The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Between his mother’s aloofness and conviction of her children’s goodness and his father’s preoccupation with the school and his conviction of the natural inclination of boys to sin, it is not surprising that Graham Greene’s own reluctance or inability to communicate his deepest concerns was ultimately to bring about a crisis.

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  Charles Henry Greene never intended to become a schoolmaster, but, as his son records, slipped into it during a lean period. Born on 12 January 1865, he was a grandson of Benjamin Greene, brewer of Bury St Edmunds, and owner of sugar plantations in St Kitts, West Indies, and a son of Benjamin’s fifth son, William, who was sent out to manage those plantations when he was only fifteen. On his return to England, William married the daughter of a master mariner and took up farming and then became a solicitor, but he always yearned for St Kitts and returned there in 1881 and died of yellow fever. His eldest son, Graham, was to have a distinguished career as a civil servant, and was knighted, but his second son, Charles Henry, was less successful. Educated at Bedford School and Oxford University, he succeeded in obtaining only a second class degree in History and a third in Classical Honours Moderations. He intended becoming a barrister and went on, in the traditional way, to eat his dinners at the Inns of Court, but then, in 1889, his cousin Julia’s husband, Thomas Charles Fry, headmaster of Berkhamsted, being in need of a temporary classics master, persuaded him to take the post, and the temporary post became permanent and he remained at the school for almost forty years. Photographs of him in his youth show a handsome man, but during his long years as headmaster of Berkhamsted he developed a stoop, becoming a veritable Mr Chips.11

  He married his first cousin once removed, Marion Raymond Greene, in 1896, the same year in which he was promoted to second master at Berkhamsted. Like most of the Greene women, Marion was ‘tall and so thin … She had a mild and extremely refined look.’ When, after twenty years as a master at Berkhamsted, Charles Greene was chosen from thirty candidates to be headmaster of the school there was no nepotism involved, for Dr Fry was not on the selection committee; but Charles Greene was very much Dr Fry’s man and Fry believed, his work at Berkhamsted being as yet unfinished, that only Charles could be trusted to continue running the school on his principles and carry out his aims.

  This autocrat, called by the schoolboys of the day ‘the presence’, literally danced for joy once his cousin by marriage was appointed head of the school. Fry was a bantam cock who had dominated the school, was pugnacious, yet had his fears as an extract from his diary shows: ‘They are all against me except Charles Greene.’12 And something of Charles’s formal style (rigorously avoided by his son Graham) comes out when he writes of Fry: ‘He gave me the inestimable privilege of his confidence and talked over with me all his plans.’13

  Given the importance of Berkhamsted School as an influence on Graham Greene in his formative years, it is essential to re-create as far as possible the atmosphere of the school at that time and the character and principles of the headmaster. Many of Graham’s schoolboy contemporaries, in retirement after colonial service or commercial work overseas, were strong supporters of their school still. Some had found fame, others were known only in their immediate circles. None was reluctant to speak of his schooldays or of Charles Greene.14

  Raymond Greene told the story of how he, when still a youngster, met the Bishop of St Albans at the theatre. His father asked him what the Bishop thought about the play and Raymond replied that the Bishop thought the play damned good. His father responded: ‘Raymond you must not make up these things. Bishops do not use bad language.’ Graham’s cousin Ben (a gentle giant of 6 ft 8 in.) stressed that his uncle was unworldly: ‘He knew nothing about the world. He was like Macmillan in the Profumo case, you know, bewildered by it.’15 And James Wilson admitted of his headmaster that he ‘was too Olympian. He lived up there somewhere.’ But authority in the school rested with the headmaster: he was all powerful. As Eric Guest commented, ‘a headmaster’s remark or lecture was a kind of decree, an arbitrary order, an ukase, and all obeyed Charles.’ Sir Cecil Parrott had no doubt that ‘Charles Greene was the absolute law in the land, the only god we knew at first hand.’ Yet Charles Greene was a very shy man, and how does such a man handle the position of being a minor god?

