The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  That his fear of drowning is rooted in a hay-fever attack receives some confirmation from a description of a nightmare endured by Pinkie, the boy killer in his 1938 novel Brighton Rock:

  A piece of blanket fell across his mouth; he breathed with difficulty. He was upon the pier and he could see the piles breaking – a black cloud came racing up across the Channel and the sea rose: the whole pier lurched and settled lower. He tried to scream: no death was so bad as drowning. The deck of the pier lay at a steep angle like that of a liner on the point of its deadly dive; he scrambled up the polished slope away from the sea and slipped again, down and down.25

  Greene makes a distinction between terror and fear, and while fear has an odd seduction, ‘one escapes, screaming, from terror’. His terror of birds, his loathing of the touch of their feathers, was inherited from his mother, though it did not prevent his being involved in the burial of a bird: ‘I remember the funeral of a dead bird which was coffined in a Price’s night-light box. My elders, Herbert, Molly and Raymond, buried him in what was called the Shady Walk [at Harston House, home of his uncle, Sir Graham Greene]. I was only a minor mourner, being the youngest, too young and unimportant to be priest or grave-digger or chorister.’26 The hairy bodies of moths also terrified him and his abhorrence of bats is vividly recalled when he describes how one came into his bedroom at Harston: ‘I saw it poke its furry nose first around the curtains and wait to be observed.’ The following night it came down the chimney and Graham shrieked with his head under the blankets until his brother Raymond came and caught it in a butterfly net.27

  Again he draws on a powerful personal feeling when he uses his fear of birds in describing Arthur Rowe’s response to the violent, grotesque character Poole in The Ministry of Fear (1943), a novel rich in disguised references to his own life. Whenever he thinks of Poole, Rowe is aware of something ‘unhappy, something imprisoned at the bottom of the brain trying to climb out. It frightened him in the same way as birds frightened him when they beat up and down in closed rooms. There was only one way to escape the fear of another creature’s pain. That was to lash out until the bird was stunned and quiet or dead.’28

  The novel’s hero, Arthur Rowe, mirrors Greene’s character and upbringing in his attitude to pain: ‘He was brought up to believe that it was wrong to inflict pain … He learned before he was seven what pain was like – he wouldn’t willingly allow even a rat to suffer it.’29 This refers to Greene’s boyhood experience of an unskilled dentist: ‘I have never suffered greater pain than I did then. I remember rolling on the drawing-room floor in agony from an exposed nerve.’30

  A sensitivity toward animate and inanimate nature was apparent when Greene was only four years old. On the occasion of his brother Herbert’s eleventh birthday during Easter 1909, the family spent some time at the seaside resort of Littlehampton on the Sussex coast near Bognor Regis (it was Graham’s first visit to the seaside). His mother wrote to her husband of a glorious day passed with a carriage ride into the woods:

  The primroses were glorious. We picked for 1-1/2 hours. Graham had never seen woods with primroses before. He was so happy: ‘I can’t help treading on them Mumma’ he said quite sadly & was much relieved to hear it would not hurt them.31

  Again, this aspect of Graham is reflected in Arthur Rowe, who felt pain so intensely that whenever he tried to move his feet ‘the earth whined back at him: he couldn’t move an inch without causing pain.’32

  As a child, Greene was a loner, secretive, keeping his fears and terrors to himself. Not even his younger brother Hugh, with whom he had the closest relationship, was taken into his confidence always. For example, on Greene’s eightieth birthday, Sir Hugh Greene, in a piece entitled ‘Childhood with Graham’ published in the magazine Adam, recalled that he had a strange, macabre childhood memory which he felt Graham apparently did not share. Over the wall from their garden (this must have been at School House) was a butcher’s slaughterhouse and Hugh Greene wrote: ‘I remember the screams of dying animals as a background to our play.’ But in fact Greene had been aware of these screams and used his recollection of them thirty years later in The Quiet American, transferring his experience to his hero Fowler as he lies wounded in Vietnam:

  another shell exploded on it – they were making quite sure before they came in. What a lot of money it costs, I thought as the pain receded, to kill a few human beings – you can kill horses so much cheaper. I can’t have been fully conscious, for I began to think I had strayed into a knacker’s yard which was the terror of my childhood in the small town where I was born. We used to think we heard the horses whinnying with fear and the explosion of the painless killer.33

