The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  The villagers were overpoweringly hospitable, presenting them with three gourds of palm wine, a basin full of bad eggs and a chicken, and treating them like royalty. Like royalty they had to endure the discomforts of being shown everything – weavers at work, a man cutting leather sheaths for daggers, a native smithy where they made blades, a woman boiling leaves to make dye, a devil dance. The devil, from a women’s society, swayed forward swinging a great raffia bustle, nodding its black mask. Finally there was the gift of a kid which escaped and had to be chased and brought back and tethered. In spite of having had no rest after their march, they had the royal necessity to keep their faces fixed in bright, cheerful masks.

  Feeling weak and ill and unable to face food, Barbara went to bed leaving Graham to escape to a very English meal alone – sardines on toast, a steaming hot steak and kidney pudding, an omelette washed down with whisky and orange. But halfway through the second course the old chief in tea gown and turban arrived with an orchestra that played tinkling music – the old chief eventually slipping away into the moonless night carrying his chair.

  Two things the Greenes learnt at this stop. One was that it was not necessary to ‘dash’, that is, return gift for gift, but only to ‘dash’ at the end of the stay. The other was that the presents they had brought with them from England – knives, and ‘housewives’ – were useless. The natives made better knives, had nothing to sew, and preferred gifts of money to enable them to pay their taxes.

  It was their first night in a native hut and for privacy’s sake they kept the door shut, but it was also their first experience of the terrors of the heat, which was like a blanket over the face, choking one. It was, Greene recorded in his diary, like the heat of a furnace.

  *

  He decided to follow the German doctor’s advice and make for Dagomai: the trouble was that nobody had heard of it – not the chieftain or his headman (absolute inseparables ‘like the higher and the lower nature’).12 To the chieftain’s son, Greene kept on repeating ‘Dagomai, Dagomai’ and at last the chief spoke of a place called Duogobmai, which to Greene’s unskilled ears seemed nearly right, and he decided to make for it – a bad mistake on his part. His determination to reach Duogobmai next day led to dissension among the carriers, mostly fuelled by a carrier called Alfred, complaining, ‘Too far … too far’, to the other carriers who had not yet become a team and were full of jealousy and suspicion, so that the ‘oily, smart, ingratiating, mutinous’13 trouble-maker had good material to work on. Throughout the next eight-hour journey, with Graham travelling fast ahead, the carriers followed slowly with Alfred telling them it was too far to Duogobmai. Unfortunately, it turned out that Alfred was right. Without knowing it, Greene was travelling to the wrong village. That day was to be an exhausting trial of wills between him and Alfred and the carriers.

  After two hours they reached a village, Pandemai, which Greene had arranged they should reach the day before, but had then sent a message – which had obviously not arrived – cancelling this arrangement. As a result, the chief was surly, but he was also in the hands of a hard-faced black missionary who was always laughing as if to say, ‘“I’m only a black and you are a white, you are always laughing at me” … with a bitter humility which didn’t … disguise the hardness and meanness below it.’ Afraid that the carriers, if they once put down their loads, would cause trouble, he decided to go straight through the village, his refusal to stay being accepted by the missionary ‘as one more sign that he was despised’.14

  Although the missionary told him that Duogobmai was six hours away, Greene would not be delayed, and, working on the premise that ‘a black always exaggerated’, pledged himself that Duogobmai was only five hours away, and like the proverbial mad dog of an Englishman, he led his party on, stalking ahead of the carriers and Barbara as the midday heat struck up from the dry ground and beat ‘down on one’s helmet so that for moments at a time it was cooler to raise it and take the full sun on the skull.’15

  On this portion of the journey, he observed ‘great yellow tenements, twelve feet high’ built by ants who drove in swarms across the path and the guerilla ants ‘who whipped at one singly through the air and fastened their pincers in the skin … their nip was like the cut of a knife’. He concluded that the ants were the real owners and rulers of the bush, not the men in the villages and certainly not the few white men who had left in little cleared spaces beside the path abandoned gold-workings: ‘a deep hole the size of a coffin, a few decaying wooden struts above a well of stagnant water.’16

  Eventually, struck with inertia under the vertical sun, he waited in a village for his party to catch up, watching the old men drowsing, blinking and scratching, a woman lying ‘in a patch of shade on her face in the dust’, sleeping. ‘A long time passed … It was too hot to be really curious about anyone.’

