We can recapture the atmosphere of Berkhamsted School during the first term of the school year in 1914, when Graham Greene moved into the Junior School, through the memories of Old Boys, The Berkhamstedian, and Greene’s autobiography. Cecil Hodges, ahead of Graham at the School, was to be called to the colours immediately on leaving, and recalled that, at the beginning of the new term, the boys ‘did not notice much change in the daily routine. In 1914 we occasionally heard a rumble of strange heavy traffic, saw a detachment of purposeful-looking soldiers, or heard some item of news that we didn’t like the sound of – it seemed we were not advancing at once to victory.’ At the same time, ‘though in the Dining Hall menu [they] sensed a change’ they ‘did not realise that things domestic were beginning to get difficult’.3 They did get difficult. Graham Greene recalls the effects of the food shortage: ‘I suppose we were always a little hungry in the war years. There were no potatoes and little sugar and we grew deadly tired of substitutes – rice and honey-sugar’. Because of war shortages, the School tuck shop was open only to senior pupils, and Greene, as a junior, would ‘stand outside reciting an accepted formula, “Treat I”, to any older boy as he came out, and occasionally one would detach a morsel of bun and hand it over’.4 Graham’s cousin Ben recalled being ‘frightfully hungry at school’ at that time and Charles Greene was later to shut the tuck shop – a terrible blow to the boys – since he felt that the difference between ‘the trench population’, as Winston Churchill described the soldiers fighting in appalling conditions at the front in France, and the non-trench population, scarcely suffering at all, should be narrowed; the boys at the school would not do better than the troops – it was immoral, it was the using up of national resources for the wrong purpose.
The heroic attitude to the war – loyalty to one’s country, which in the case of a public school that was to provide officers for the army involved total acceptance of personal sacrifice, and devotion to training to meet the demands of war – was reflected in The Berkhamstedian: military matters were taking precedence over all others. The November 1914 edition states in its editorial: ‘Had it not been for the stern fact of war, the chief point of interest would have been the new playing fields, now really our own’ (Edward Greene had shown ‘splendid generosity’ in his subscription to their cost.) But more important, as the editor states: ‘We meet this term under the shadow of war and, as is only natural, all other School arrangements give way to the imperative claims of the O.T.C…. No examination for Certificate “A” can be held this term, but lectures are given for the senior members of the Corps on Tactics and Musketry.’ The boys were sternly reminded that ‘More is required of each cadet than a perfunctory attendance at parades … all those who are hoping to get commissions … must have as sound a knowledge of the use of the rifle in war, and handling of the smaller units in the field, as he has of manual exercises and parade movements.’
To begin with, two parades were held weekly, but later there was a parade only on a Friday, held after morning school on the Gravel Quad behind the Old Hall. Life became more hectic that day as the boys would be polishing buttons, belts and brass both before and after breakfast. Button sticks were lost and borrowed. N.C.O.s helped the less competent to wind their puttees in such a way that they could avoid ugly bulges. Recruits were advised to acquire second-hand belts for, as every old soldier knows, they take polish more easily. After the parade, the boys marched off to the playing fields to drill and execute manoeuvres.
The first war-time school concert, held on 19 December 1914, was a heavily patriotic affair. The School Song, ‘Come what may, we’ll be men’, and Kipling’s ballad, ‘The Flag of England’ were sung, followed by ‘England’s Battle Hymn’ and the concert finished with an orgy of the national anthems of the Allies – France’s ‘Marseillaise’, Belgium’s ‘Brabançonne’ and the Russian national anthem, ‘Boze, carja chrani’ (‘God Save the Tsar’) and finally ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’. In March 1915, The Berkhamstedian reported that ‘more and more O.B.’s are flocking from all over the world to join the colours and take the place of the fallen.’ Few were disheartened, for only three Old Boys of the school had so far died in battle.
