The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  – W. H. AUDEN

  GREENE’S JOURNAL FOR 16 April 1941 records the madhouse remembered by Londoners as ‘The Wednesday’. In a single night 2,000 civilians died and 100,000 homes were destroyed, as central London experienced its worst raid.

  In spite of the terrible loss of life and property, the Sunday Times’s headlines would not disturb its readers: ‘FIRE FIGHTERS PARRIED BIG RAIDS: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT DAMAGED AGAIN’. The report which followed – of the bodies of men, women and children (one, a dead child in a wrecked perambulator) uncovered from underneath the wreckage of four apartment houses in a working-class district – would have stiffened the resolve of Londoners. So often newspaper articles sought to find heroes and this time it was the Auxiliary Fire Service. That Wednesday 20,000 firemen prevented the blaze becoming a conflagration. The AFS men, who bore the full brunt of the fire-fighting and bombing, the newspaper reported, ‘had their tails up!’

  When the air-raid siren went on 16 April, Greene and Dorothy were having a drink in the Horseshoe.1 Leaving the pub, they went to Frascati’s and then to Victor’s, hoping to have dinner before the raid got under way, but both were closed. They ended up in Czardas, sitting apprehensively next to plate-glass windows. An hour into the raid, bursting bombs in Piccadilly shook the restaurant in Dean Street, and they left, walking back to the home they shared in Gower Mews. Dorothy was on duty fire-watching and Greene went with her to her post on the roof of a garage. Before they reached the garage, they saw flares from enemy planes drifting down ‘like great yellow peonies’.

  Greene watched the flares flattened up against the wall of Maple’s store. At first very little happened in the area he patrolled as air-raid warden. This was bounded in the south by New Oxford Street and in the north by Euston Road, Gordon Square on the east and Gower Street on the west. His station was No. i post under the School of Tropical Medicine in Gower Street. He had anticipated signing off by two-thirty in the morning, but the succession of flares made that seem impossible. A big raid was clearly in progress. Flares came down again right above them as he stood at the corner of Alfred Place and Tottenham Court Road. Further flares came down across Charlotte Street and suddenly there was a huge detonation. He and other wardens had only time to get down on their haunches before the shop window showered glass upon their helmets. Running down Alfred Place, they shouted at a dangerous uncovered light at the corner of Ridgmount Gardens. Then confusion descended. They found Gower Street ravaged on both sides.fn1 A parachute bomb had fallen on the Victoria Club in Malet Street where 350 Canadian soldiers were sleeping. Ordered to the club, Greene and Dorothy found soldiers coming out in grey, blood-smeared pyjamas, some barefoot, though the road was littered with glass.

  Greene and another warden took a stretcher and went in to find a man trapped on the stairs. The building on one side had disappeared and in front of them was a twenty-foot drop into the foundations. But the trapped man was a goner: only his head and shoulders were visible and a clot of blood by the head. When they decided to take the corpse out of the building, trained stretcher-bearers arrived and Greene lighted their way down the stairs. They all feared the building would collapse since it was held together solely, it seemed to Greene, by wishful thinking.

  Earlier, hearing from women wearing dressing-gowns and bleeding from cuts on the face that someone was hurt on the top floor above RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), two other wardens, a policeman and Greene, ran up four littered flights. They found a girl, very heavy, on the floor, bleeding and with stained pyjamas. There was room for only one man to lift her at a time. Greene took her down two flights, but the burden had to change hands three times. The girl was in pain but apologised for being heavy.

  Outside there were flames everywhere. Another stick of three bombs whistled down and Greene lay on the pavement, a sailor falling on top of him. Broken glass cut his hand and he bled a great deal so he had to go back to No. i post to have it dressed. As it was being dressed, another stick of three came down. Again Greene and his companions dropped, this time to the floor of the post. The windows blew in and Greene felt that this was the end and ceased to believe in the possibility of surviving the night. He began an Act of Contrition. When interviewed he admitted he was afraid of being wounded, but not of being killed: ‘In the blitz, one was very frightened to begin with but then one gave up the idea that one was going to survive and one wasn’t frightened any more.’2 With Greene it was a great deal more complex than this.

