The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Poverty and unemployment in Great Britain were increasing the number of emigrants to Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and a third-class passage to Canada cost £2 7s., a not inconsiderable sum for the ordinary working man in those days. A case of child neglect reported in The Times on the day before Greene’s birth reflects the condition of the poor. The unmarried parents were known drunks whose numerous children were forced to live not in the house but on the outside staircase, scantily clad, and fed by neighbours. On the same day an outbreak of smallpox was reported in Dewsbury.

  For the better off, servants were still available and their advertisements in The Times for positions suggest a high standard of service: a butler stressed that he was thoroughly sober, honest and obliging – and a good carver; a valet, seeking a post as attendant to a bachelor or invalid gentleman, stated that he was a certified masseur and in character an abstainer, a non-smoker and a good traveller. There was no butler or valet in Charles Greene’s home, though there were many servants. At the Hall in Berkhamsted, the home of Graham Greene’s uncle Edward, there were twenty-three servants and a chauffeur.

  *

  Writing of his childhood, Greene claimed that we are all ‘emigrants from a country we remember too little of’; though it haunts us and we try to reconstruct it, all that is most important escapes us – ‘we can’t remember how happiness felt or the quality of the misery; we watch our children’s eyes for hints: knowledge has altered the taste of every emotion.’ And yet, in his fiction and non-fiction, in forgotten poems, journals and letters, Greene has constantly returned to and remembered his childhood – the good occasions and the bad, the feelings of happiness and misery, the taste of every emotion, memories of blood and death and childish terrors – some which were painful for him but were not much more extraordinary than those experienced by many children, except perhaps that his response was more sensitive, his memory more enduring. Certainly he remembered a great deal of that ‘country of childhood’.

  *

  At Berkhamsted School, St John’s was a boarders’ house, opened by Dr Fry in 1890 – rather different from an ordinary home. Yet, although both his parents were involved in school life, the ethos and pressures of St John’s, or for that matter of the school itself, do not seem to have impinged on his early consciousness; but of course he was not quite six years old when the family left St John’s. His earliest memory, if he has it right, dates from his second week of life, perhaps an understandable exaggeration given the circumstances in which he wrote about it, but obviously a very early and possible memory. In 1926, when he was desperately in love with Vivienne Dayrell-Browningfn2, he wrote to her:

  And in a way perhaps I’ve always loved you, since I was born … because, darling, you are beauty, through and through … and so when I was a fortnight old, and loved the glint of a watch dangling in someone’s hand, I really loved you, only I didn’t know it. And I can never stop loving you, therefore.7

  Otherwise, all that he claims to remember about his physical surroundings were the ‘chintzy drawing-room’ where his mother read stories to her children, the nursery where he took his early steps and awkward falls and concentrated silently upon the fire half-hidden behind the fire-guard, noticing how the shadows cast by the flames advanced and receded, and the extra piece of garden they had across the road, with its summer-house and bushes which blocked the view of his home – his ‘first experience of a foreign land’. To his child’s imagination, his home was ‘England’, the garden ‘France’ and to cross over from one to the other was an adventure, involving danger and secrecy but also affording the safety of a hiding place and of knowing that home was not far away. Certainly the mould was being formed.

  What he then had no knowledge of was the boarding area of the house where there were ‘such grim rooms’ – the schoolroom, the dormitories, the changing-rooms, the lavatories without locks on the doors – a much more unpleasant ‘foreign’ land (planned by Dr Fry) which was to lie in wait for him for thirteen years. His discovery of that shut-off area in what had once been his home was, as he said, ‘climacteric’, but it is probably true to say that from the age of seven he was increasingly ‘menaced by the approach of school and a new kind of life’.

  His infancy went according to nature’s – and man’s – plan. For four months he was fed at his mother’s breast and weighed 11 lbs when he was one month old. He was dressed in his first short clothes on 15 January 1905 when he was three months old and four days afterwards this future nomad took his first modest ride in a cart drawn by the family donkey, Miranda, to the post office to collect the mail. He cut his first tooth on 6 July 1905.8

  A photograph taken when he was four shows that he had fair curls falling round his neck and, following the fashion of the time, wore a pinafore which gave him ‘the ambiguity of undetermined sex’.9 At that period his adenoids and tonsils were removed, the operation being carried out at home and leaving him with the memory of a tin chamber pot full of blood. The sight of blood was to disturb him into manhood and he sometimes fainted at the mere description of an accident. These incidents of nausea were only conquered during the London blitz some thirty years later.

