The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

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The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 8

by Norman Sherry


  He read the second lesson in the school Chapel and had a particular passion for The Book of Revelation and one particular passage in it, the 21st chapter, and many boys remembered his reading this with the names of lovely sounding jewels which he would roll out, not only because of the beauty of the passage but because of the strength of his personal feeling for its beauty. ‘The foundation of the Holy City rolled off his tongue, especially when he reached the tenth stone, Chrysoprasus’, recalled S. R. Denny:

  And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire, the third, chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardony; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst.

  Was it part of Charles Greene’s persona or an authentic concern that led him to give some of his pupils, on the day they left school, some words of advice, most of which mystified them? Here they had their last view of Charles, the old-style believer in clean living and the good Christian life. His advice to Nichols was innocuous enough, and advice which his own son Graham has followed throughout his career: ‘I remember one of the last things he said to me just before I left school – “One thing you’ve got to think about – application, application, that will take you to the top of things, application.” He was always repeating things of this kind.’ And Stanier also recalled his last day: ‘His sort of leaving talk to me – he had me into his study – and he said, “I’m sure I’ve no need to warn you against drink and gambling. I’ll just say one thing – see that you come to your future wife clean.” And that was that.’ E. T. Arnold, a relative of Matthew Arnold, remembers to this day paying his respects to Charles on leaving school to join the Army in 1918: ‘I was puzzled then, I am still puzzled now sixty years later, by his advice. It was: “Remember to be faithful to your future wife.” I did not know then what on earth he was getting at.’ It happened to Sir Cecil Parrott just before his confirmation: ‘I remember Charles saying suddenly out of the blue to me: “An army of women live on the lust of men.”’

  A curious man, Charles Greene, but one beloved by his pupils. According to Eric Guest he was a man of great moral courage and an ardent opponent of all witch-doctors in and out of society. Undoubtedly, he had an obsession about homosexuality but even Ben Greene (who did not love his uncle) expressed his strong support for Charles when told that one Old Boy had said that he was a bit phoney: ‘A phoney always looks for popularity and this was the last thing that Charles ever looked for. He isn’t among my pantheon of two or three people that I feel the better for having known, but he was a man I respected and I wouldn’t mind having a hundred thousand of him now.’

  R. S. Stanier, prefect, head of the house and later temporary master at Berkhamsted, in speaking of Charles and Marion Greene’s relationship, said firmly that they ‘were absolutely whole-hearted lovers all their lives’.

  I think [wrote Graham Greene] my parents’ was a very loving marriage; how far any marriage is happy is another matter and beyond an outsider’s knowledge … but I think their love withstood the pressure of six children and great anxieties.

  Raymond, Hugh and Elisabeth Greene confirmed this.

  We can gauge the depth of Charles’s love for Marion from letters he wrote to her in 1905, when Graham was three months old, after nine years of marriage, from the Hotel d’Angleterre in Cairo. The way Charles addresses his wife – ‘Dearest love and sweetheart’ – suggests that he retained a boyish freshness in his love. He tells Marion: ‘Kiss the children and the dear little baby [Graham] specially because he is so small’; ‘Kisses to yourself & the children & an extra one to the baby for comforting you.’ But his feelings for his wife are obviously strong.

  Only one thing was wanted – to have you to enjoy it with me. I ache to have you darling. I feel after a day of Egypt as if I must start back again. It is not that I don’t enjoy myself, I do intensely. But there is always an abiding want – my dear sweet wife. Although I have been but one day here, a few days after you get this I shall be starting back … I shall be thinking of you all day long.

  Your loving husband

  Nine years have we been married; and you are still & ever the dear Marion I began to love at Cirencester & have gone on loving more ever since.

  I miss you more even than when I went to Italy. There is a void where you are not.