  When Barbara, the carriers and Alfred arrived, the latter stirring things up and gathering evidence from the villagers as to how far Duogobmai was, there was much palaver and, faced with an incipient revolt, Greene felt the blacks were humbugging him, until his servant Laminah whispered, ‘Amedoo’s feet very bad’, but added, ‘Amedoo go on. He say he no humbug.’17 Thus he discovered that ‘one of the curious things about a black servant [is] the way in which he included loyalty in his service and there was no trait of cowardice in their loyalty, no admission that the richer is the better man.’

  Greene stubbornly went on, allowing only short rests. At one point a man with a few words of English followed him, saying they would never reach Duogobmai before dark – and they did not.

  The Loffa river had to be crossed by a seventy-year-old hammock bridge of knotted creeper swinging down from a platform fifteen feet in the air. ‘Sometimes the creepers had given way’, and, ‘the whole bridge swung like a rope ladder’.18 According to Greene’s diary the actual struts (on which one stepped) were about a foot wide. A good many were broken. On that bridge he caught up with Mark and Amah whom he had sent off at five that morning to reach Duogobmai and warn the chief that they would need food and board for the night. He had been walking for eight hours, they for twelve: Mark was ‘completely exhausted, clutching a chicken’, but Amah, a Mandingo, physically a fine specimen, was still fresh, and amused that Greene had caught up with them.

  After the bridge, Duogobmai came in sight as the dusk was falling, a line of blackened huts at the top of a long red clay slope: ‘A strange pink light welled out of the air, touching the tall termite mounds which stood along the path. It gave the whole landscape, the ant heaps and the red clay and the black huts of Duogobmai on the hill-top camp, a curious Martian air. Men ran out of the huts and looked down at [them] climbing up out of the dusk and the forest.’19

  There was no moon and the smouldering torches of the blacks moving between the huts ‘lit only wretchedness and dirt’. He was anxious about his cousin, wondering whether she had managed to cross the long, hammock bridge in the dark, avoiding the gaps where the creepers had given way. She arrived about forty minutes later with a sullen pack of worn-out men to find him sitting on a box, dozing.

  The majority of the carriers had decided not to cross the river Loffa until next day, because it was too dark to use the bridge, so that the Greenes were without beds, mosquito nets, lamps, torches, food and the essential water filter. However, they were given green palm wine which tasted like sour barley water and for which Greene was developing a taste; Amedoo slung up their hammocks; and the two Greenes stumbled out into the jungle to relieve themselves. It was pitch black except for the light of fireflies and they struck endless matches, making water in the dry, pitted ground.20

  It was, as he recorded in his diary, their worst night yet, but he began to come to terms with the situation and suddenly felt curiously happy and carefree: ‘One couldn’t, I was sure, get lower than Duogobmai. I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our
lampless sleeping place among rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.’21

  But to a degree it was escapable. Vande, his headman, had persuaded the carriers to cross the river and so they did have beds and mosquito nets, food and a filter after all. They sat on a box, too tired to talk, too tired to eat, except for a cup of soup which tasted heavenly. The carriers were too tired to grumble. They sat round the lamps and had their chop: ‘I heard vitality come slowly back to them and Alfred sowing dissension.’ When the carriers’ lamp went out the rats came ‘all together, falling heavily down the wall like water’.