  As no further bombs fell, he went out again into the night with his companions. This time they found Dallas, the big factory in Ridgmount Gardens, ablaze. Behind every window and on every floor a wall of flame was blowing up. The bombing had only gone on for an hour. Greene felt the appalling thing about these nightly raids was that they never seemed to end.

  In spite of the severity of the raid, in all that terrible night, Greene met only one person who lost his nerve. He was ‘a large fat foreigner’. He had one foot crushed and was crying to be taken to the hospital. The wardens crossed hands to carry him, but he was so heavy that they had to rest in spite of his cries. It was now three o’clock in the morning, but because of the continuous flares it seemed like broad daylight. At one point the Chief Warden told the ‘fat foreigner’ that there were others more injured than him and he would have to be left. However, his mixture of moaning and crying was such that, with the help of a soldier, they got him to the Ministry of Information, which was being used that night as a temporary dressing station.

  After three minutes’ rest, Greene was sent to the fire station to warn them of the all-encompassing fire at Dallas’s, though they were unable to come for three hours. Going down the iron steps into the well round the building, he heard another bomb coming down. He crouched down once more and heard it fall away. He was then involved in rescuing an old man in a basement in Gower Street, the back wall of whose house had been blown out. The old man was just out of hospital with a tube in his bladder and had been told he would never walk again. He did so that night and was happy. Greene finally had time to call at the shelter in Gower Mews, where Dorothy Glover, along with her fire-watching duties, was shelter warden. She was delighted to see him, having heard rumours that he had been wounded and was covered in blood.

  The raid died away about five in the morning. One survivor remembered that ‘the Strand looked amazed and broken in the morning light. Buildings we had known for twenty years were no more than cracked walls … Little tongues of flame still licked the edge of great advertisements … Even the trees were wounded.’3 Later it was discovered that a parachute bomb had landed at the end of Bloomsbury Street and a high explosive bomb had hit the Jewish Girls’ Club in Alfred Place: the club, changed into a black hole belching fumes, was choked with smashed brickwork and mutilated corpses. More than thirty had been killed and rescuers were taking out the bodies for a long time. For days there was the sweet stench of corruption from the bodies in the rubble.

  Two days later Greene wrote to his mother about the Wednesday raid:

  It really was the worst thing yet. On my beat which only consisted of about three quarters of a mile of streets, we had one huge fire, one smaller fire, one H[igh] E[xplosive] and, worst of all, a land mine. The casualties were very heavy, as the landmine which got the Canadian soldiers’ home by the M. of I. blasted houses right through Gower St. The fires are not quite out yet. I got off with a cut hand from having to flop down flat on the pavement outside the landmine place. One thought the night was never going to end. Hardly three minutes would pass between two and four without a salvo being dropped. I feel very stiff and bruised … One’s first corpse in the Canadian place was not nearly as bad as one expected. It seemed just a bit of the rubble. What remains as nastiest were the crowds of people who were cut by glass, in rather squalid bloodstained pyjamas, grey with debris, waiting about for help. I was very lucky when the mine went off as I was standing with two other wardens in Tottenham Court Rd. We got down on our haunches, no time
for more, and a shopwindow showered on top of us without cutting any of us. One felt rather pursued. I was having my hand bound up at my post under the School of Tropical Medicine in Gower St. when a stick [of bombs] came down again, and we were all over the floor again with the windows blown in … I shall be glad to get away for three nights. The whole place still smells horribly of burning.4

  The sights of that night supplied the images for what one day, Greene felt assured, would happen to him. His mother was greatly relieved to get his letter, and a message from her younger daughter (she was sleeping outside London that night), for she feared neither might have survived. ‘It seemed to me,’ his mother wrote, ‘it must have been everywhere … I thought it was worse [than the worst raid]. Paper has just come and we see how awful it was. St. Paul’s at last. Will it ever end.’5 But even at Crowborough they had a bad raid:

