and of his dead mother, Rowe ref
lects Greene’s own sense of the difference between the peace he and his mother knew in Berkhamsted and the blitz in London:

  ‘This isn’t real life any more,’ he said. ‘Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on … but it’s not there any more.’ His mother smiled at him in a scared way but let him talk … ‘I’m hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me. You remember St Clement’s – the bells of St Clement’s. They’ve smashed that – St James’s, Piccadilly, the Burlington Arcade, Garland’s Hotel, where we stayed for the pantomime, Maple’s and John Lewis. It sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read – about spies, and murders, and violence … but dear, that’s real life: it’s what we’ve all made of the world’ … he put his mouth to the steel frame of his bunk and kissed the white cold cheek. ‘My dear, my dear, my dear. I’m glad you are dead. Only do you know about it? do you know?’ He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.

  ‘Why, it’s a madhouse,’ his mother cried. ‘Oh, it’s much quieter there,’ he said …31

  5

  The Destructors

  And the crack in the tea-cup opens

  A lane to the land of the dead.