  Greene’s short story, ‘End of the Party’, is crucial to our understanding of him as a boy since its hero, Francis, who is doomed, suffers from many of the fears of his creator – fear of darkness, of bats, the footsteps of strangers, and also the sense of isolation from adults, including his mother: Francis is amazed at the way in which adults misunderstand the nature of their own children and he has a desire not to ‘lay bare his last secrets and end reserve between his mother and himself’. That Greene is drawing on his own character here is confirmed by one example of his determined secrecy. He was at his uncle Graham’s home, when he suddenly discovered that he could read – the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. Not wanting anyone to know of his discovery, he read the book secretly in a remote attic, though his mother must have had some inkling since, on the train journey home, she gave him Ballantyne’s Coral Island to read. Stubbornly he refused to read it and during the whole of the interminable journey forced himself to stare at the only illustration in the book – a group of children poised on some rocks.

  Unlike the fictional Francis, Greene had several reasons for concealing his new-found ability. His parents had been concerned because he was a reluctant reader. He had shown no interest in such teaching books as Reading Without Tears and their ‘cat sat on the mat’ approach. His mother’s offer of Coral Island would not have been attractive either – after all, as he said, the detective Dixon Brett had a boy assistant with whom he could identify.34 But there were other causes for his reluctance. At seven years old he ‘feared that reading represented the entrance to the Preparatory School’, and he was to go through its ‘grim portal’ a few weeks before his eighth birthday. He also disliked ‘the sense of patronage’ which he detected when he was ‘praised for something others did quite naturally’.

  In Marion Greene’s ‘All About Baby’ booklet there is the following brief entry: ‘Started lessons Miss Heseron Jan. 1911.’ This marks the beginning, and a very gentle one, of the then six-year-old Graham Greene’s formal education. These lessons were private, but in September of the following year, just before his eighth birthday, he went through the green baize door beyond his father’s study to enter preparatory school. On his first day he had to read a passage from Captain Cook’s voyage and found the eighteenth-century prose dull. His mother, writing to aunt Alice in South Africa, added a few comforting comments: ‘Graham seems very happy’ and ‘today is his birthday and Ben, Ave, Tooter [Edward Greene’s children], and his school friends have been to tea and it went very very well.’

  The Preparatory Department of Berkhamsted School was established by his father in the year Graham became a pupil there. His mother wrote to Alice that ‘Charley’ had bought Elvyne House where her sister Maud had once lived (it was in Chesham Road) and turned it into a boarding house for boys of eight to ten and a half years old, but the preparatory classrooms were in the Junior School at Berkhamsted. The Department and the House were run by a Mr Frost. Marion wrote: ‘It has started very well with 8 boys. They all seem so happy & Mr Frost is in the seventh heaven.’35 And in his speech on Founder’s Day, 1913, Charles Greene described Frost as a man ‘who seemed specially fitted by nature to be a helper and a friend to little boys’.36 S. R. Denny, Graham’s contemporary, remembered Frost, ‘surrounded by a cheerful gang of gambolling preppers … He was very popul
ar and fatherly’. But not to Graham, the unforgetting (and perhaps unforgiving) who was ‘a little afraid of him. He used to sweep his black gown around him in a melodramatic gesture, before he indulged his jovial ogreish habit of screwing a fist in one’s cheek till it hurt.’37 One Old Boy could still recall his impression of Greene as having ‘the face of what looked to me a very shy and sensitive little boy above a green and gold Preparatory House tie’. Whether he was as happy as his mother suggests is debatable. He only admits to being ‘not unhappy at school’ at that period, but he had a tendency to become ill as school days approached and caught measles before entering Preparatory School and chicken pox five weeks after starting school. Such childhood illnesses are of course normal and infections are easily picked up at school, but illnesses that were not too severe would give him an extension of a quiet, secluded existence away from disciplined group routines and activities. He recalls that after he was six but before he went to school, he ‘began regularly to steal currants and sultanas out of the big biscuit tins in the School House store-room’, methodically putting the currants in his left pocket and sultanas in the right and carefully eating every one – even the fluff-covered ones – to escape detection, perhaps indicating his anxiety about the future.