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During that first year of the war and Greene’s first year in Junior School, he took steps, with an independence that must have been fostered in his childhood, to remove himself from the disciplined world of school and continue the kind of existence that his instinct indicated was right for him. ‘All life long,’ he wrote, ‘my instinct has been to abandon anything for which I have no talent’.5 And those things for which he had no talent – organised games, tennis, golf, dancing, sailing, and gymnastics – demanded a physical co-ordination and an acceptance of established conventions of movement and aims. In later life, while training for intelligence work during the Second World War, he failed to master the intricacies of riding a motor-cycle. At school, too young then to be involved in the O.T.C., he first removed himself from gymnastics by pretending to the gym mistress (the gym master had been called up into the army) that he was ill. The ‘evasions and deceits’ had begun. He would then slip out on to Berkhamsted Common and, hidden among the gorse bushes, enjoy watching people going by. Having given up the idea of vaulting, climbing a rope or scrambling on the parallel bars, he then went into a more extended truancy, better organised since he had now ‘sussed out’ the school day, and had worked out a way of circumventing the implications of the green baize door.
On reaching the age of eleven, he no longer had breakfast in the nursery with his five-year-old brother Hugh and the baby Elisabeth, but joined his parents and Molly, Herbert and Raymond in the dining-room. After that he ought to have gone through into the School for prayers in Deans’ Hall with the prefect in charge crying, ‘Go Down’, the rush to collect books and the cardboard sheet against which they were carried and a companion with whom to ‘Walk Down’ to the Hall and be seated there in reasonable class order. At that time, Major James Parsons, second master and later Mayor of Berkhamsted, took charge. He twittered, he tapped the table with increasing ferocity, demanded silence but did not obtain it; the school prefects patrolled the aisles, seconding Parsons’s efforts with little result. Then Charles Greene would enter, gown swinging behind him, and climb on to the platform. He would place his mortar board on the table and up went the sound of schoolboy voices singing Psalm 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’.
So, with an obvious innocence of the power and interrelatedness of the establishment, instead of going into Deans’ Hall, Graham would, after breakfast, gather up his school-books as though going to prayers, but instead would wait in the garden until he knew the school was assembled, and he was free. It was a dangerous, exciting freedom. Sometimes he would walk up the High Street to the local W. H. Smith’s shop to look at the books. He confesses to having once stolen a sixpenny paperback, Stanley Weyman’s The Abbess of Vlaye. When he returned home, he would stoop beneath the level of the dining-room window in case a maid caught a glimpse of him and would go cautiously to the croquet lawn where the summerhouse was that could be turned round so that it faced away from house and school and there, sitting in a deck-chair, he would read all day, breaking only for lunch.
In his autobiography, Greene said that he ‘carried on his truancy until the last day of term’, but a much earlier account, in a letter he wrote to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, suggests that it lasted only two weeks. Yet even this, given the rigorous surveillance in the school, was a remarkable feat. When his truancy was discovered, ‘there was a rumpus, a most painful rumpus’.6 A master to whom Graham had reported himself sick to account for his absence asked Charles Greene how his boy was progressing. Knowing of no sickness in his family, Charles Greene came back home and discovered his son in the shelter – ‘or rather I think he sent my mother … I was told to go to bed, and when I was in my nightshirt my father came up and caned me. This is the only beating I can remember.’7 He did, however, have the impres
sion that his father used to smack him as a child.8
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By June 1915 the whole of the Senior School belonged to the O.T.C. and the number of Old Boys killed in action rose to fourteen. The death of Captain H. H. Berners is described in The Berkhamstedian:
He was the life and soul of our lot. When shells were bursting over our heads, he would buck us up with his humour about Brock’s display at the Palace. But when we got to close quarters it was he who was in the thick of it and didn’t he fight! I don’t know how he got knocked over, but one of our fellows told me he died a game ’un. He was one of the best officers, and there is not a Tommy who would not have gone under for him.9
The phrases and the euphemisms concealed the reality of trench warfare and death, and were all set against the social scale of officers and Tommies, leaders and men. This is also very close to the boys’ adventure story, the standards of the public school, the glossing over of the horror of war and the finality of death.
