The boys unpacked their things in an empty room in the rest house and set out their wooden table and chairs and opened some tins for their supper – while they drank bottled water feverishly57 and took their quinine.58 A case of whisky was opened and Greene went out to seek a Dutch gold prospector in his tent to invite him to bring his soda and have a drink. Greene calls him Van Gogh, though the diary shows that his name was De Groot, but he was sweating with fever: ‘He was bad, very bad: he had spent a lifetime in the tropics, but nine months in the Republic had got him down.’59 Barbara, who had ‘never known before what it was to be quite so weary’, crept on to her hard camp bed and fell fast asleep.
On the following day, 27 January 1935, their first at the mission, they were relaxed, without anxiety, unaware of the difficulties that lay ahead. They were struck by the extraordinary Sabbath peace of that garden village: ‘It was … unmistakably Sunday. A herdsman drove out his goats among absurdly Biblical rocks, a bell went for early service, and I saw five nuns going down in single file to the village through the banana plantations in veils and white sun-helmets carrying prayer-books.’60 A photograph taken on that first morning has survived, on the back of which Greene has written: ‘Biblical scene outside the Rest House, Holy Cross Mission, Bolahun.’ Greene invited the nuns to have ‘chop’ (dinner) with them – ‘girlish excitement’, he records in his diary. Also he noted the excitement of an old black woman on seeing a white woman who was not a nun: ‘old woman came leaping across beating her arms in the air with excitement at the sight of B[arbara]. Wanted to shake hands. So did all the children. A touch of the lips and then a simultaneous licking of the thumb and first finger.’61 Nevertheless, there was sickness and disease at the mission as Barbara Greene records: ‘Everywhere the natives … walking about with smallpox, yaws, elephantiasis, and covered with venereal sores. A horrible sight, which we saw in every village we stayed at.’62 No wonder that the mission concentrated on teaching the elementary rules of hygiene and on healing bodies. Greene’s servant Amedoo went down with lung trouble and ‘lay on the doctor’s couch dumb with terror’.63
Characteristically, Greene was observant of everything around him. At Benediction in the ugly tin-roofed church he noted two young converts: ‘A tiny piccaninny wearing nothing but a short transparent shirt scratched and prayed, lifting his shirt above his shoulders to scratch his loins better; a one-armed boy knelt below a hideous varnished picture (He had fallen from a palm tree gathering nuts, had broken his arm and feeling its limp uselessness had taken a knife and cut it off at the elbow).’64 They went to Tailahun, the next village, to see funeral ceremonies and took photographs:
Christianity and paganism both marked the dead man’s grave, for there was a rough cross stuck on the mound to propitiate the God whom the old chief had accepted on his deathbed, while in a pit close by, following a pagan rite, sat eight wives, naked, except for a loin-cloth. Other women were smearing them with clay; it was rubbed even into their hair. The majority were old and hideous anyway, but now the pale colour of the pit in which they sat, they looked as if they had been torn half-decomposed from the ground. They had lost with their colour their mark of race and might have been women of any nation who had been buried and dug up again.65
They stayed at the mission a week. To Jimmy Daker in Freetown the Greenes were ‘poor innocents’. Father Parsell, still living at Bolahun at the age of eighty-two, recently spoke of the two travellers as ‘babes in the wood’ without ‘a clue’ of what they were getting into.66 And this was true – how could it be otherwise? However, they assiduously studied manuscript maps of the Western Province drawn up by Dutch prospectors seeking gold, had consultations with the German linguist Heydoern and finally decided on a different (and longer) route.
After Bolahun, Greene and Heydoern parted, never to see each other again. Heydoern was indeed a rare man, a German scholar at ease in the jungle and able to speak the local languages – Mende, some Buzie and even a few words of Pelle. Twenty years later, Heydoern came back into Greene’s life in a curious way, or at least his memory did. Greene was in a hotel room in Cracow drinking with a Polish novelist and talking cautiously in Stalinist Poland. Both novelists were taken aback by a knock on their door, thinking it might be the secret police. Extraordinarily, it turned out to be a German who introduced himself to Greene with the words: ‘You knew my brother in Liberia … he walked with you to Bolahun.’ Greene searched his mind and remembered the reticent mysterious and scholarly German. He asked his whereabouts and was told that Heydoern had been killed in 1943 on the Russian front.
*
Bolahun was a village Barbara called ‘a kind of Garden City’, with its cheap oranges, mangoes and bananas. What Greene remembered was the swooping flights of small, bright rice-birds, the fragile yellow cotton flowers, ‘butterflies, palms, goats and rocks and great straight silver cotton trees’, ‘the graceful walking women with baskets on their heads’.67 It was a friendly mission with its spartan but clean rest house, where on that last night there was dancing on the verandah. Amedoo had recovered as had De Groot who came over for a cup of tea, ‘pale as a ghost under his bleached gold stubble … he treated the natives with a harsh lack of consideration one would never have guessed existed behind the horn-rimmed glasses.’68
‘It wasn’t so good when the dancers went,’ Greene recalled. Barbara had been bitten all over by insects and he had a rash over his back and arms. After dinner, he went to the last pail-closet (‘the wooden seat … swarming with ants’) he would see before the end of his journey in Monrovia. It was a luxury, as was the rest house. It would be native huts after that, with rats, worms and fevers. This last night was to be a grim presage of the future. Their boys now included Mark, whom Greene describes as ‘slightly touched’ but who was a Christian and spoke some English. Mark needed their two lamps while washing up the dinner things, and Graham and Barbara sat ‘in the waning light’ of their two electric torches. Large horseflies, cockroaches, beetles, cockchafers and moths invaded the place; ‘big spiders dashed up and down the wall, the [water] filter in the corner slowly and regularly dripped, a tom-tom was beating somewhere.’69 He was at last driven to bed by a great black moth the size of a small bat.70
Greene’s mind must have been going over their journey. On the following day he would indeed embark on a journey without maps, and we can interpret that phrase in a number of ways.
In the strictly geographical sense, he was about to enter an unmapped area of Liberia. People in Sierra Leone did not travel inland. They went off by sea or air. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, few people, whether Liberian or European, had travelled more than 30 miles inland. The Fathers had been kind, finding 26 carriers who would go with the party all the way to Monrovia and cashing Greene’s cheque for £40 in small silver, but they could not advise on the journey ahead. There was the possibility of a route to Sinoe and Mana Kru by way of the northern border to Ganta, where they hoped to find the medical missionary, Dr Harley, who might help them to work out a route to the coast. The German doctor at the mission knew only of Kpangblamai, Duogobmai and a long march to Nicoboozu and then to Zigita. Dutch prospectors’ maps did not go far. The only certain route seemed to be Sir Alfred Sharpe’s, but to follow it, one had to rely on rumour and hearsay.
Then there were the cultural maps. What we might call ‘the disease maps’, he had copies of before leaving England, but the cultural maps had to be absorbed gradually, in a process of confrontation, first as the tourist, more or less insulated from the places he was travelling through, then as the independent adventurous traveller and then as the white man forced by an intimate contact with an unknown civilisation to adopt colonial attitudes in order to survive and to accept that he must bargain, command and live uncomfortably while depending on the natives. The next stage, for Greene, was an encounter with the black ruling class. From his point of view, they were all journeys without maps. And there was the final map – a totally new one, which was the mental, physi
cal and psychological one – again, his personal map. And he was to push himself to the limit, physically and mentally.
Although in his travel book Greene gives details of his problems and fears, it is from his diary, in which he describes his dreams, that we can judge the true extent of the pressure he was under at this point: ‘Dreamed I’d got home again and played with V. Missed and loved her a great deal.’ He fell asleep and ‘woke missing her’ and then after further sleep woke up again ‘wanting V quite desperately’. It is no wonder that, after his return to England and when he had completed his travel book, Graham, in dedicating the book to his wife, added that beautiful quotation from William Plomer’s ‘Visiting the Caves’: ‘I carry you like a passport everywhere.’ Close to the references to his wife, he wrote in small print the following:
Woke up at 4 cold & had to put on a vest. Dreamed also that there was a case of yellow fever and we were put in quarantine. Found one of The Times’ night staff burning this diary in case it carried infection. All my family about. Furious to the point of tears.
Dreamed that I was present at the assassination of the President of Liberia. He was shot in his carriage by one of the drummers I saw at Tailahun. Tried to send the news to The Times.
Mark, who wakened Greene at five o’clock on the following morning, had impressed him, ‘though he is ugly and smelly’.71 Mark spoke and wrote English after a fashion and had made a supreme effort to be taken on for the rest of the trek. Greene kept in his diary Mark’s letter of application to him:
Sir. In honour to ask you that I am willingly to go with you down Monrovia please kindly I beg you and Miss or Madam.
Because your love me so dearly I don’t want you must live me here again, and more over I am too little to take a load. I will be assisting the hammock till we reach. Me and the headman. Please sir dont live me here again. I was fearing to tell you last night please master, good master and good servant. I am yours ever friend
Mark.
It was to be a great adventure for Mark who had never seen the sea or a ship or a brick house.
fn1 This was a Mr Henry Owen Lipscombe. He was, according to the local newspaper, supervisor of schools. His wife had arrived in the Colony only a month earlier. He was thirty-five.
35
Whisky and Epsom Salts
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
– ALBERT CAMUS
AT 7 A.M., Barbara set off in the hammock with a light heart, ‘A long line of us’, she wrote in her book, Land Benighted, ‘winding down the road … The sweat streamed down [the carriers’] backs. They carried their heavy packs on their heads, and worked hard for their three shillings a week.’1 Graham left half an hour later, setting himself his usual gruelling pace and catching up with them in less than an hour.
They made very good progress, reaching their first stop, Kolahun, in two hours; because of the President’s recent visit to the area the trees on each side of the road had been cut down. When the sun broke through the heavy morning mist there would be no shade, and this made Graham anxious to press on to Kolahun where they were to have their first encounter with a representative of the Liberian ruling class. They were not looking forward to their obligatory visit to the District Commissioner, D.C. Reeves, to whom they each had to pay two pounds in order to obtain permits of residence. He was a Vai, a Mohammedan who hated Christians, white men, and the English language.2 Also, he had a reputation for cruelty. It was believed that on capturing some Mandingo traders smuggling goods over the border from French territory, he had them shut up in a hut and burnt to death. The nuns at the Holy Mission had seen him passing rapidly in a hammock, his messengers whipping the carriers.
Greene waited for him in the compound of his house – superior because of its two storeys: ‘Everything was still … A gramophone was playing, and Miss Josephine Baker’s voice drifted across the compound with an amusing and sophisticated melancholy. It made everything for the moment rather unreal: the carriers sitting in the dust, the quiet drift of huts, the forest edging up over the horizon became no more than a backcloth for a lovely unclothed cabaret figure.’3 It was not a cabaret figure who appeared, of course, but Mr Reeves, coming from behind some curtains dressed in a scarlet fez and a long native robe, with black Victorian side-whiskers, and thick grey skin.
Greene’s description of Reeves as a character in a Parisian revue plays down any sense of danger, but there must have been some threat in this initial meeting. Reeves ‘gave an effect, more Oriental than African, of cruelty and sensuality: he was gross, impassive and corrupt.’4 The situation could have turned nasty.
However, Greene’s forward planning turned out to be useful. He had written, according to his diary, what he calls a flowery letter to the President of Liberia, and the President, far from having left the area, was staying in Reeves’s house and Greene was to have an interview with him. As the two Greenes waited, a black officer changed the gramophone record, and then a young woman came in. She was the loveliest thing he saw in Liberia and he could not keep his eyes off her. He wanted somehow to express the pleasure the sight of her gave in the ‘empty sun-cracked place.’5
Even Barbara conceded that she was beautiful, with dreamy black eyes that brought to mind stories of the Thousand and One Nights. She wore European dress, looked more Chinese than African, and had a quality of deep repose. She did not speak a word, only taking up a pack of cards and shuffling them. He was to see her once more at the end of the journey, in Monrovia, standing on the President’s balcony watching the Krus demonstrate their loyalty below, and she remained for Greene ‘the kind of vivid memory which draws one back to a place, even after many years’.6
Greene was conscious that he was meeting the President of the country dressed in shirt and shorts, a water-bottle at his side, and covered in the dust collected on the way. He remembered all the stories he had heard of how Liberian rulers liked to keep a white man waiting and might demand that he be suitably clothed for the interview. Moreover, Greene expected to meet a thug similar to District Commissioner Reeves, or perhaps like the black mercenary, Colonel Davis.
But then President Barclay – who Greene had dreamed the night before had been assassinated – walked into the room.fn1 To Barbara he looked ‘as if he had just left the Fifty Shilling Tailors’, and Greene described him in his diary as ‘a mulatto type wearing a dark suit, a cheap striped shirt and striped tie’, but both were impressed by his affable manner, and rhetoric. He talked to them for an hour, reluctant to relinquish them: ‘it was not easy to stem the rolling tide of the President’s hopes, the roads, the aeroplanes, the motor-cars.’7 ‘He was a politician in the Tammany Hall manner, but he was something new on the Coast. He might be out to play his own game, but he was going to play it with unexampled vigour.’ He told them that his power was greater than the American President’s since, once elected, he was ‘boss of the whole show’.8
Eventually, and no doubt delicately, Greene had to end the interview. They had a four and a half hours’ march to the next village, Kpanglamai, to which he had sent Mark and Amah on ahead to tell the chieftain of the white man’s arrival and his need for a hut and food for 30 men, and he wanted to reach it before nightfall.
They were now travelling along the northern border of Liberia, trekking generally one hundred feet above sea level over broken ground and scrambling up hills, crossing the great Mano river over a bridge of twisted creepers. Sir Alfred Sharpe admitted that he had never been in any part of Africa where the going was so bad, yet Greene enjoyed those earlier days of the march – the swallow-tailed butterflies swarming at the water courses – ‘Everything was new, the villages with the women pounding rice, the cluster of stones where the chiefs were buried, the cows rubbing their horns along the huts, the taste of warm, boiled and filtered water in the dried mouth.’9
In those early days he walked in high excitement, and faster than his carriers or his cousin, with a sense that he was going deeper and deeper into unknown
Liberia. That first week was ‘a dash’, and his hammock men kept up with his gruelling pace and thus ‘an evasive half-relationship developed from shared oranges, the rests at the water courses’,10 where they drank out of the empty meat tins they carefully preserved and Greene from his bottle.
Towards the end of the worst heat of the day they saw Kpangblamai and Mark running to greet them with ‘plenty, plenty fine house’ – and it was their finest lodging in a native village in Liberia. Greene describes it as ‘a small stable with two stalls and a verandah … The walls [incongruously] were papered thickly with old advertisements and photographs out of illustrated papers, most of them German or American. Over a chair made out of an old packing-case … beautiful women showed their teeth brushed with Chlorodone, handsome men displayed their ready-made suitings, somebody wondered why she wasn’t a social success, and a man in uniform denounced a clause of the Treaty of Versailles.’11
Thus the headlines of the 1930s, commercial and political, were preserved (as in formalin) deep in the Liberian jungle and provided, in the narrow clearing of a simple African village, the brightness of our limited civilisation. Greene and his cousin were to sleep that night on platforms of beaten earth spread with matting.
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 67