  However reluctant he had been to learn to read, however daunted by the prospect of a preparatory school, having once begun, he read with absorption and intelligence. In his eighth year his mother wrote to his aunt Alice:

  [Graham] was sitting reading poetry very gravely to himself & he looked up & said, ‘how different the funerals of Sir John Moore & the Duke of Wellington were. At Sir John Moore’s not a drum was heard … not a funeral note while at the Duke of Wellington’s were drums & music.’ Rather curious, don’t you think it striking a person of 8?

  His reading matter was not always so serious and thought-provoking. He was able to quote from memory the closing twenty lines of the romantic poem, ‘The Cavalier’s Escape’ by G. W. Thornbury: ‘But pad, pad, pad like a thing that was mad/My chestnut broke away’, and also Alfred Noyes’s ‘The Highwayman’ which tells how Bess, the innkeeper’s black-eyed daughter, sacrificed her life to warn her highwayman lover that soldiers were lying in wait for him.

  The books Graham read as a child ranged from Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Little Duke, the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, E. Nesbit’s novels, and Beatrix Potter, to romance, adventure and history in Kipling, Captain Marryat, Henty, Rider Haggard, Stanley Weyman and Captain Gilson. One of the advantages of being the son of the headmaster was, he recalls, that on holidays the thousands of books in the school library were available, ‘only waiting to be explored’.38

  For him, it is only in childhood that books have a powerful influence: ‘What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?’ he asks, and recalls ‘the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee’39 when he found a novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman or Stanley Weyman, and the fear he felt when, in Preparatory School, he first read Dracula: ‘The memory is salt with the taste of blood, for I had picked my lip while reading and it wouldn’t stop bleeding.’40 And it was terror that struck him most: the Ugly Wugglies in Edith Nesbit’s children’s book The Enchanted Castle who are made of masks and umbrellas and suddenly come alive and applaud ‘the children’s play from their roofless mouths, clapping empty gloves’; or the strange attraction of suffering and cruelty when the mad Khan in Rider Haggard’s Ayesha goes hunting with bloodhounds the man who has courted his wife – ‘never shall I forget the scene of those two heaps of worrying wolves, and of the maniac Khan, who yelled in his fiendish joy, and cheered on his death-hounds to finish their red work.’41

  But reading had other importance apart from providing excitement, fear and escape: ‘in childhood all books’, he writes, ‘are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future.’42 Indeed Greene believes that early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching.43 It was Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter, the story of the disastrous night of Cortez’s retreat, which lured him to Mexico twenty years after reading it and led ultimately to his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory. And he is certain that he would not have made a false start, beginning his post-university career with the British-American Tobacco Company, if he had never read Captain Gilson’s Lost Column; that without having read in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines about the witch Gagool he would not have been drawn to Liberia in the 1930s:

  In 1935 I found myself sick with fever on a camp bed in a Liberian native’s hut with a candle going out in an empty whisky bottle and a rat moving in the shadows. Wasn’t it the incurable fascination of Gagool with her bare yellow skull, the wrinkled scalp that moved and contracted like the hood of a cobra, that led me to work all through 1942 in a little stuffy office in Freetown, Sierra Leone?44

