Beyond the buddleia were the two greenhouses at right angles to each other and through a gateway by the smaller of the two was a croquet lawn, at the far end of which were apple trees and a revolving shelter, then a wooden fence which separated the lawn from the kitchen garden. Beyond the kitchen garden on the left were the stables which housed only the donkey Miranda and on the right the entrance to the School quad, which lay at the back of School House.
After the move to School House, and when he was twelve, Herbert Greene started the School House Gazette, which takes us further into their family life. Apart from Charles, and Hugh, who was less than a year old, the whole family seems to have been involved in it, including Aunt Nono, Herbert being editor and Graham office boy. It is literate, competent, amusing at its level. We learn from it that on Graham’s seventh birthday on 2 October 1911, he ‘got two tents from me [Herbert], a book from auntie Maudie, a book from auntie Eva, a fort from Mumma, soldiers from Nanna & Da, sweets from Ave, a paint book from Tooter, a shooting game from Molly. The cousins came to tea and we played French and English and egg hat and hide the thimble after tea.’ There was a serial, a ‘Lost’ column (Mrs Greene’s Omoto pen. Last seen in Drawing-room of School House), a ‘Jokes and Puzzles’ section, typically youthful and unchanging: ‘Why is your eye like a schoolmaster using corporal punishment? Because it has a pupil under the lash’; ‘Why should a thirsty man always carry a watch? Because it has a spring inside’; and the celebrated Detectives Herbert and Raymond Greene offered their services. There was a ‘Table Talk’ column in which is recorded a family discussion about the horses they will ride that day, which is stilted except for Mrs Greene’s injunction, ‘Sit up Molly’, and Herbert’s, ‘The craze for notoriety is the curse of the present age’, and Graham’s interpolation, ‘You are silly, Molly – girls are so silly.’ One feels that this is a deliberate send up of the family by the editor and it attracted letters of protest: ‘The story about our talking at breakfast was all wrong – ’cept the part that said Molly is silly – ’cause she is silly, girls always are, Graham.’
Two items are intriguing. One is an account, with a full-length photograph of Charles Greene, M.A., F.His.S. – ‘Was educated at Bedford. Afterwards went to Wadham College Oxford. Has been at Berkhamsted School for 22 years. Last Easter term was appointed Head-master in place of Dr. Fry who was given the Deanery of Lincoln.’ The second shows that on his seventh birthday Graham took part in a competition run by the Gazette which involved answering a questionnaire (he won the second prize of twelve tubes of water-colours). The questionnaire gives some insight into the cast of mind of the family with its emphasis on aims, qualities, pastimes, hobbies, holidays, cricket and reading, and Graham’s answers reflect the stage of his development:
What is your greatest aim in life? To go up in an aeroplane.
What is your greatest idea of happiness? Going up to London.
Who is the greatest living statesman? Don’t know any.
Who is your favourite character in fiction? Dixon Brett.
What are the qualities you most admire in men? Good looks.
In women? Cleanliness.
What is your favourite pastime? Playing Red Indians.
What is your pet hobby? Collecting coins.
What is your favourite quotation? ‘I with two more to help me will hold the foe in play.’
Who is the author you like best and which book? Scott, The Talisman.
Who is the cricketer you most admire? Herbert Greene.
Which is your favourite holiday resort? Overstrand.