  Marion Greene was, as her family, friends and the schoolboys recall her, astonishingly remote. Sir Cecil Parrott remembered that she was called ‘Ma Greene’ by the boys and that she was ‘very, very tall [she was exactly 6 ft], thin, remote, nervous and the kind of person you always worried about speaking to in case things went wrong but then you discovered that she was worried about you’. Eric Guest had a remarkably similar memory of her – ‘so tall, so thin you were terrified to look at her, only to discover she was terrified of you. She had a habit of putting her hand up to her mouth, in a nervous gesture, when she talked.’

  Anthony Nichols, always a hostile critic, remembering his meeting with ‘Ma Greene’ on his first visit to the school with his father and having tea with the Headmaster, said that she was a meek woman, physically flat-chested, with thin and pursed lips – she was always dabbing her nose: ‘She was talking to my father and immediately shut up in the middle of a sentence because Charles began rumbling in the background. I remember the embarrassment. She was so very shy.’

  Few boys had much to do with ‘Ma Greene’ but prefects did meet her and her equally tall daughter Molly (‘they were like hop poles’) every Sunday afternoon when school tea parties were held at School House for visitors and prefects. The occasions were disconcerting for the boys, as S. R. Denny recalls:

  As the church clock chimed the hour of four about a dozen of us were ushered into the drawing-room – a pleasant long apartment overlooking the churchyard – by a spruce parlour maid, to be greeted by name and handed a cup of tea. No plate. This was the first test! Could we manage a slice of cake on that precarious resting place?

  We stood in a line rather sheepish and shy. Those nearest to Charles and Mrs Greene were engaged in stilted conversation, largely on a school subject. One more daring than the rest would pass round the three tiered cake stand to any other guest who might be present, praying that it would not fold up and deposit its contents on the floor.

  Those not actively displaying their social graces murmured amongst themselves. One learnt another skill at those terrifying seances – how to dispose of a large chunk of cake which has fallen into the carpet by the pressure of one’s heel.

  In spite of tremendous shyness, Graham’s mother was an enlightened and forward-looking woman – Greene women tend to be so – a good Protestant, who allowed people to be individuals. Sir Hugh Greene’s first wife, Helga, recalled how Marion used to read aloud to Charles after his retirement and when he was much older: ‘It is difficult to describe the Greene woman’s voice, something rather like the Queen’s voice, very much of a certain class.’

  While she gave the impression of being shy, she did her duty – all those boring Sunday tea-parties are an example. Sir Hugh Greene, in comparing his mother and father, thought that, in spite of his father’s range of knowledge, his mother was much sharper and more penetrating. And while a walk with Charles was a splendid experience – he knew intimately the flora and fauna of the area – he was yet, Hugh believed, a bit naïve and bewildered by life.21

  Most of all Marion Greene had a certain demeanour and Alice Greene (Charles’s sister) records in her diary in September 1881 not only Marion’s beauty as a child but also her manners at the age of seven as seen from the point of view of an adult: ‘Aunt Lally was much struck with Marion’s manners, size and beauty. She says she is a child whom no one could dream of taking liberties with and whose manners would befit an empress. The expression on her face – one could almost call it scorn – when she entered the drawi
ng room and found visitors there, Aunt says she will never forget.’

  To some degree, the ‘rich Greenes’ were in awe of Marion and this seemed to have been solely due to Marion’s strength of personality and quality of intellect, as well as her superior sense of the nature of local society. They often felt in her presence socially inept. The fact that they lived in the Hall, had several gardeners, a chauffeur, countless servants, had two to serve at table, had their clothes laid out nightly, did not seem to them as weighty as intellect. There was, according to Ben Greene, a lording it over the rich Greenes by the intellectual Greenes. Ben Greene reinforced this view with an account of a comment by his sister Kate, then aged seven: ‘She was heard to say, lisping a little, to some visitors in the dining-room – “I am very stupid and my brothers and sisters are very stupid, and my mother and father are very stupid, but we have such clever cousins.”’22

  Marion Greene had a tight hold over her emotions. Something of the control and the habit of correct form is revealed in a letter she wrote on the death of her husband, to her younger, and favourite daughter, Elisabeth. The letter begins ‘My own darling Elisabeth’ but even on this sad occasion, her mother ended her letter with her full signature, ‘Marion R. Greene’. And this favourite daughter admitted that her mother would never throw her arms round you and kiss you: ‘I remember when I went abroad on special duty during the war, she didn’t make any fuss – yet she was a remarkable mother. She had certain wonderful qualities in a mother: she was dependable and she was always there. She was very stable and practical. She was rational and had good sense, and she was always interested in what her children did and this extended throughout their careers – she wanted to know but would not interfere with one’s decision.’23

  If Marion had a fault it lay in her remoteness, her inability to show tenderness towards her family in spite of her love for them. Her central passion was for her husband.

