The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Philby also felt that in the field Greene met with little success: ‘The results of his work there were meagre, and he was kind enough not to overload the bag, too many overseas stations did so, creating a lot of useless work. As regards the enemy, Graham drew a blank, almost certainly because there was a blank.’62

  But Greene did not think his posting was insignificant. Since the Mediterranean was completely closed, all convoys military or otherwise had to go to Egypt and North Africa via the Atlantic and the West Coast. Freetown was important because it was the main port of call. Also, after de Gaulle had attacked Dakar unsuccessfully the Allies were militarily at war with Vichy France, and Sierra Leone was more than half bordered by French Guinea, now in Vichy hands:

  We had to be prepared at any time for a military assault. I had to have agents near the border on the look out for any possible movements by the French. This was why I was travelling a number of times in the interior to find agents and to check with them.63

  These trips up-country were a godsend to Greene: ‘I got up to the Protectorate for a week, and that saved my sanity, though I had to put in a 70 hour week afterwards to make up for it.’64

  In Ways of Escape, Greene wrote of one trip up-country. A little narrow-gauge line ran up to Pendembu, near the Liberian and French Guinea borders. Greene had made the journey seven years earlier when he was just turned thirty, on the long walk through Liberia which he described in Journey Without Maps. Nothing had changed. He took his boy with him, took also his own supply of tinned food, his own chair, his own bed, and even his own oil lamp to hang on a hook in the train compartment when darkness fell. The train stopped at Bo for the night, where there was a rest house, and then it travelled laboriously uphill to Pendembu. At Pendembu was a rest house also, but it was not well maintained, and Greene preferred to take his evening meal on the railway line with his camp table set up on the track.65

  Greene provides us in The Heart of the Matter with an intimate account of a journey into the interior, which is similar to many he made up-country. Scobie’s journey is precipitated by the suicide of a young district officer. He is driven up-country by his ‘boy’ Ali, whose character mirrored that of Greene’s own ‘boy’ – the boy in fiction and the boy in fact had the same name – who also drove him up-country:

  When Louise [Scobie’s wife] and Wilson crossed the river and came into Burnside [it was actually called Brookfield] it was quite dark. The headlamps of a police van lit an open door, the figures moved to and fro carrying packages. ‘What’s up now?’ Louise exclaimed, and began to run down the road. Wilson panted after her. Ali came from the house carrying on his head a tin bath, a folding chair, and a bundle tied up in an old towel. ‘What on earth’s happened, Ali?’

  ‘Massa go on trek,’ he said, and grinned happily in the headlamps.66

  The journey is precisely recalled, though Greene travelled up-country in his Morris car not in a police van: ‘The police van took its place in the long line of army lorries waiting for the ferry. Their headlamps were like a little village in the night. The trees came down on either side smelling of heat and rain.’ Scobie, no doubt like Greene on such occasions, falls asleep, as they wait in the long line of traffic. When he opens his eyes, Ali is standing close by waiting for him to awaken: ‘“Massa like bed,” he stated gently, firmly, pointing to the camp-bed he had made up at the edge of the path with the mosquito-net tied from the branches overhead. “Two three hours,” Ali said. “Plenty lorries.” Scobie obeyed and lay down.’67 An hour later Ali wakes him up with a cup of tea and plate of biscuits. They still have an hour to wait:

  Then at last it was the turn of the police van. They moved down the red laterite slope on to the raft, and then edged foot by foot across the dark styx-like stream towards the woods on the other side. The two ferrymen pulling on the rope wore nothing but girdles, as though they had left their clothes behind on the bank where life ended, and a third man beat time to them, making do for instrument in this between-world with an empty sardine-tin.68

  Greene recalled with authenticity and love those journeys:

  Ali squatting in the body of the van put an arm around his shoulder holding a mug of hot tea – somehow he had boiled another kettle in the lurching chassis … He could see in the driver’s mirror Ali nodding and beaming. It seemed to him that this was all he needed of love or friendship. He could be happy with no more in the world than this – the grinding van, the hot tea against his lips, the heavy damp weight of the forest, even the aching head, the loneliness.69

  Greene was always happy away from civilisation: too much comfort appalled him. The absence of domestic pleasures pleased him, and ‘Massa go on trek’ meant a return to an isolation which he loved.

  The same feeling of happiness and contentment came to him when he returned to his ‘creole villa’ after an up-country trip:

  It was past midnight when he drove into town. The houses were white as bones in the moonlight; the quiet streets stretched out on either side like the arms of a skeleton, and the faint sweet smell of flowers lay on the air … He was tired and he didn’t want to break the silence … The small boy waved his torch from the door: the frogs croaked from the bushes, and the pye dogs wailed at the moon. He was home.70

  * * *

  fn1 On Keats’s tombstone are the words: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’

  fn2 This phrase comes from Emile Augier’s play Le Mariage d’Olympe:

  Marquis:Put a duck on a lake in the midst of some swans and you’ll see he’ll miss his pond and eventually return to it.

  Montrichard:La nostalgie de la boue!