Edmund Blunden, who was a young officer in the war, describes in Undertones of War,10 an ‘old trench’ – one which had been German but had been overrun by the Allies: ‘It was strewn with remains and pitiful evidences. The whole region … being marshy and undrainable, smelt ill enough, but this trench was peculiar in that way. I cared little to stop in the soft drying mud at the bottom of it; I saw old uniforms, and a great many bones, like broken bird-cages. One uniform identified a German officer; the skeleton seemed less coherent than most, and an unexploded shell lay on the edge of the fragments.’ And then there were the rats feeding on the rotten flesh – dead men, dead horses or parts of both. Sometimes the bodies were not buried for months and became part of the trench parapets.11 It was such fallen that the Old Boys of Berkhamsted School were flocking to replace, and there were many places to be taken – almost one million British died.
On Founder’s Day, Monday, 31 July 1916 (Berkhamsted School was then almost 400 years old), Charles Greene spoke proudly of the fact that 900 Old Boys were serving their country, but also stated that 76 had been killed and 125 wounded. A year later the casualties had mounted to 132.
Although Graham was very young at that time and the war impinged on him only minimally, he was living in an environment which was very much affected by it, both overtly and covertly. The overt signs of war were the expressions of traditionally heroic attitudes and the acceptance of sacrifice for one’s country, a sacrifice linked with loyalty to the school. As Charles Greene said of the Old Boys who had been killed:
However hard it might be to think of their death, it was yet a proud thing and a most touching thing to their old masters to read in their letters, or to hear from their parents, of the love which these boys had for their old school … that had been a most uplifting thing.
Graham remembered the whole Junior School pressing up against the terrace whenever there was a rumour that an Old Boy had been decorated with a D.S.O., an M.C. or a V.C., since the first two ensured a half-day’s holiday and the last (and there were two of those) a whole day, the matter being settled by the appearance of the Headmaster.
The School’s Roll of Honour was the visible record of sacrifice and loyalty to school and country – remembered later by most Old Boys. Graham Greene recalled that ‘outside the school chapel there was the list of old boys killed, plaque after plaque in double column, to remind us of the recent years.’12 One Old Boy remembered that it was the master John Trask (he had a grizzled beard) who was to be seen every morning posting yet another black-edged card in the cloisters, and the deaths were recorded in the ‘In Memoriam’ section of The Berkhamstedian. Cecil Hodges recalled that the beginnings of the reality of war, as the older boys were to know it, came as the losses became more personal to them: ‘Reports of casualties on Active Service began to come through … the Roll of Honour came inexorably into being. The dead were honoured by name and the rendering of a “Marche Funèbre” (usually Chopin, sometimes Handel) at the conclusion of Evensong in Chapel on Sundays. And it was not very long before we began to hear the names of those whom we had so recently known as part of our life – a House Prefect, captain of cricket perhaps, or a scrum-half or a long distance runner – gone, and we should never see him again. It was very hard to believe.’