  Never heard such planes, the noise went on steadily. Guns shook the house so much that at 10 we went down to the shelter. Then a bomb dropped … We stayed down till i when there was a lull and luckily Da went to sleep but Aunt Nono and I not till after 3. A big crash was one of our planes which came down at Redbridge Farm. Love from your loving mother.6

  The incidents were manifold. Greene recalled after a raid police dogs searching the ruins for the living and the dead and recalled also a body in Tottenham Court Road which three fire engines drove over. He remembered a body was laid bleeding on a door in the road to escape glass. Warden Charlie Wix took a fur coat from a broken shop window and put it over the man. When Wix returned some time later, he discovered the body had been removed to the pavement and a thief was going through the man’s pockets. In The Confidential Agent, Greene’s knowledge of death is gathered particularly from his wartime experiences:

  She lay there stiff, clean and unnatural. People talked as if death were like sleep: it was like nothing but itself. He was reminded of a bird discovered at the bottom of a cage on its back, with the claws rigid as grape stalks; nothing could look more dead. He had seen people dead after an air raid, but they fell in curious humped positions – a lot of embryos in the womb.7

  Inevitably, after the raids Dorothy and Greene needed emotional release. David Low recalled that one of the biggest bombs fell and hit the corner of Bloomsbury Street, and a great furniture shop took a direct hit:

  Coming from my shop in Cecil Court, I saw Graham and Dorothy walking up Bloomsbury Street. As a result of the bomb, there were papers flying everywhere, office correspondence and papers about this and that. Graham and Dorothy were picking up the papers whatever they were and reading them to each other in the street and roaring with laughter.8

  *

  Greene was very happy with Dorothy as a comrade in arms, another soldier under fire. Vivien, writing on the sixteenth anniversary of their first meeting in Oxford, expressed her deep loneliness and her strong desire to join her husband: ‘Dear heart, I do miss you especially much when I think of our anniversaries & the breakup of all the warm basket [home] … snails without snailshells especially miss their stable companions. I so miss our conversations, walking, or in our chairs in our own house.’ They had been parted a year and a half and she felt ‘quite dwindled away from being a wife and am only an inefficient nursery governess’.9

  She signed herself ‘Pusska’, a cat name for ‘wife’. Three days earlier, she had asked Graham if she could come to London to be with him during the blitz, but he must have successfully dissuaded her:

  Darling Love, So disappointed, as I feel I ought to have heard one raid & barrage, but certainly I would not like to be without you [he would need to be out during raids as a warden]. In a hotel cellar we could be quite cosy, but I should be dreadfully worried knowing you were in it: I am now, but it would be worse hearing it, silly as it sounds.10

  In an undated letter she had spoken of raids in the area of Oxford: ‘A stick of bombs was dropped, no damage – on Weds, just before II. about three miles off, a stunning event for country mice.’ Vivien might have faced the blitz with courage but she was never tested. Her rival Dorothy was spunky and courageous during the blitz, and Greene loved her for it – a truly independent creature, able to stand up to the worst raids, and never panicking under the conditions of war. Dorothy was with Greene from the beginning: ‘From the first raid, she was courageous, oh yes, and showed no fear of any kind.’11

  Vivien, in contrast, though a woman of remarkable fortitude, showed by her manner a need for dependence. She desired to be a Victorian wife, accepting whatever the strong male determined, though perhaps part of her reacted in this way because she thought it was a means of retaining her husband’s love. It was not.

  She continued pressing to come to London, though in her own modest way: ‘I may possibly have Fri. in London independently for snuffling round & prob. ring you up to hear your voice & any news but don’t stay around purposely.’12 She also offered to visit him on their anniversary, but because of the unusually severe and persistent raids, the meeting did not come off. One senses that she was making a last-ditch attempt to join her husband whatever the danger in London – after all, if Dorothy could face the hazards of war, Vivien must have wanted to, though she had a prior responsibility to care for her young children. Her brother Pat turned up – he was going to Staff College – and suddenly on 4 April 1941 she sprang her surprise in a daringly direct letter:

  Do you ever really miss me or am I the termly tea out with relations: faint thoughts of keeping house for Pat if he went to Staff College … I think I would be quite useful there! If you give a baffled Woof & come lolloping up bristling I’d have to reconsider it, but make up that big brilliant mind of yours because you’ll turn round & see what you THOUGHT was Pussy purring on the mat was really just the white enamel refrigerator turning on & off – if you know the difference.13

  Sometimes Greene visited his family in Oxford: ‘He’d come down for a day, and a day was enough, once a month. I don’t think he ever felt, “Oh, if only I could be with the children,” or anything like that. He didn’t really care for them until they were grown up. I never got the impression that he took any notice of them, you know.’14 His children thought otherwise. Francis Greene recalled that, on these visits, Greene spent a great deal of time with them. He would take them on long walks through the back streets of Oxford, playing a game which they called ‘Left, right or straight on’.15

  Vivien told me that she believed that she had married a tiger (in later years she became a member of the Protection of Tigers League): ‘I must have realised, quite unconsciously, his undomesticated nature, realised that he was the wildest of creatures and the least domesticated.’16 But Greene’s visits were also made under difficult circumstances, not of his making. Stella Weaver never had him to stay in Trinity and he used to stop at the King’s Arms: ‘I’ll try to get rooms for you for 18–20th (i.e. nights of 18th & 19th). Come anyway as I may not have time to write again.’17

  Two weeks later, his four-year-old son had a fever and Vivien was up hourly through the night tending her child: ‘At 4 he was quite normal-looking & said, “Hullo, my blessing,” when I came in, the angel.’ While he was preparing to visit his son, Vivien wrote to Greene insisting that he ‘MUST bring some sugar & if possible a few rashers!’18 because of the difficulty of food rationing.

  There was another reason, apart from the blitz, for Greene’s irregular visits. Dorothy didn’t like him to go often: ‘I don’t know why he was interested in Dorothy, attracted to an older woman,’ Vivien said.

  He talked about her, yes. I think he enjoyed this. He told me that when I darned his socks, and he took them back, she would cut out the darn – probably because my darns were so bad, but he said she did it in a rage. Nevertheless, I never felt anything against her. For a long time I felt on a precipice. He once said to me that I was suspicious and I answered that, ‘I’m not suspicious, I’m apprehensive.’ That seemed to come like a flash before I could bite it back and he said nothing, but I think he felt the truth of that.19r />
  But Vivien felt then that if she didn’t take any notice of the affair, it would blow over and after the war everything would be different.

  You see, you can’t think of it now, but then one thought – other people’s houses, everyone disturbed, children changing school. After the war things would settle down and it would all be part of the past and so forth. But of course things got worse, much more alarming and frightening – but no, I never said a word … not one word. I suppose, in a physical sense the marriage ended just before war was declared.20

  *

  Greene once described his house at 14 North Side, Clapham Common as ‘the most beautifully decorated house I’ve ever been in’ and Herbert Read’s wife described it to me as ‘a most enchanting house – like a Mozart opera – with the double step’: but it did not survive the blitz unharmed. Greene wrote to his mother the day after his house received a direct hit:

  Alas! our house went at 1.30 a.m. on Friday. I arrived to collect some objects at 8.30 to find a scene of devastation. There has been no fire & no flood & the structure is still standing, so something may be salvaged when the demolition people have made it safe to enter. Either a landmine at the back or else a whole load of bombs. The secret workshop in the garden next door destroyed, part of the L.C.C. flats & damage all along the row, but the back of our house got the worse blast. Impossible to get beyond the hill for wreckage. I only hope some of my books & some of V’s things will be saved. But there was still an unexploded bomb nearby to go off, & the whole place is likely to tumble at much more shock. Rather heartbreaking that so lovely a house that has survived so much should go like that. And I feel one-armed without my books. No hope of salvage starting before Monday. However there were no casualties.21

  Malcolm Muggeridge records in his diary how, finding his house seriously damaged and roped off, Greene had gone down to Oxford to break the news: ‘When he told Vivien, he said, she rebuked him for mentioning what had happened in front of the children, which seemed to him unreasonable.’22