  In an undated letter from Liberia, Barbara wrote of her experience of sleeping in native huts: ‘I sat up all night in a state of fear & horror. It was not a case of one rat or two rats but literally swarms of rats. My suitcase was broken so that it didn’t close properly & next morning my clothes were chewed into great big holes. Then there were bats overhead & every imaginable thing ready to bite us … fleas & bugs that became friendly with me that night and haven’t left me since.’ But her sense of humour came through in the next line: ‘I’ve never had such faithful friends in my life.’22 Greene lay awake listening to the ‘vermin cascading down the walls, racing over boxes’. He discovered that nothing could be left out for the rats would eat anything, shirts, stockings, hair-brushes, the laces in one’s shoes.

  And after all they had come to the wrong village, one that had never seen a white face so that they were a constant source of interest. The oldest man said he didn’t want a ‘dash’ he only wanted to sit and watch the white man writing, drinking, coughing, wiping the sweat from his face.23 And the village was shifty and mean: ‘A woman goes round scraping up the cow and goat dung with her hands, children with skin disease, whelping bitches and little puppies … among the food Souri is cooking for us in the dust outside a hut.’ Even the village beauty had smeared and whitened breasts which hung in flat pouches to her waist, which caused Greene to consider for how short a period of their lives most people can be seen naked with any pleasure. Barbara Greene wrote of the village: ‘There was an atmosphere of decay everywhere … Even the children were like horrid old men, and their wicked little faces grinned at us. I felt that if we stayed in this village much longer we, too, would deteriorate and go bad, the atmosphere of degeneration was so strong … I kept looking at Graham to see if I could see any change beginning in him … I thought I might see that shameful, shameless look creep into his eyes. I half expected his face to alter, and his body to become diseased and horrible like those around us. The unlovely nakedness pressing so close to me filled me with repulsion.’24

  But the carriers demanded a day’s rest and Greene thought it wise to agree; so both Greenes took the opportunity to spend the morning writing up their diaries under the intent stare of the villagers. Graham tried to get drunk, but the spirit ran out in sweat almost as quickly as he drank it.

  At least they got rid of the trouble-maker, Alfred. ‘Alfred goes home with a dash,’ Greene wrote in his diary, and he was replaced by an impressive singer whose voice could be heard ‘down the trail proposing the line of an impromptu song, which the carriers took up’, the songs ridiculing the moods and manners of their employers and informing the inhabitants of the villages they passed through about their journey.25

  *

  ‘In Duogobmai the atmosphere had been sordid and degenerate. In Nicoboozu it was happy and charming, and … in Zigita, even in the light of morning, it was evil,’ Barbara wrote in Land Benighted.

  Nicoboozu was an artistic centre where the blacksmith beat out little silver arrows for the women’s hair and twisted silver bracelets and anklets from ‘old Napoleon coins brought from French Guinea’; the men wore ‘primitive signet rings’ and ‘the weavers were busy’ and there was ‘an air of happiness about the place’.26 Graham bought two rings and gave one to Barbara; Laminah bought a magnificent robe for ten shillings for his father, and Amedoo, bargaining for a robe and being advised by the seller that his master would advance the money, replied: ‘I be bad man if I ask master for big money … I get small coppers from master, but master can’t afford to give me big money.’ They had been provided with very good, honest servants. Laminah, when Barbara was bargaining for something, would advise, ‘No buy, Missis. Dat man plenty big humbug. No good sword.’27

  In Nicoboozu the women walked through the village with ‘glowing wood from the smithy … to light the fires … All round … were the sounds of tinkling harps … There was a moon and a native village … there were two white people watching and having their arms stroked from time to time’ as a sign of approval.28 There was also a dance by ‘emaciated old women slapping their pitted buttocks in a kind of Charleston; but they were cheerful and happy and we were happy too … and we drank warm boiled water with whisky and the juice of limes.’29 Their cook, Souri, made them an enormous omelette and Amedoo, Laminah and Mark served them with the greatest dignity and care. With the little huts shining in the moonlight around them, Barbara began to feel the overwhelming magic of Africa, and sitting in the dark there, at that moment she wanted nothing more. Graham wrote that ‘the timelessness, the irresponsibility, the freedom of Africa’ began to touch them at last.30 It was one of their happiest moments together and one of the last times they could talk completely naturally together. The other side of the coin was that they had to adapt to the strains of the journey: ‘Graham … would sometimes become rather obstinate, hanging on to some small, unimportant point like a dog to a bone. But we never quarrelled … We knew … it was the ghastly damp heat that was lowering our vitality, and we would smile at one another and think, “We won’t talk about that again.” Politics was the first thing to go … One subject after another would be put away, left on one side, marked carefully “Not wanted during voyage”, till gradually practically nothing remained on the last day or two of our trip except the enthralling subject of food.’31 But in Nicoboozu that was a possibility they had not even considered.