The dichotomy between the outward show and the appalling reality was felt by the older boys at Berkhamsted. Cecil Hodges had often wondered, since those days, whether they could have been aware of the numbing effect on their spiritual vigour of the conflict between the apparent and obvious and the true but obscured reality:
We did as we were taught – held our heads high on the parade-ground (O.T.C.) and elsewhere in public; but within ourselves we knew that we should be packed off for training as soon as we were 18, and overseas very soon after. It was a prospect that put an end to any remote ambition or aspiration. No one could count on coming back. And that was how I left Berkhamsted within a few months to sample ‘the way of glory’, on active service in France. Mercifully I survived. In looking back over a long distance, I feel that I am right in recollecting a period at Berkhamsted (2 to 3 years or so) of unrelieved suspense and oppression: suspense in which we hung day in day out, with no future further than tomorrow, awaiting good news; oppression by a heavy pall of inscrutable mystery which grown-ups assured us must never be allowed to diminish the will to win.13
Hopelessly physically unco-ordinated as he was, Graham Greene was in trouble when he entered the senior school at the age of ten and a half and joined the O.T.C. He hated military uniforms and could never learn to put on his puttees neatly – he was unable to tie a necktie until he reached University. Any under-officer of the O.T.C. who had money was allowed to buy specially shaped puttees which looked smart, but Graham did not reach the rank of under-officer, nor would his father have given him permission to buy them, as this might have been construed as a special dispensation and Charles Greene would never have tolerated anything that smacked of nepotism: the Greene boys – Raymond, Graham and Hugh – could receive worse treatment than others but never better. Unlike Raymond who became a senior prefect, head of his house, and was looked up to by other boys, Graham genuinely fumbled. He dreaded parades. He would get out of step forming fours and botch fixing his bayonet. A very sensitive boy, the fact that his physical awkwardness could not be hidden and therefore was obvious to others, filled him with intense shame. He felt found out, and writing to his future wife a dozen years later about people who had known him at that time he asked: ‘Do you slink by such people with an inferiority complex? I do. It’s the one thing that it’s impossible to forgive one’s parents.’14 His sense of personal humiliation was to last many years.
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The period of the war was a testing time for his father also – perhaps his most testing time. Many of his best masters were lost to the war machine and he managed the school by bringing people out of retirement and, according to Ben Greene, taking on women teachers, many of them ‘extraordinarily tough and frightening’, and a certain number of drunken curates. He had to recruit staff wherever he could find them and he held the school together with difficulty, but the greatest pain came from the deaths of boys he had only so recently taught. Claud Cockburn, as a pupil, observed and understood him: ‘He’d got all the philosophy of the Victorian age, yet he was trying sincerely to adapt to all these kids who were, after all, in the middle of World War I. Most of the sixth form was wiped out, year after year, and he’d sit there teaching the sixth form, then they were called up and 80 per cent of them would be killed. I know when I was in the sixth form, I think only about ten per cent or so of the previous year were still alive, and we thought that was life. So it was, so it was, but it must have been an appalling experience for a man of his great liberal mind.’ Distant figure as he was to the boys, one who spoke in a peculiar voice, gestured with his hand in an odd way, pulled his hair down in front from time to time and walked across the cloisters to the Hall with a long stride and a flowing gown, the war was for him a shattering e
xperience and the deaths of those he had helped to educate wounded him deeply.
Graham Greene’s father, as well as being a simple patriot, was also genuinely liberal in outlook. He was appalled by the attitudes of imperialism and militarism which the war engendered: ‘You mustn’t confuse the relative militarism of the School with anything on his part,’ Claud Cockburn insisted. ‘Charles Greene remained a liberal throughout the War, and I remember very well he came to see my father and my father was a real roaring mandarin and he loved Charles and Charles sort of loved him, but Charles was shocked by my father’s extreme imperialistic opinions. One day Charles Greene came to our house and he said, “The most appalling thing has happened”, and he had been down on the playing fields where the O.T.C. were training, and he’d seen or listened to the Sergeant Major training these recruits, and he’d heard him saying, “Well now when the enemy come out of trenches and surrender and raise their hands, remember not to take your fingers off your machine guns.” And Charles came back and said, “My God – we must all protest against the army becoming as barbaric as those fellows.”’ Indeed there were signs of local barbarism – a dachshund was stoned in the High Street in Berkhamsted.15 Eva Greene also had an unhappy and anxious time.
The school during wartime increased in size and to a master on active service Charles Greene wrote: ‘We have passed the 500 limit. I have seen the 200, 300, 400 and now 500 limit passed. I should have liked to rejoice, but it seems too trivial for joy just now … The 200th boy’s name was Dear and the 500th boy’s name was Good.’
By Founder’s Day 1918, 1,145 Old Boys were serving and 184 had been killed. The war had only three and a half months to run but the number of school dead increased to 230.
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 9