  By nature and inclination he was a very liberal man (Graham was beaten only once by his father), though by the standards of our day he sometimes acted illiberally; and although he was not by nature a disciplinarian, his job was to impose discipline. According to Anthony Nichols, his problem was increased by the fact that he took over from one of the great Victorian headmasters, but he dealt with the situation in the special way of a very shy man – he created a protective persona mainly through his mannerisms, some of which probably originated in genuine nervousness:

  He could be very irascible and when he was you would see him nervously tying his gown literally into knots and he spat a little, or so it seemed to us, into our heads and he would swing his gown furiously and he would bang desks … I remember his tugging at his gown; he never stopped tugging and touching it while talking or he would be twiddling with a quiff of hair at the front of his head reaching it with his arm over the back of his head and he always seemed to be clearing his throat … He was someone out of Greyfriars magazine.

  He was, also according to Nichols, ‘soft and paunchy and his moustache … gave him a walrussy effect. He was always, it seemed … carrying papers and Charles carried his papers and his books with an air of display. And of course, he had these physical eccentricities; his pince-nez were never on his nose for five minutes at a time and he was always fiddling with them.’ He was untidy and boys would look to see if he had egg on his tie. Felix Greene provides us with a gentler picture of an unworldly man: ‘He always had ash on his coat. He was constantly lighting his pipe. [It] never lasted more than about fifteen seconds and he’d fumble around and light it again. He never managed to keep a pipe alive, because, well, he was like that.’ By exaggerating his innate eccentricities Charles Greene created a caricature which was to some degree comic and on occasions ludicrous. Boys often indulged in mimicry at his expense, yet under it all one senses a natural gentility, and a genuine unworldliness.

  Perhaps most important was the fact that his pupils found him unapproachable and with his ‘slightly vacant look’ he gave the impression (and this is true of his son Graham as a boy) of someone detached from life. But he also believed in, took over and enforced, the Victorian philosophies of his predecessor, Dr Fry. According to Claud Cockburn, Charles Greene’s favourite word was ‘keenness’ and he had a strong belief in doing one’s duty, an example of which was given to me by R. S. Stanier. According to school routine, after tea the boys had prep., then supper and went to bed at nine, but the prefects were allowed to stay up until ten, Charles or ‘Charlie’, as the boys called him, expecting this extra hour to be used for further preparation. He was, therefore, genuinely shocked when he wanted to speak to a particular prefect and discovered that he was having a bath. ‘You mean to say,’ the prefect was asked publicly, ‘that you desert your duty to go and have a bath?’

  On the whole Berkhamsted was a humane school. There was very little bullying and the masters were concerned about the boys in their charge. It was also one of the least corrupt of schools due to the influence of Dr Fry and Charles Greene’s own character. James Wilson told me that ‘the masters backed up Charles one hundred per cent in his purity campaign. Many of his staff were dedicated bachelors and chaste as a dedicated Roman Catholic priest. They were all devout Christians and Charles as their leader was absolutely ruthless in maintaining the moral tone of the school.’

  His main concern in this urge towards purity was the dampening down of the sexual urge, particularly the homosexual. Graham Greene himself admits that it is possible that his father believed that masturbation led to madness and perhaps blindness. Following the plans of Dr Fry, the school was organised to prevent the possibility of homosexual relationsh
ips developing.

  To begin with, ‘muscular Christianity’ (an idea originating with the Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley) was encouraged. According to Claud Cockburn, the goal was ‘to keep us all going endlessly, so that we wouldn’t get into all this sex stuff.’ Eric Guest recalled that ‘no boy was ever allowed to be idle’. The cult of games had been established in many public schools and Dr Fry was not against compulsory games: ‘Manliness’, he felt, ‘is one of the virtues which our public school system is designed to teach, and there is no reason why it should not be taught by compulsion to the few who do not take to it willingly.’16 So they played cricket all summer and football all winter and then in the spring there was the Officers’ Training Corps (the O.T.C.). If you went running or trained with the Corps you could get off everything else. Cockburn (given to special pleading, it’s true) asserted that all the military activity of the boys during the First World War had nothing to do with winning the war. It was a way of keeping busy.