  But the books for children of that period not only provided adventure and excitement and the strangeness of foreign lands, they instilled standards of heroism, idealism, courage and self-sacrifice, presented in a world that was much simpler than the future was to be for Greene. There were stories of honourable men – Captain Scott writing his last letters home; Oates walking into the blizzard; Pierre Curie’s experiments with radium which led to the loss of his hands; Damien working among lepers and contracting leprosy. ‘In childhood,’ Greene wrote, ‘we live under the brightness of immortality – heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock.’45 It was a world that he, like his hero Arthur Rowe, did not wish to lose and wished to return to. Seeing a garden fête in the middle of London during the Second World War, Rowe is drawn irresistibly towards it: ‘The fête called him like innocence: it was entangled in childhood, with vicarage gardens and girls in white summer frocks and the smell of herbaceous borders and security’46 and he longed to mislay the events of twenty years of adulthood, for in his lean experienced skull lay childhood.

  Childhood and the innocent eye, however, are temporary and their loss began for Greene at about the age of ten, when the move from Preparatory School to the Junior School at Berkhamsted made him realise that the world was not as he had imagined – not as he had gathered from his reading. He began to be aware of cowardice, shame, deception and disappointment – the real world, in fact. He began to see that heroes in life were not simple, were not brave, did not always tell the truth and were in the long run often defeated. He began to have reservations about the two white heroes in King Solomon’s Mines:

  but Quatermain and Curtis – weren’t they, even when I was only ten years old, a little too good to be true? They were men of such unyielding integrity … that the wavering personality of a child could not rest for long against those monumental shoulders … Sir Henry Curtis perched upon a rock bleeding from a dozen wounds but fighting on with the remnant of the Greys against the hordes of Twala was too heroic … they were not life as one had already begun to know it.47

  There comes a moment in childhood ‘when the door opens and lets the future in’.48

  Apart from the Walter Mittys of the world, however, the loss of innocence and childhood illusions is part of the normal process of maturing. In Greene’s case it would seem to be the abruptness of his awakening to reality that was traumatic, and yet, from an early age, there was a strangeness about him. A family group photograph illustrates this. Elisabeth is still a baby, which places the photograph in the spring or summer of 1915 when Graham was eleven. Herbert, the eldest boy, is in military uniform, Raymond, Molly and Hugh are all staring normally at the photographer, but Graham is sitting apart and looks as if he is ‘somewhere else’. He has the lost, unanchored look of a child, but he also seems different and separated by more than physical
distance from the others. This view of him was reinforced by some of his contemporaries at school, who thought that he was ‘very different and perhaps a bit bonkers.’ (We must set beside this Sir Hugh Greene’s comment: ‘We Greenes are all a little bonkers!’) As a child Greene could become very excited and this was reflected in a language of his own devising which he was still using, on occasions, when he was twenty and in love with his future wife:

  Will you be affectionate in spite of the cold weather? Will you be brazen? I shall be. Will you be scandalous? I shall be. Will you be shocking? I shall be. Gooja Gooja Gooja Gooja. I’ve not gone mad, darling, but when excited frantically, I always babble nonsense to myself in the Lollabobble dialect.49

  Graham may not have been ‘bonkers’ but he was different.

  *

  It is little wonder his parents did not fully understand the nature of their son, given his ability to conceal his fears and emotions, though sometimes his sympathy for others would move him to tears. A story which his mother would read to the children during their hour with her in the drawing room caused him much distress:

  I remember the fear I felt that my mother would read us a story about some children who were sent into a forest by a wicked uncle to be murdered, but the murderer repented and left them to die of exposure and afterwards the birds covered their bodies with leaves. I dreaded the story because I was afraid of weeping.50

  This was not just a childish reaction – even today he sometimes finds himself slinking shamefacedly from a cinema with tears on his face, and perhaps this imaginative sympathy with the predicaments of others helped to make him a novelist.

  But along with sensibility went integrity. At the age of four, he had a conviction that promises made are promises kept. In the same Easter letter quoted above, Marion Greene recorded how her sister Nora (called Nono by the family) had come up against young Graham’s stubborn determination to stand by his word: