Nora put the boys to bed last night & Molly & I went to Church. Graham refused to say his prayers to Nora & when she embarked on a second try, he said ‘Auntie Nono I volunteered before I wouldn’t say mustard [wouldn’t say anything].’51
We do not know why he had volunteered not to say ‘mustard’ but presumably some peccadillo had been committed by the brothers and because he had been sworn to secrecy he was not going to break faith – in prayer he might have been obliged to do so. Moreover, we have here an example of a child contending with the adult world despite his natural powerlessness. It must have taken some strength of character to refuse Aunt Nono’s request.
This child mystified not just his parents. His aunt Eva, who married Edward, Charles’s brother, in Santos, Brazil in 1901, was twenty-two when Graham was born. When she was almost 100 years old her memories of the Hall in Berkhamsted where she had lived were still fresh:
I never found it easy to understand young Graham. Once I remember when he was naughty, he refused to own up to the fact until he had persuaded us to say please. He must have been then 5 or 6 years old. He seemed as a boy completely inexperienced and yet he was not. He was very shy and yet he was not shy. He seemed to respond to us. I never knew, when he called at the Hall, whether he was happy or unhappy. He was certainly different from any other child I have ever known. He came over to the Hall very often during the time his father was Headmaster at Berkhamsted. I don’t know, I think he just left me puzzled. I just never knew whether he was as a child pleased or unhappy, approved or didn’t approve. I never knew. I never knew.52
Graham himself remembered how, as a child, he was unjustly smacked for refusing to apologise for things he had done. We can imagine the scene: his family demanding he should apologise and he in return demanding that they say please first – as, no doubt, he had been taught to say ‘please’ when making a request.
But it was not until he was almost thirty, in a Spectator book review (30 June 1933), that Greene revealed his sense of hopeless opposition to the injustice of adult behaviour towards children:
Against the background of visits to grandparents, of examinations and lessons and children’s parties, the tragic drama of childhood is played, the attempt to understand what is happening, to cut through adult lies, which are not regarded as lies simply because they are spoken to a child, to piece together the scraps of conversation, the hints through open doors, the clues on dressing-tables, to understand. Your whole future is threatened by these lowered voices, these consultations … the quarrels in the neighbouring room, but you are told nothing, you are patted on the head and scolded, kissed and lied to and sent to bed. Herr Lothar has written the All Quiet of childhood, showing what is behind the official posted bulletins: ‘X has been irritable.’ ‘X has been good.’ ‘X has gone to bed in tears.’
The impression that comes from this is that of a child who was imaginative, fearful of many things, complex, often withdrawn, but with an early developed sense of justice and independence. With this went not only the need for security, but the allied need for solitariness, and the need to defend the territory that provided both. At his uncle’s home, Harston Hall, he had the remote attic to read in and the hiding places in the rambling gardens, and was so jealous of them that he refused to reveal them to a small boy who was invited to share his summer holiday there.53 At St John’s he had the ‘French’ garden from which he could watch the ‘English’ garden unobserved, and the seclusion and comfort of his bedroom when he was ill and could enjoy the peaceful darkness, endless time, privacy and ‘books brought by my mother for me to read …’54
Though solitude and secrecy were essential to him at times, he was never lonely: ‘however occupied the parents might be, in a family of six children, a nanny, a nursemaid, a gardener, a fat and cheerful cook, a beloved head-housemaid, a platoon of assistant maids, a whole battalion of aunts and uncles, all of them called Greene’, there was no loneliness, and the ‘six birthdays, the Christmas play, the Easter and the summer seaside, all arrived like planets in their due season’. ‘The clouds of unknowing were still luminous with happiness.’55
He also had pets and toys and engaged in the usual activities of a child, though in his case it would seem that they took on a Greeneian irony. He had a small garden plot at School House, 6 ft square, where he succeeded in growing radishes, but he remembered also the excitement of collecting snails in a bucket and of pouring salt on to them – ‘they exploded into foam’.56 He once owned two white mice, but ‘one ate the other and then died of loneliness’.57 He shared with his brothers a succession of canaries, but one broke a blood vessel singing too loud and long. His favourite toys were a clockwork train and some lead soldiers: ‘When the soldiers had lost too many limbs to stand up we melted them down in a frying-pan over the nursery fire and dropped them into cold water as people do now in Sweden on New Year’s night, seeking omens of the future.’58 And he remembered how his uncle Frank, his mother’s brother, would make Chinese junks by folding paper and sailing them in his bath. He longed to make his own Chinese junks but did not ask his uncle to show him how. Instead, he tried to find out for himself with the aid of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia but ‘never learned the secret’.59
fn1 His uncle Edward did in fact marry a German, born in Brazil.
fn2 Later she called herself Vivien.
2
Personal Map
Memory is like a long broken night
– GRAHAM GREENE
IT WAS LATE in the year 1910 that Charles Greene and his family moved from St John’s house to School House. For Charles Greene the move was a milestone in his career: he was the new headmaster of Berkhamsted School.
The November 1910 issue of the school magazine, The Berkhamstedian, had reported, ‘Within a fortnight of the beginning of the new school year came the announcement that the King had been pleased to approve the appointment of Dr Fry the headmaster to the Deanery of Lincoln.’ The Times of 28 September announced the appointment and gave an account of Dr Fry’s career, and the Morning Post congratulated Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, on appointing a man not only Liberal in politics but one who had given ‘long and meritorious services to the Church’. The name of Fry’s successor was not published in The Berkhamstedian until the next issue of April 1911, so that the new appointment must have been made in late November or early December 1910, but the editor, late as it was, extended ‘the heartiest of welcomes to the Head’, whose appointment afforded ‘matter for the profoundest satisfaction’ since there had been no need to have ‘recourse to external aid’ in making it.
School House was to be the family home until Charles Greene retired in 1927, and it was here that the latest addition to the Greene family, Hugh, was born in November 1910. Their new home was more in the centre of Berkhamsted than St John’s and also much more part of the School. Whereas St John’s, a comparatively new building, dating from 1890, was situated in Chesham Road off the High Street, School House was in Castle Street, also off the High Street but where the Norman Church was. It was part of the old Hall, the original ‘free school’, built of brick and freestone in 1544 by its founder, John Incent, Dean of St Paul’s, and, inevitably, added to by Dr Fry.
It must have been from the time of the move to School House that Graham Greene began to get to know more intimately the town in which he lived for his first seventeen years and where he was nearer to being rooted than in any other place. If Berkhamsted did not finally hold him – for once he could escape, he did – it nourished him, gave him moving, unforgettable moments of happiness and deep scarring misery, allowed him to experience first love and make his first attempts at serious writing. It was to be his personal map for life: ‘Everything one was to become must have been there, for better or worse. One’s future might have been prophesied from the shape of the houses as from the lines of the hand.’1 It was a map not simply of physical features but one on which were traced emotional and psychological contours mapping his develo
pment from childhood to adolescence and forming a personal historical addition to the history of the town. Berkhamsted was a place to which, in his long fascination with his childhood, he returned again and again in imagination: he described its streets and buildings and historical events in The Lawless Roads, ‘Fanatic Arabia’, ‘The Innocent’, ‘Across the Border’, The Human Factor and in his autobiography, most often recalling the same details so that any one of the descriptions points to the specific characteristics that had had significance for him. In his short story, ‘The Innocent’, the narrator goes back to his home town, Bishop’s Hendron, obviously Berkhamsted, and discovers why the town has such a hold on him:
the old grain warehouses across the small canal, the few lights up the hill, the posters of an ancient film … It was very dark, and the thin autumn mist, the smell of wet leaves and canal water were deeply familiar … We came up over the little humpbacked bridge and passed the alms-houses … little grey stone boxes, but I knew them as I knew nothing else. It was like listening to music, all that walk … We passed the school, the church, and came round into the old wide High Street and the sense of the first twelve years of life. If I hadn’t come, I shouldn’t have known that sense would be so strong … but now with the smell of wood fires, of the cold striking up from the dark damp paving stones, I thought I knew what it was that held me. It was the smell of innocence.2
Greene’s recollections of Berkhamsted and School House have detail and warmth and reflect the innocence of a generally happy childhood. For him, the town, with its short streets running north and its long streets running south uphill and two miles of High Street (as wide as many a market square) holding them together, ‘was like a crucifix for a man with one arm too long’. Among the High Street shops and abusing ‘its broad dignity’ was the New Cinema with its green Moorish dome, built after the First World War. He remembered how his father once allowed the senior boys of the school to go to the cinema to see a Tarzan film under the mistaken impression that it was an educational film of anthropological interest. Soon after the start, Charles Greene stalked out, followed by his wife, but the boys were allowed to stay. Charles regarded the cinema ever afterwards with suspicion and disillusionment.
In the same street was an authentic half-timbered Tudor house (opposite the false Tudor front of the Tudor café where ‘four one-armed men [once] dined together, arranging their seats so that their arms shouldn’t clash’) which was used as a photographer’s studio. The Greene family knew the photographer well, for Newman, as he was called, was official photographer to the school. In the unfinished novel ‘Across the Border’ Graham, calling him Millet and the town of Berkhamsted Denton, takes us into that ancient shop: ‘There was a smell of chemicals, and in the dim bare light an antique pillar of plaster with a velvet top to rest the elbows on. Something hooded stood in a corner, and a metal clamp to fix the neck in … old Millet had had a flair for character in his day. As much as the crusader he was a relic of the time when Denton was a place in which to live.’3 There was the ruined castle, the crusader’s helmet in the church, the almshouses, the Grand Junction Canal, the warehouse nearby, the faint smell of coal dust blown up from the coal yards and the railway with its twice daily stream of commuters. And there was the toy shop on the High Street kept by an old woman called Figg: ‘One climbed down a few steps into something like a crowded cabin, where on bunk over bunk lay the long narrow boxes of Britain’s toy soldiers … an amazing variety which recalled all the imperial wars of the past century: Sepoys and Zulus and Boers and Russians and French.’4 In contrast you entered the sweet shop in Castle Street by climbing steps. It was opposite the churchyard and the jewellers on the corner of the High Street. The jeweller was an old man with a white beard who sat behind the window, magnifying glass in his eye, mending watches, looking, Graham thought, like the figure of Moses.5
It is interesting that Graham’s recollections of Berkhamsted are those important to a boy between the ages of six and twelve, but not to one who knew the town from the inside. He knew it as a middle-class boy from the School – not intimately. His knowledge began with walks supervised by his ‘crotchety nurse or the nurse-maid’, but one walk the nurse would never take them on was along the tow path by the canal which had ‘the menace of insulting words from strange brutal canal workers [from the coal barges] with blackened faces like miners, with their gypsy wives and ragged children, at the sight of middle-class children carefully dressed and shepherded’.6 At the rubbish tips by the canal at the end of Castle Street he made friends with two or three working-class town boys and for a time used to meet them in secret (for his mother would have been deeply disturbed to have found him fraternising with such riff-raff), bringing with him a cricket bat and ball, neither of which they possessed. And then there was the old woman who lived in Castle Street and prepared tripe, ‘a far lower occupation than a butcher’s’, though during the First World War the Greene family of necessity frequently ate her tripe with white onion sauce.7
He remembered the faces of the population of the town, recognisable faces ‘pointed … like the knaves on playing cards, with a slyness about the eyes, an unsuccessful cunning’.8 And he recalled the photographs in Newman’s window of ‘wedding groups bouqueted and bemused like prize oxen’. Although he says in his autobiography that his encounter with working-class boys was one of the few ‘memories which remain … suggesting some social conditioning’, it is obvious that social conditioning had begun with his birth: he had been conditioned to a middle-class family life and the public school environment. Remoteness was not only a quality of his relationship with his parents. He was remote from Berkhamsted, the working-class boys, the local people and the gypsy children of the coal barges. But he still owed much of his sense of security as a child not only to the nursery and the garden across the road at St John’s, but also to the ‘green spaces of a map [as] empty as Africa’ – the wastes of gorse and bracken of the great Common of Berkhamsted and the small Brickhill Common and the park of Ashlyns9 where he was to find privacy, solitude and an escape from the pressures of school life.
*
Another important feature on his personal map of Berkhamsted was the Greene family: Harston in Cambridgeshire, St Kitts in the West Indies and Berkhamsted had been ‘colonized’ by the Greenes who ‘seemed to move as a tribe like the Bantus, taking possession’.10 On special occasions, they could muster twenty-six relatives. Graham belonged to a wide-ranging family which did all the usual, accepted middle-class things: seaside holidays at regular times, gardening, church, tennis.
At the far end of Berkhamsted, at the Hall, ‘the great house of the town’, lived the rich Greenes. Those at the School were the intellectual Greenes. Charles Greene’s brother Edward, who had been a highly successful businessman in Brazil, chairman of both the São Paulo Pure Coffee Company and of the Brazilian Bank among other companies, had returned to live at the Hall with his wife, Eva, and their six children (just as there were six children at School House), of whom ‘Tooter’ was Graham’s particular friend with whom he would sit, god-like, on the roof of the Hall, surveying the country-side, eating sweets and planning their futures as midshipmen or Antarctic explorers (though it was with Tooter’s younger sister, Barbara, that Greene was eventually to travel adventurously through Liberia). Also in the town was his mother’s spinster sister, Maud (who had been a nurse) the poor relation, but also ‘a walking news-letter’ of Berkhamsted, who took him as a child to convalesce in Brighton. He would later travel from London to visit her and hear the Berkhamsted gossip.
Charles Greene’s family would spend Christmas Eve with the Edward Greenes. There was the novelty of a German influence (Eva Greene was German in origin) in the shape of a Christmas tree and carols sung in German round it and presents for all the children laid out on separate tables. Christmas began for Graham at his home on Christmas Day with ‘a heavy stocking lying across the toes and a slight feeling of nausea due to excitement’. Also Christmas was especially a
time for family amateur theatricals. Elisabeth remembered the popularity of Saki’s ‘The Unrest Cure’. Plays continued in the family for many years as a letter written by Graham when he was twenty-two shows: ‘I’ve had to invent an impromptu play for Raymond and Charlotte and Hugh and Elisabeth and me to act on Christmas night, a sort of acrobatic charade. It’s horribly gruesome.’
Graham’s sister, Elisabeth, recalled a playtime life of charades galore at home, sometimes by word, sometimes by pantomime: ‘for some reason I particularly remember Vivien in an advertisement of “Still beautiful by candlelight”.’ She remembered another game they played in their drawing-room: ‘Each person wrote a question on a piece of paper, folded it down the middle and passed it on and the next person wrote a word. The papers were folded up and each person took one. They then had to write a poem answering the question and bringing in a word. I thought this was hell, but I remember how good Graham was at it.’
Graham excelled in all games of this kind. On one occasion when the family was assembled and the rich Greene cousins were also present, they were asked which two books they would take with them to a desert island if they were marooned. Graham astonished his older relatives by immediately mentioning the essayists Lamb and Bacon. ‘How could you cap that?’ asked ‘Tooter’ Greene.
If Greene ‘reluctantly’ set on his personal map the School, that reluctance stemmed from his experiences after he was thirteen, for his home in School House was a happy one. What impressed him about School House as a six-year-old was ‘the long path from the street to the front door, on the right the red-brick Tudor school hall and on the left, divided from [it] only by a flower-bed, the old disused churchyard’,11 whose leaning graves could be seen over the low garden wall. Nobody was being buried there any longer and ‘the dim inscriptions on the tombstones spoke of falling asleep and peace and hope of resurrection.’12 Over the years scraps of bone would move under the wall and the gardener would regularly turn them up when he was re-making the herbaceous border. Rhododendrons pressed up towards the window of the drawing-room and at the end of the path was a tennis court and beside it a small flower garden with a pond full of tadpoles and a buddleia which in the summer swarmed with peacock butterflies. Following the fashion then, he did for a time catch and kill butterflies, but never pinned the corpses out in a case. Later he was paid ‘a penny a dozen for killing cabbage-white butterflies with a tennis-racket’ just as he had been paid by the hundred for the corpses of snails he had exploded with salt.13
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 5