  There was also a system of perpetual watchfulness set up by Fry and continued by Charles Greene. According to Eric Guest, someone had to know what each boy was doing at any given time. No one was allowed to be alone. Graham Greene, writing of this system in A Sort of Life, does not blame his father for it, but he does write contemptuously of the ‘authorities’ who imposed it, and of course, his father was the ultimate authority. Masters who were heads of houses had great personal authority and could exercise their own censorship. Graham’s first housemaster was the old silver-haired bachelor, Mr Herbert:

  To add to my inextricable confusion of loyalties he happened to be my godfather, mysteriously linked at my birth to look after my spiritual well-being … Mr Herbert was certainly not a cynic. He was an innocent little white rabbit of a bachelor, dominated by the dark Constance, his sister … My only memory of him is seated at a desk in the St John’s schoolroom on the first evening of my first term there, while each boy in turn submitted to him, for censorship or approval, any books he had brought from home to read. The danger was in the source – home, where dwelt unreliable and uncelibate parents.17

  Boys in the houses had individual sleeping cubicles separated by six-foot high wooden partitions with a curtain across the front. No boy ever visited another boy’s cubicle and even to stand on one’s bed and have a chat with the boy in the next cubicle was the height of daring. Masters and prefects patrolled the dormitories at night, inevitably involved in spying. James Wilson could go back to the day when he had to report on a boy: ‘I can remember the occasion well. I came to the conclusion that someone was masturbating and I had to tell the housemaster about it. They kept a very, very tight rein on us.’

  Even Sunday walks were so organised as to prevent intimacy. Graham wrote: ‘On Sundays we would go for walks, by order, in threes, and the names had to be filled up like a dance programme on a list which was hung up on the changing-room door. This surely must have had some moral object, though one which eludes me today … Three can surely be as dangerous company as two, or were the authorities cynical enough to believe that in every three there would be one informer?’18 All ten Berkhamsted Old Boys interviewed recalled that Sunday walks were organised as Graham Greene tells us but that it was in groups of two not three.

  Charles Greene dealt with any suspected amours by means of expulsions. According to R. S. Stanier: ‘Charles left us with the strong impression that we had to avoid misbehaviour in the dormitories; that misbehaviour in the dormitories was more serious than misbehaviour elsewhere. In my time of five years … there were about four cases of expulsion for things of this sort. I suppose Charles would say that if by expelling one or two boys on four occasions in five years, he preserved that innocence of mind, it was worth it.’ Claud Cockburn, who greatly admired Charles Greene, was probably speaking with only half a tongue in cheek when he said: ‘Being a really Victorian Liberal, he believed sincerely that if people were allowed to be together – between any two boys who might conceivably be alone together for more than twenty minutes – sin would occur.’

  Charles strongly hated a sloppy posture and would shout right across the school grounds if he saw an example of it. One Old Boy remembered how Greene had ordered a pupil, because he found him lounging about with his hands in his trouser pockets, to have the pockets sewn up for a week. But another Old Boy thought there was an ulterior motive in this: ‘It was all tied up with sex, in case we had holes in our pockets.’

  Most of the boys had only the vaguest notion of what was going on. James Wilson felt sure that he just escaped ‘getting the sack’. He was found by his physics master, reading Alec Waugh’s Loom of Youth (1917). The physics master punished him instead of reporting him to the Housemaster, Herbert, who would in turn have reported him to Charles Greene and he would have been expelled. (Wilson’s whole generation was fascinated by The Loom of Youth. It created an absolute sensation in raising the apparition of homosexuality at Sherborne School.)19