Coin collecting and playing Red Indians are fairly predictable activities, though his honest confession that he did not know any living statesmen is in character, but he explains in his autobiography how a seven-year-old would have read Scott’s novel The Talisman. It was a simplified version published in a series for children by Blackie. For a boy at that period it would be the height of ambition indeed to go up in an aeroplane and in his autobiography he recalls his family waiting a whole afternoon in the garden at St John’s House hoping, in vain, to see Louis Blériot (who made history with the first flight across the English Channel in a monoplane on 25 July 1909) make the first London to Manchester flight.14 But Greene’s description in A Sort of Life of watching from the nursery an Old Boy of the School called Wimbush crash the first plane he (Graham) ever saw, on the School playing-fields, is a recollection of a much later event. James Wilson, a contemporary of Greene at Berkhamsted (whose schoolboy diaries provide us with a day-to-day account of school life) relates that this incident occurred on 27 March 1918, when Greene would have been thirteen and a half. And it was Wimbush’s brother who crashed the single-seater Sopwith Triplane on the fields where heats were being run in preparation for Sports Day. The plane was reduced to matchwood and the pilot died, not at once, as Graham believed, but two days later in hospital. Though this was not a nursery incident, it was one that had a powerful effect on Graham’s hypersensitive nerves: ‘Often since then watching planes cross the sky, I half-expect to see them fall to earth, as though it were my gaze which had caused that first crash.’15
Much later, in 1945, the widow of the author Mervyn Peake met Graham Greene at a bus stop in Oakley Street, London. He had returned by air from a visit to America,16 and she recalled that he described to her the heart-stopping experience of the plane’s engines literally ceasing in flight. But Graham’s reaction to this was unexpected. He was deeply sorry the plane had not gone down: ‘I would have been happy to die, very happy to die.’
Overstrand, which Graham claimed as his favourite holiday resort, is many miles from Berkhamsted on the Norfolk coast near Cromer and was where the family spent their summer holiday. Littlehampton, which he says meant more to him with its goat carriages, sea anemones and picnics in Arundel Park, was where they went at Easter as his mother thought it was too vulgar a resort in the summer, being visited by the wrong people.17 And that going up to London was his idea of happiness is totally understandable. Once a year at Christmas, the children were taken to see a production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Graham loved it, his favourite scene being when Peter Pan fought alone against the pirates with his sword, and second to that was the moment of enjoyable horror when the green-lit face of Captain Hook appeared at a service hatch and put poison into Peter’s glass. Although the dying fairy Tinker Bell touched him, he would never call out with the audience that he believed in fairies in order to save her as he had a deeply felt need to be honest: ‘It would have been dishonest, for I had never believed in [fairies], except for the period of the play.’18
Two interesting revelations are his admiration of good looks in men and cleanliness in women. At the age of seven, Graham Greene, like many small boys, had a poor opinion of the female sex. Perhaps his desire for cleanliness in women stemmed from his fate of being at the mercy of aunts and other females who wanted to kiss him. An incident of this kind occurred on his seventh birthday and was reported in the Gazette by his aunt Nono. In his autobiography he tells how a Miss Wills, then matron at the school, embarrassed him by kissing him when he took her a piece of his birthday cake: ‘I returned to the family circle, angry and shattered by the experience.’ His aunt Nono recorded the incident in a parody of ‘Jenny kissed me when we met’ by Leigh Hunt, entitled ‘The Awful Day I Shall Never Forget’:
Miss Wills kissed me when we met
As I took my birthday cake in
Ladies you who love to get
Kisses on my lips, this take in
Though I’m nippy, though I’m spry
Though I dodged she never missed me
Though I’m growing old and shy,
Miss Wills kissed me.
Graham Greene had an uncomfortable feeling then that the incident would not be forgotten because it had been ‘immortalized by art’, and in a sense he was right, for many years later the Daily Mail tried to publish a copy of the poem, but was prevented by Greene’s threat to
sue them for breach of copyright. This incident was a spin-off from a public campaign against the British Broadcasting Corporation in general and Hugh Greene (who was then Director General of the B.B.C.) in particular, a campaign led by the eldest Greene son, Herbert, who by that time had something of a reputation as the black sheep of the family. He was master-minding a lively campaign from his home in Sussex and invited down a journalist, Miss Olga Franklin, no doubt to help with publicity. Herbert felt that his younger and more successful brother Hugh was, as Director General, too iconoclastic. He had dared to remove the universally loved 9 o’clock News and the powerful chimes of Big Ben which introduced it. To many people, Big Ben and the news at nine were sacrosanct and not to be meddled with by the likes of Hugh Greene. Thus a family quarrel, the first but not the last, was carried out in public.