  Describing her as she was dying on 23 September 1959, at the age of eighty-seven, Graham Greene wrote: ‘When she was in an untroubled coma before death and I was watching by her bed, her long white plantagenet face reminded me of a crusader on a tomb.’24

  *

  There was another presage of school beyond the green baize door for Graham Greene in the person of the former headmaster, Dr Fry. Why was it that Graham so hated his father’s predecessor? Charles Greene’s sister, Mary, known as ‘Polly’ to the family, described Dr Fry and his wife in her unpublished diary before Graham Greene was born. Mary never married, painted hard, and sometimes well, all her life and though Graham writes of her ‘gaiety, fantasy and silliness’, her account of Fry seems shrewd:

  Dr Fry was bald, had fine features and a long beard that changed later from golden brown to snowy white. He could hardly be called portly but he had a comfortable figure. He was a very small man but he had such a look of importance that in five minutes after being introduced to him a stranger would think of him as tall. Cousin Julia could not be said to be dominated by her husband because her complete subservience to him was so voluntary and glad.

  Several Berkhamstedians, admirers of Dr Fry, have told me of their distress at Graham Greene’s criticism of him, in particular Colonel Wilson, older than Greene, a benefactor of the school and author of a booklet on its history, who wrote, ‘In my view his comments about Dr Fry, his father’s predecessor, were unkind, unjustified, libellous and in the worst possible taste since Fry is not allowed to defend himself.’ And he adds, significantly, ‘Also, as Fry left when Graham was under five years old [Graham was actually six], I cannot conceive where he collected his impression.’25 How did Graham obtain any impressions of the man which could bring about such dislike?

  Greene’s condemnations appear in A Sort of Life, published in 1971, and two of the anecdotes he relates are intended to show Fry as ‘the absurd figure he has always been’. Dealing, as they do, with the man’s weaknesses, they reveal a lack of generosity and sympathy. The first describes Fry’s behaviour when visiting the Greenes and must date from some time after Fry had left the school and when Greene was older than six years:

  This Manichaean figure in black gaiters with a long white St Peter’s beard sometimes came to stay. After breakfast on these occasions it was my mother’s duty to clear the hall outside the dining-room of maids and children, so that the Dean could go to the lavatory unobserved and emerge again unseen by anyone.26

  The second anecdote must come from a still later date:

  On [Dr Fry’s] last voyage … [returning from a lecture tour in America] fate overtook him and showed him up as the absurd figure he had always been. He had suffered a stroke before embarking which damaged his powers of speech and his neighbours at table overheard him asking his son Charley, the Vicar of Maidenhead, for certain shocking objects when all he had in mind was a soft-boiled egg.27

  But in 1936, thirty-five years before Greene published these anecdotes, he had recorded them in an unpublished diary and the suggestions are that these two stories about the Doctor are hearsay, as is the Doctor’s reputation as an unjust flogger. The entry is as follows:

  I remember Dr Fry chiefly for his gaiters, & his big white spade-shaped beard, for his rather bullying hearty manner & the reputation he left behind at Berkhamsted as an anal flogger … Coming back from a lecture tour in America just before his death, he had a fit and went off his head. I must try & discover the absurd story of the boiled egg his son, Charley Fry, Vicar of Maidenhead … wrote home. It was meant to be rather horrifying & pathetic but was simply very funny & a little macabre when you had known [him].