  11

  A Mad Cook, a Suicide and a Nest of Toads

  Sympathy is like rain on brown grass.

  – SARAH COLERIDGE

  IN HIS FREETOWN home, Greene had his share of domestic crises. Once he was aroused by the cries of his cook, who was chasing his first, unsatisfactory steward, a Mende, with a hatchet because the boy had borrowed the empty sardine tin in which the cook was accustomed to fry Greene’s morning egg. Later, both boy and cook were gaoled. The boy was sent to prison for perjury (‘an offence beyond his comprehension’),1 despite the fact that Greene had him defended by the best black lawyer in Freetown. His cook also finished up in gaol when he went completely off his head.

  One night, after a week’s long trek up-country, Greene returned to find his house deserted, and his cook (who was a very good cook) in prison under medical observation. It all began when a woman complained to the police that she had paid him money to make a ju-ju (magic) for her and the ju-ju hadn’t worked. The police superintendent refused to charge him, but Tamba, the cook, suddenly sat down on the floor of the police station and started ranting and wouldn’t move. When charged with obstruction, he began to orate from the dock, so they gaoled him.2 When Greene visited him, he couldn’t bear to see him in a grim cell. He contacted the Vichy District Commissioner across the border in French Guinea (not easy in wartime, especially since he had agents operating across the border), and had the cook returned to his native village: ‘where he would end his days well looked after, at liberty except for an iron ring round his ankle to show that he had been afflicted by God’.3

  To his mother he wrote: ‘I expect you heard of my domestic troubles: the cook who went insane and the steward who went to prison … I’ve settled down now … with a better boy and a tolerable cook – not the artist the other one was. The only thorn in the flesh is a completely useless small boy whom I picked up in the Protectorate and shall drop back there again when I go up the week after next.’4 In The Human Factor Greene explained (though putting his comments in the mouth of Hargreaves, head of MI5) how he chose his servants: ‘In Africa he had lived with intuition, he was accustomed to choose his boys by intuition – not by the tattered notebooks they carried with illegible references.’5

  The loyalty of Greene’s boy is reflected in the attention and faithfulness of Scobie’s boy. The SOE man in Freetown tried to b
ribe Greene’s boy to leave his employment. This might seem unusual, but each secret service (both British after all) meddled regularly in the affairs of the other. No doubt the SOE representative wished to know what Greene was up to. The SIS sometimes suffered casualties through the activities of the SOE.

  In his spare time, Greene was reading Byron with great enjoyment: ‘I’m in the middle of Don Juan (about the fourth time); I do think it’s one of the greatest things from every point of view, poetry, politics and sense, as well as wit, in the English language. I’d far rather Paradise Lost disappeared than Don Juan.’6 In late June he wrote to his mother about minor problems of health: ‘One always has a few little festering bits – in my case at the moment a boil on the arm and a shaving cut that won’t heal’; and colour changes to his hair at thirty-seven: ‘I am going greyer with startling rapidity!’ He told her he’d been reading ‘Motley and the Old Testament, both with huge pleasure’. But he rationed his favourite author, Anthony Trollope, to one a month, so that he’d have some Trollope left to read throughout his tour in Sierra Leone: ‘in a few days I shall have another rationed Trollope – The American Senator’.7

  Reading Trollope in Africa is introduced into The Human Factor (written thirty-seven years later), and the references recall Greene’s own experiences: ‘During his service in West Africa, he had grown to appreciate the novels of Trollope … At moments of irritation, he had found The Warden and Barchester Towers reassuring books; they reinforced the patience which Africa required. Mr. Slope would remind him of an importunate and self-righteous District Commissioner [Richard Cox]; and Mrs. Proudie of the Governor’s wife.’ And reading Trollope many years later in England with a whisky at his elbow, darkness falling early in November:

  he could even imagine himself in Africa, at some resthouse in the bush, on one of the long treks which he always enjoyed, far from headquarters. The cook would now be plucking a chicken behind the resthouse and the pye dogs would be gathering in the hope of scraps … The lights in the distance where the motorway ran might well have been the lights of the village where the girls would be picking the lice out of each other’s hair.8

  There are many random notes in his journal which look like preliminaries for a future novel, though never used:

  My boy’s brother’s dying. Of gonorrhoea. My boy too has had the g. ‘Cured now.’ ‘Injections?’ ‘No.’ He makes an expressive gesture with his hands. ‘Doctor throw it out.’ His stilted walk with buttocks projecting and the smell of drink. ‘You drink if you see your brother – own father, own mother – lying on bed, not seeing you. You drink to keep water out of eyes.’ He cannot yet tell his brother’s wife. If people know he’s dying they’ll all come in and steal his things. All night he’s going to have a party at his brother’s, drinking so that water doesn’t come out of his eyes, and quietly checking on his brother’s belongings and getting his small brother to write them down.9

  At 4.30 daily, Greene would have tea, ‘then take a solitary walk along an abandoned railway track once used by European officials, halfway up the slopes below Hill Station’.10 From that point, he had a wide view of Freetown’s huge bay and he could see the old liner Edinburgh Castle as it lay rotting on a reef (it was said) of empty gin bottles. This was the hour Greene loved best, when the sun began to set and the laterite paths turned the colour of a rose.