On that visit Miss Franklin was given the opportunity of looking at a copy of the School House Gazette and of reading private letters and early schoolboy poems of Graham’s as well as his early diary, which she found appealing but which has since disappeared. Miss Franklin particularly recalled another poem about kissing, written by Graham when he was about eleven, bemoaning the necessity at family teas of kissing his aunts. Miss Franklin recalled Graham’s regretting the whole necessity of the family ritual:
He described how the whole family sat round the table at Nursery Tea. He spoke of the ‘green baize door’ which separated them from the school itself. He did not enjoy kissing one particular Aunt, and enjoyed even less being watched whilst doing it. The poem was competent yet the feelings described were those of a much younger child who, like so many children, resented being kissed … by grown-ups. But together with what Herbert had told me of the family teas in early days, I got the impression that Graham’s emotional growing-pains had been intensified by the somewhat grotesque family scene of the quite Brobdingnagian members of an excessively tall family (especially the women) closeted together at compulsory tea in that Victorian [sic] background.19
If Miss Franklin remembered that poem correctly, it is interesting not so much because it expressed Graham Greene’s dislike of being kissed by grown-ups, but because of its very early mention of the ‘green baize door’ – an actual door which was to become also a symbolic one, and was eventually to open the way for him into the place he set reluctantly on his personal map, the School: ‘part rosy Tudor, part hideous modern brick the colour of dolls’-house plaster hams – where the misery of life started …’20 In The Lawless Roads (1939) he wrote, ‘If you pushed open a green baize door in a passage by my father’s study, you entered another passage deceptively similar, but none the less you were on alien ground.’ That ground was to become like a sombre theme in a Sibelius symphony, repetitive and each time louder. His experience of it came gradually. It included the matron’s room where he had gone with the gift of a piece of his birthday cake, but it also included the old Hall, the original school, the school dining-hall where he and his brother Hugh would push the big tables together and play an elaborate war game based on H. G. Wells’s Little Wars, and the school library where he was free to read. He had the ‘freedom of these regions only out of term’ and in his memory they were always empty – ‘stony, ugly, deserted’, ‘grim rooms’ like those he had not known of at St John’s House, but which must have presaged a threat to him even while he played or read in them. They were certainly alien since they were not part of his normal life, except that they were where his father worked. The green baize door was to become the division between heaven and hell, the gate that separated Eden from the wilderness of the world.
3
Charles and Marion Greene – and Dr Fry
That dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape.
– DODIE SMITH
THERE WAS A lack of intimacy between Graham and his parents, in spite of the lively, extended family environment, which would appear to have resulted from differences in personality rather than from lack of affection. He associated his mother with a remoteness which he did not at all resent, and with a smell of eau-de-cologne. ‘If I could have tasted her,’ he writes, ‘I am sure she would have tasted of wheaten biscuits … The wheaten biscuit remains for me a symbol of her cool puritan beauty – she seemed to eliminate all confusion, to recognize the good from the bad and choose the good.’1 His mother was not only remote but had a ‘wonderful lack of the possessive instinct’2 which, Greene comments, was made much easier for her to achieve by the presence of Nanny. In spite of his disclaimer that his mother’s remoteness did not trouble him, he yet speaks of her in terms appropriate to some official dignitary: ‘She paid occasional state visits to the nursery.’
Very often in his novels Graham Greene was to draw on his memories of childhood, trying to recapture the uniqueness of that experience and sometimes the personality of his mother. He returned to that period particularly in The Ministry of Fear, which was published in 1943 but written in 1942, the year his father died, when Graham was working for British Intelligence in Sierra Leone. The reminiscences form part of the background of the character of Arthur Rowe who recalls the drawing-room at his home and the memory of his mother’s perfume: ‘He remembered afternoon tea and a drawing-room with water-colours and little tables, a piano no one played and the smell of eau-de-cologne.’ This is a compilation of obvious details, but another passage comes closer to the flavour of Greene’s relationship with his mother. In the novel, which contrasts the horrors of the Second World War with the security and innocence of the peaceful life that preceded it, Arthur Rowe, having experienced the blitz on London and also having killed his wife (it was a mercy killing), tries to tell his mother what he has done. The sense of unlistening security established around mother and nurse, unable to comprehend Rowe’s distress, could well be a reflection of the experience of the seven-year-old Greene, trying unsuccessfully to communicate his fears to his mother (the setting is the garden at the School House, Berkhamsted):
… he was having tea on the lawn at home behind the red brick wall and his mother was lying back in a garden chair eating a cucumber sandwich. A bright blue croquet-ball lay at her feet, and she was smiling and paying him the half-attention a parent pays a child. The summer lay all around them, and evening was coming on. He was saying ‘Mother, I murdered her …’ and his mother said, ‘Don’t be silly, dear. Have one of these nice sandwiches.’
‘But Mother,’ he said, ‘I did. I did.’ It seemed terribly important to him to convince her; if she were convinced, she could do something about it, she could tell him it didn’t matter and it would matter no longer, but he had to convince her first. But she turned away her head and called out in a little vexed voice to someone who wasn’t there, ‘You must remember to dust the piano.’
‘Mother, please listen to me,’ but he suddenly realized that he was a child, so how could he make her believe? He was not yet eight years old, he could see the nursery window on the second floor with the bars across, and presently the old nurse would put her face to the glass and signal to him to come in. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I’ve killed my wife, and the police want me.’ His mother smiled and shook her head and said, ‘My little boy couldn’t kill anyone.’3
‘If one of us,’ writes Greene, ‘had committed murder [my mother] would, I am sure, have blamed the victim.’4 Marion Greene, far more than her husband, made Berkhamsted a secure world for all of her six children. But there is a possibility that her confidence in them and her inability to imagine anything but good for them may have blinded her to Greene’s unhappiness in his adolescence, or at least made its sources incomprehensible to her.
Trevor Wilson, at one time British Consul in Hanoi and who provided Greene with some insight into the conditions in Vietnam for The Quiet American, called on Marion Greene very late in her life. It was her love for Graham that he recalled: ‘She must have been in her eighties then, a very beautiful person. Just said big things of Graham. She said quietly, “Look after Graham”.’5 Until her death, Greene wrote regula
rly to his mother – very rarely to his father. Even before he encountered his father in the role of headmaster at school, Greene found it difficult to love him or to communicate with him:
To be praised [by him] was agony – I would crawl immediately under the nearest table … my only real moments of affection for my father were when he made frog-noises with his palms, or played Fly Away, Jack, Fly Away, Jill, with a piece of sticking-plaster on his finger, or made me blow open the lid of his watch.6
He remembered his father sitting in a deck-chair in the larger of the two greenhouses at School House, where he grew orchids and green grapes, smoking a pipe and ‘blowing smoke over the grapes to kill greenflies’.7 ‘As a headmaster,’ Greene writes, ‘he was even more distant than our aloof mother.’8 He would sometimes take a winter holiday alone in Egypt, France or Italy with a friend, Mr George, a clergyman and also a headmaster. When the children went off for their Easter holiday at the seaside, travelling with their mother and nurse in a reserved third-class compartment with a hamper-lunch, his father wisely would always come down alone a few days later second-class.9 It could well be that, as headmaster of Berkhamsted, Charles Greene needed to have periods of relaxation away from children, something that his young son could not have understood, but because he could not believe that his father’s interest in him was genuine, Greene did not come to love his father until he had children of his own – only then he ‘discovered a buried love and sorrow for him’.10
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 6