  Apart from the difficulties of travelling without maps and finding accommodation in native villages, Greene was put into the position of one of his boyhood fictional heroes – having, in spite of his shyness and inexperience, to deal with a party of native carriers in a country of which he did not know not only the geography but also the customs. He had to become a white leader of black men overnight. He must have drawn to some extent on his public school and Balliol experiences, being used to that effortless sense of knowing how to behave, the courteousness in the face of any difficulty. He had also the physical determination and ability to push on. Fortunately, he did not distrust and despise the natives. Barbara wrote:

  Graham, from the beginning, treated them exactly as if they were white men from our own country. He talked to them quite naturally and they liked him. They knew where they were with him, and apart from their everlasting cries of ‘Too far,’ they did everything he wanted them to do. His method of conversation was far from simple, and he used long, complicated phrases. I do not believe that the men ever understood him, but after a while they began to get some dim idea of what he was driving at. After the day’s trek they would like to lie round him, and joke and laugh, while he would smile kindly upon them.

  His position became that of a benevolent white father:

  Once away from their own country the men depended so much on us. They knew they were going to Monrovia, but what or where Monrovia was they had no idea. But with child-like simplicity they handed all responsibilities over to my cousin, quite sure that he would look after them and see that they came to no harm.32

  Every evening the carriers came to him, pointing out their hurts ‘with the utmost confidence that he could make them well again’, though the Greenes had left their medical supplies behind in the last minute rush and had only Epsom salts, boric acid and iodine. With them he treated sore throats, venereal sores, yaws and even a leper who came to them at Zigita to be healed, dumbly holding out his rotting hands. ‘I gave him
’, wrote Greene, ‘a few tablets of boric acid to dissolve and bathe his hands with.’33 ‘The man took it with shining eyes. He turned and went away with a firm step. It meant at least one day of happiness for him,’ Barbara wrote.34

  *

  The trek to Zigita was short (a mere five and a half hours) but extremely tough. This, the largest town of the Buzie tribe, was one of the highest points in Liberia, nearly two thousand feet up and reached by forest paths so steep that they were both almost on hands and knees scrambling over rocks and boulders, climbing up and up.35 So steep and yet there was thick bush on either side of them, the high trees joining in an archway over their heads. Barbara felt it hard to breathe and she recalls that it felt as if someone was hammering iron nails into her throat.36

  Zigita was also reputedly the home of evil spirits, the centre of Buzie sorcery: on nights of storm, lightning ran along the top of the encircling hills in a green flame and the inhabitants lived under the shadow of sorcerers. The Greenes were to be affected by that atmosphere of evil and magic.

  They were accommodated in a rest house with two rooms and a verandah, but only their bedrooms were free from the intrusion of the carriers wanting medicine and sleeping in corners. More worrying was the villagers’ fear of the Big Bush Devil. While the Greenes were drinking whisky and lime, a stranger came in with a command from the Big Bush Devil not to be out that night or to look through a window since the Devil would be dancing through the village. The warning reached the carriers gathered in the cookhouse and ‘suddenly all the voices were turned low like lamp flames’.37 They were warned that if the white people disobeyed the Bush Devil’s order, the carriers would be poisoned – and Zigita women learnt the secrets of poisoning in bush school.