  The first words he uttered appear to have been inspired by a tragic event, the death of his sister Molly’s pug: ‘It had been run over – by a horse carriage? – and killed’,10 and had apparently been thrown into his baby-carriage by the nurse who ‘thought it convenient to bring the cadaver home this way’. In his autobiography Greene makes no comment on the shock of such an incident, and indeed, earlier, in his travel book, Journey Without Maps (1936), he wrote: ‘There was no emotion attached to the sight [of the dead dog]. It was just a fact. At that period in life one has an admirable objectivity.’11 There may be some truth in this, but a few months afterwards, when he first spoke, to his mother’s surprise he said, ‘Poor dog’, which suggests an imaginative sympathy with the creature which was both pathetic and impotent. One wonders why he needed to deny the emotions which this event must have aroused, a denial strengthened by his controlled unemotive language: ‘no emotion’, ‘just a fact’, ‘admirable objectivity’ – like splinters of ice. We cannot date this incident exactly, but assuming he was somewhere between eight and ten months at the time, he must have been distinctly aware of the sudden oppression of having a dead dog tossed into the restricted space of his baby carriage – and a pug normally weighs little less than a child. However young he was he must have had an instinctive awareness of death from the carcass, the smell, perhaps blood, perhaps the mouth pulled back over the teeth in the snarl of death. Wouldn’t there be a growing sense of panic, even nausea on finding himself shut in, irrevocably committed to sharing the limited confines of a pram with a dead dog? It may well be that the impact of this experience was reflected thirty-eight years later in his novel, The Confidential Agent, in a passage describing the hero’s horror in recalling the death, not of a dog, but of a cat: ‘He felt sick and shaken; he remembered the dead tom-cat close to his face: he couldn’t move: he just lay there with the fur almost in his mouth.’12 Knowledge of death came early to Graham Greene.

  There was a second confrontation with death when he was six and he was to return to this event on no less than five occasions in his writings. Each time something is added to the incident. The first account is brief: ‘Another fact was the man who rushed out of a cottage near the canal bridge and into the next house; he had a knife in his hand; people ran after him shouting; he wanted to kill himself.’13 This was followed by a rather more developed version in the unpublished manuscript, ‘Fanatic Arabia’ (the title derived from Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta) in which Heinz, the hero, recalls seeing a man ‘run into one of the little shabby almshouses, blackened with railway soot, with a knife: he wanted to cut his throat but a crowd of people followed him and wouldn’t let him.’14 The third version appears in ‘The Innocent’ (1937), when the neighbours pursue the man up the stairs but the suicide is left unconfirmed.

 
; Three years later, in the Prologue to The Lawless Roads, a new factor has entered (one which could not have been known to a child of six). The man’s desire to end his life stems from his loss of a sense of God: ‘He was going to cut his throat with a knife if he could get away from his neighbours, “having no hope, and without God in the world.”’15 These last words were in one of Greene’s favourite books, Apologia Pro Vita Sua by Cardinal Newman.

  The final version, and perhaps the one closest to the truth, comes over thirty years later in A Sort of Life, a vivid cameo sketch, the almshouses in Berkhamsted leaning against each other near the Grand Junction Canal, the crowd outside one of the houses, a man breaking away and running into another house – though in this version the crowd does not follow him. Instead everyone stands outside in anticipation of the bloody event. Among the crowd was the child Graham Greene (his age reduced to five) with his nurse.

  However vivid and compelling this incident was to Greene, doubts about its authenticity bothered him for many years and were only dispersed when he was writing his autobiography and sought confirmation from his brother Raymond, who told him: ‘You did in fact see the man cut his throat, standing by a first floor window, or the nurse may have obstructed your view. Anyway he succeeded.’ It is strange that I could find no report of this incident in the Berkhamsted Gazette for the years 1908–11. Nevertheless, with his brother’s confirmation, we can conclude that powerful experiences of blood and death were part of his early life.

  *

  Until his schooldays began, Graham Greene’s life was nursery-orientated. His brother, Hugh Greene, described the unchanging routine of those early years and the close, secure, busy world of the nursery, with its natural hierarchy of brothers and sisters, its pressures, standards and shared pleasures, secrets and arguments.16 His older sister, Molly, thirteen when Graham was born, was soon to move out into the adult world, but there were Herbert and Raymond above him. As he grew older and was no doubt more in authority, there were Hugh and Elisabeth below him. They saw their parents for an hour in the evening from 5.30 to 6.30. In the afternoon they went for a walk with their nurse – sometimes with a nursemaid as well. During the rest of the day they lived in the nursery and took their meals there. Even had they wished, their parents, certainly their father, would not have found it possible to spend much time with their children, but in Edwardian, as in Victorian, middle and upper class families, with their large houses and numerous servants, this was the norm. For some children, such as Beatrix Potter, this meant a lonely life, but that was not the case with Graham Greene, and until he was thirteen he was not deprived of company and affection.

  He remembered the nursery at School House (to which the family moved when he was six) as: ‘a large confused room … with toy cupboards and bookshelves and a big wooden rocking-horse with wicked eyes and one large comfortable wicker-chair for the nurse beside the steel fireguard.’17 He remembered a long succession of nursemaids, but the important woman in his childhood was his Nanny, who had been with the family for thirteen years before his birth, brought in originally to look after his eldest sister Molly. What he remembered of her was her head bent over his bath and her white hair in a bun – what he described as that ‘white bun of age’.18

  A very early and forgotten poem, ‘Sad Cure’, gives a vignette of the Greene home as seen from a child’s point of view and emphasises the child’s helpless inarticulateness in face of what he sees and feels. Comfort (with its related security) and Fear (with its related terror) are the two poles of the child’s world – the comfort and security of nursery and drawing-room, the fear and terror of the dark stairs and dark bedroom:

  If he shut his eyes, he almost heard

  the butter frizzling on the thick hot toast,

  while Nurse was clattering teaspoons, clinking cups …

  He’d sometimes sit and spin the minutes out

  before he dared the dark stair to his bed,

  reading or sometimes tempting Nurse to tell

  of witches, pirates, angels, devils even …

  Comfort and Fear – these two alone made Life.

  But while the Fear too often stood alone …

  The Comfort always had been mixed with fear.

  They could not tell … what his feelings were

  when a small wind crept round an ancient poster,

  nor yet the smell that always brought a drawing-room to his mind,

  the spirit lamp, the tea-cups and the jam.

  They could not tell; he could not tell himself.

  What is most strange is if they could relate

  each trivial sight which brought him ecstasy,

  and set his small … soul,

  a-stuttering out its happiness to the dark.19

  He had a mind so sensitive and an imagination so vivid that the coming of evening raised up terrible possibilities and ‘all the nerves [were] ajump with the fear of bed-time’ bringing him near hysteria. Apart from trying to extend nursery comforts by encouraging his nanny to tell him stories, he remembered that he used to take ‘a multitude of soft animals’ to bed with him – an indication of fear and insecurity. He remembered two bears, a rabbit and a blue plush bird. He ‘kept the bird … only for the sake of filling the bed, because [he] disliked the feeling of plush’ and had a terror of birds.20

  To drive away the fear and find security he would drop his teddy bear out of bed so that when his nurse came to pick it up he felt assured that all was normal and he could go to sleep. When the house fell quiet and he had fears of fire or of being deserted by his family, he would get up and sit at the top of the stairs so he could hear the voices from the dining room below: ‘the low comforting drone of dull adult conversation which told me that the house was not yet ablaze’.21 These recollections appear in his autobiography as late as 1971, but as early as 1936 he had used them in ‘The Basement Room’: ‘they saw him into bed and lit his night-light and left his door ajar. He could hear their voices on the stairs, friendly like the guests he heard at dinner-parties when they moved down to the hall, saying good night … he was safe.’

  The journey to bed (and this was in School House) was one of fear in itself. He had to creep by what he calls a branch line on the main staircase that ran steeply up to his mother’s private lavatory. At night this narrow stair was a point of terror – anything might lurk there in ambush. It seemed it was always on landings that he was most in danger. When he was nearly seven, and unhappy at the thought that he would soon have to attend school, he was terrified by a witch, who, he believed, lurked on the nursery landing by the linen-cupboard: ‘After a long series of nightmares when the witch would leap on my back and dig long mandarin finger-nails into my shoulders.’ Looking back to these genuine terrors in A Sort of Life he recalls how, in a dream, he attacked the witch and put her permanently to flight: ‘I dreamt I turned on her and fought back and after that she never again appeared in sleep.’22 Greene was sixty-seven when he wrote his autobiography and we might think his nightmares were the figments of his imagination, but they appear in a review written when he was twenty (and hidden away in a 1924 copy of The Oxford Outlook): ‘Comfort is not a reality. The real things are terrible things. The stairs to bed, the empty cupboard on the landing, and the witch with white puffed hands and the fleshy face, who waits always round the corner.’ Philip Lane in ‘The Basement Room’ also has nightmares which could well have been Graham’s own – ‘the inevitable terrors of sleep came round him: a man with a tricolour hat beat at the door on His Majesty’s service, a bleeding head lay on the kitchen table in a basket, and the Siberian wolves crept closer. He was bound hand and foot and couldn’t move; they leapt round him breathing heavily.’

  Minor ailments pleased him for they confined him to bed and brought him a sense of peace, endless time, and a night-light burning in his bedroom, a feeling of security.

  Fear of drowning, from which he also suffered, probably originated in an early attack of hay-fever brought on by playing in a hays
tack. His family was mystified by the illness as he lay awake coughing and gasping for breath all night – ‘perhaps during that night I evolved my fear of drowning – I was able to imagine the lungs filling with water’. He had dreams when he would feel himself drawn as if by a magnet to the water’s edge and later, in adolescence, they became so strong that they affected his waking life: he would find his feet would be actually attracted by the margin of a pond or river. This fear must have been strengthened by what he heard of reports of inquests in the Berkhamsted Gazette on people – often children of bargees – who had drowned in the Grand Junction Canal running through the town. It was believed locally that no one who fell into the locks on the canal could be rescued: ‘I cannot to this day’, wrote Greene, ‘peer down … the sheer wet walls, without a sense of trepidation.’23

  In The Quiet American (1955), Greene was to draw on this particular fear when Fowler and Pyle have to sink into the flooded paddy-field in Vietnam to escape the enemy:

  the footsteps halted: they only seemed the length of a room away. I felt Pyle’s hand on my good side pressing me slowly down; we sank together into the mud very slowly so as to make the least disturbance of the rice. On one knee, by straining my head backwards, I could just keep my mouth out of the water. The pain came back to my leg and I thought, ‘If I faint here I drown’ – I had always hated and feared the thought of drowning. Why can’t one choose one’s death?24