  Anthony Nichols also described how he just escaped expulsion. There had been an outbreak of Spanish ’flu and thirty boys were despatched to the school sanatorium. On one occasion the boys were talking schoolboy sex when the under-matron came in: ‘What we were saying was the usual things – “Look at my oranges – look at my balls or at our bananas” – just ordinary schoolboy sex and we were reported by the under-matron to Charles and Charles called a number of us in. I remember being terrified and he asked me very peculiar questions. He wanted to know exactly what had been said by the boys. “What was meant by banana?” he asked.’ And thanks to Wilson we know exactly how the expulsions took place:

  What would happen would be that boys would be called out of class, summoned by the sergeant to report to the headmaster’s study and they would be away for a period, and then another boy would be called, and this might go on for a day or two. And then, suddenly, so and so, and so and so, would just disappear. You never said goodbye to them, you didn’t know what had happened to them. They simply faded away and disappeared. Their names will never appear in the Old Boys’ list and they will never be heard of again.

  Sometimes, a less dramatic method than expulsion was used by Charles Greene and Graham was well aware of this. In his novel England Made Me (1935) Minty, the seedy, unscrupulous journalist, is gently sent packing: ‘it was Minty who left, after long hours with the housemaster, not expelled but taken away by his mother. Everything was very quiet, very discreet: his mother subscribed for him to the Old Boys’ Society.’

  Charles Greene was, said Ben Greene, ‘bewildered by sex. He just didn’t understand it.’ And Ben gave an example of Charles’s swift action to head off the sex bug: ‘When I was at school, he expelled one awfully nice boy for kissing a girl up on Brickhill Common. A master saw him kissing, and he was expelled the next day.’

  Charles’s bewilderment over such matters seemed to find its way into the manner in which, on these occasions, he interrogated the boys. Nichols recalled that he would ask questions such as, ‘Do you know what masturbation is?’ or ‘How many times have you masturbated?’ and when the initial fear of the boy being questioned had receded, Charles became for the boy something of a figure of fun: ‘He would never say, “Please leave me now”, he would say, “You boy, you will go, go, get out of my sight.”’

  He was also known, affectionately, for his ‘jawing’. As a lay preacher he gave a sermon at the beginning of every term – very often on the theme of ‘purity’. An entry in James Wilson’s diary reads: ‘Charles preached a very vehement sermon against filthiness.’ There was also a special ‘jaw’ at the end of term, another when a boy was made a prefect and a very special ‘jaw’ for confirmation. Yet it was a little like the blind leading the blind. Graham’s cousin, Ben, recalled his father Edward telling him nervously of the problems a young man had to face in the world, and suggesting his best plan was to follow the rules of the Church, to study his lessons diligently, and to go to ‘Uncle Charles for confirmation lessons’. The trouble was that his uncle was so
narrow, had no real experience and only followed church rules. Yet Charles’s jawing was tremendously effective. He was an excellent public speaker. One can see how firmly established Charles Greene’s behaviour was, and how slightly comic also, in the following incident.

  Charles was in Egypt in 1904 and in a tourist way was visiting the pyramids: ‘The climb to the King’s chamber is half way up, very steep and hot. Two Arabs hold each a hand; another carrying a candle. With the help of the three the journey is quickly done; I gave the men very good backsheesh but with one consent they howled for more. I sat down and gave them a lecture on their sins then and there. I don’t suppose they understood a word, but I probably glared at them as you tell me I do when I am angry. They threw up their arms to Heaven and with just as much animation as they had howled for more exclaimed “we are all satisfied”.’20

  Charles Greene’s language had an evangelical flavour and he was indeed something of an evangelist. He was, thought one Old Boy, a kindred spirit with the prophets of the Old Testament and like an Old Testament prophet himself: ‘The talk given by Charles to new boys was a bit Sinai-like. One felt that something terribly important was being said, but one didn’t quite know what it all amounted to.’ Another Old Boy remembered his splendid sermons in Deans’ Hall:

  He was always speaking, as it were, about the blood of Jesus Christ and the Lamb of God. I remember one particular graphic phrase which you would find appearing in sermon after sermon. The phrase was: ‘What of the ships, O Carthage, O Carthage, what of the ships’. Whenever he was stuck in would come this kind of pronouncement.