  Hugh remembers his fear of being seen using a lavatory. My mother had to clear a way for him to the lavatory, sending all the children away from the hall & passage & shutting herself in the dining room. The only warning he could give was to hang unhappily about the hall. If someone tried the door when he was in the lavatory he would remain there for a very long while. A strong virtuous wicked man.

  One wonders why Hugh is brought in as witness since, being six years younger than Graham, he is unlikely to have remembered as much about the Doctor as Graham (he was born in the year that Fry retired) and the phrase ‘must try to discover’ suggests that the story of the egg was family tradition and not something Graham knew about at first hand. Graham Greene may well have considered the Doctor’s requirements as a guest an intolerable imposition on his mother and a slight to the family pride.

  But Fry’s reputation as a flogger came from Kenneth Bell, Greene’s tutor at Oxford, a good friend and an old Berkhamstedian who, as a schoolboy, had his cap snatched from him by a bully and was then beaten by Fry who saw him in the street without it. It does seem that while Fry probably was as unpleasant as Greene thought, his opinion is based on family feeling and tradition rather than Greene’s personal experience of the man. Perhaps, and more likely, it is a reaction to his father’s admiration of Fry and his perpetuation of Fry’s traditions in the school.

  Unquestionably Graham saw Fry as the man who, by the force of his personality, had determined the nature of a school which Graham later found so unpleasant that it helped to develop in the young boy suicidal tendencies. Moreover, he would no doubt have felt more kindly towards his father had Charles Greene more seriously modified the Fry mould.

  There is a further irony. Fry’s success was in part due to his powers as a great fund-raiser. Colonel A. G. Wilson credits Fry and his wife Julia with ‘defraying the costs’ of building the Chapel. But Fry had no money of his own, and his biographer shows just how financially useful to Fry the Greene family were: ‘The Greene family was influential, talented and prosperous, Julia herself having access to considerable private means. On their silver wedding anniversary, Fry paid tribute to his wife, who, he joked, had left a home of great luxury to marry a poor man. It was quite true.’ And Fry’s biographer also admits that Edward Greene (Julia’s father) and his nephews Sir Graham, Charles and Edward, ‘the more prominent members of Fry’s new family circle … in one way and an
other … helped him enormously throughout life.’28

  In 1929, Fry, still upset by the death of his wife the previous year, went off to Antofagasta in Chile to try to raise money for Lincoln Cathedral, and suffered a stroke there that impaired his powers of speech and forced him to return home. He died on 9 February 1930.

  4

  The First World War and the School

  The lamps are going out all over Europe.

  – SIR EDWARD GREY

  IN AUGUST 1914, during the summer holidays, Graham Greene was staying at his uncle Graham’s home, Harston House, though his uncle was probably not there, being a ‘very remote’ Greene who was never there when his nephews and nieces were, but stayed ‘safely away from any family turbulence’ in his bachelor flat off Hanover Square in London.1 On this occasion he was probably at the Admiralty, where he was permanent private secretary to the First Sea Lord. Starting off with Lord George Hamilton in 1887, he had held this post under successive First Sea Lords – Spencer, Goschen, Selborne and finally Prince Louis of Battenberg over whom he had great influence. Sir Graham Greene foresaw the approach of war, and arranged that the whole British fleet should be on manoeuvres and ready for action. Something of his power is reflected in the Daily Mail’s description of him as ‘the octopus of Whitehall’.2 He was also known as Sir Graham ‘Secretive’ Greene. Greene was right in his prediction, as Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August.

  Graham Greene, aged nine, remembered during that holiday being sent out with a basket of freshly picked apples from Harston’s orchard for some weary soldiers resting on Harston Green. It was a gesture in the tradition of charity from the big houses to the needy in Victorian and Edwardian times (though George V was then on the throne), but it had deeper significance. Those soldiers were being sent to a bloody war but their young benefactor was to begin his own kind of warfare in the following months which eventually was to destroy his idealism and bring him to a state of ‘knowing’ – an experience which, set against the devastation of Europe during the next four years and its effect on Berkhamsted School, was minor, though not to the boy with the apples.

 

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