  Greene took his evening walk alone, but we can see how he transferred his sights and experiences to The Heart of the Matter. When Scobie is asked why he likes the place he answers simply, ‘It’s pretty in the evening.’ Later in the novel, when taking his wife Louise to the club on the hill, Scobie is again very much aware of the night:

  In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.11

  And Greene was right. In 1948, soon after the publication of The Heart of the Matter, a Mr Northcott of London – he had served in Sierra Leone at the same time as Greene – recalled ‘that fleeting few minutes during the brief twilight, when everything seemed to be suffused with a pink glow: It was an amazing sight, and I often wondered what caused it.’

  In The Heart of the Matter, Father Rank, a congenial gossip, takes the same walk along the railway track and, as he passes the abandoned station, unknowingly interrupts Wilson and Louise Scobie as they kiss:

  she pulled away and he heard the sad – to and fro – of Father Rank’s laugh coming up along the path. ‘Good evening, good evening,’ Father Rank called … ‘A storm’s coming up,’ … and his ‘ho, ho, ho’ diminished mournfully along the railway track, bringing no comfort to anyone.

  ‘He didn’t see who we were,’ Wilson said.

  ‘Of course he did. What does it matter?’

  ‘He’s the biggest gossip in the town.’

  ‘Only about things that matter,’ she said.12

  Earlier in the novel, Wilson is made aware of Father Rank’s gossiping nature, though the gossip is mild enough:

  ‘You were saying something about a rumour?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘My head is a hive of rumours,’ Father Rank said, making a humorous hopeless gesture. ‘If a man tells me anything I assume he wants me to pass it on. It’s a useful function, you know, at a time like this, when everything is an official secret, to remind people that their tongues were made to talk with and that the truth is meant to be spoken about.’13

  The Heart of the Matter is infused with Greene’s experiences and chance encounters. The nature of Father Rank reflects the nature of Father Mackie, a priest Greene admired and whose church he visited while in Freetown. Greene once recalled to me that Mackie was suspected of being a spy because he was overheard mentioning at dinner with the Colonial Secretary that the Queen Mary was in port. A man from the police (a type similar to Wilson in the novel) came to see Greene and asked him to warn Father Mackie not to speak so indiscreetly in front of the black boy. Greene pointed out the absurdity of this since everybody could see that the Queen Mary was in port – it came in regularly.14

  Greene returned to Freetown in 1967 and called again at the Catholic church:

  The Brookfield church was unchanged, where my friend Father Mackie used to preach in Creole: the same bad statue of St. Anthony over the altar, the same Virgin in the butterfly blue robe. At Midnight Mass I could have believed myself back in 1942 if in that year I had not missed the Mass. A fellow Catholic, the representative of the rival secret service, SOE, had come to dine with me tête-à-tête and we were soon too drunk on Portuguese wine to stagger to the church.15

  *

  The insufferable MI5 officer Wilson is based in part on Harwood, the old schoolboy contemporary of Greene’s at Berkhamsted School. But the portrait is partly autobiographical, as Greene’s journal shows, transferring the cockroach hunt with his colleague to Harris and Wilson in the novel. There is one further event which the fictional Wilson indulges in which is derived from Greene’s own experience.

  In the novel Wilson’s ‘melancholy lust’ rises when his eye catches a young girl naked to the waist passing by ‘gleaming through the rain’. Later he sees her again, the water trickling down between her shoulder blades and he decides to visit a brothel to slake his sexual thirst. His colleague Harris asks him what he will find to do in town at that hour. He answers brusquely: ‘Business’, and then admits silently to himself that ‘it was business of a kind, the kind of joyless business one did alone, without friends’.16

  What follows is a straightforward account of Greene’s own experience later incorporated into the novel. It also refers to the first and only car Greene ever owned. Driving along, Wilson stops every few hundred yards to wipe the windscreen with his handkerchief because the wiper blades don�
�t work. In Kru town the hut doors are open and families are sitting around the kerosene lamps. There is a dead pye dog lying in the gutter with the rain running over its white swollen belly. Because it is wartime, as in blitzed London, the headlamps of his car are blacked out to the size ‘of a visiting-card’. In ten minutes Wilson reaches the great cotton tree (a well-known landmark in Freetown, then and now) near the police station, Greene’s own ostensible office, and leaves his car outside the main entrance. Anyone seeing it would assume he was working inside. With his car door open he considers whether to return to Harris or go to the brothel close to the police station: ‘He thought sadly, as lust won the day, what a lot of trouble it was.’

  He had forgotten to bring his umbrella and he was wet through before he had walked a dozen yards down the hill. It was the passion of curiosity more than of lust that impelled him now … The brothel was a tin-roofed bungalow half-way down the hill on the right-hand side. In the dry season the girls sat outside in the gutter like sparrows … Now it turned a shuttered silent front to the muddy street, except where a door, propped open with a rock out of the roadway, opened on a passage …17

  Wilson looks quickly this way and that and then steps inside the brothel.