The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  Their next stop was to be Bassa Town and, reluctantly, Greene hired two extra carriers so that he might travel in a hammock, but he felt that he was thus treating the carriers as animals. ‘One heard the hammock strings grinding on the pole and saw the shoulder muscles strain under the weight’, and so he walked two hours and then rested ten minutes in the hammock.

  At Bassa Town he noticed evidence of ‘civilization’ in a young prostitute rushing to meet them who ‘hung around all day posturing with her thighs and hips suggestively. Naked to the waist, she was conscious of her nakedness; she knew that breasts had a significance to the white man they didn’t have to the native. There couldn’t be any doubt that she had known whites before.’78 Greene is vague as to whom she was posturing at but Barbara Greene is quite clear about the matter: ‘A young girl, an obvious little prostitute, hovered round and postured in front of Graham. She was a beautiful little creature … my cousin was beyond noticing anything.’79

  That night, sweating between blankets in a fever, Graham recorded in his diary: ‘Last tin of biscuits, last tin of milk, last piece of bread’, and added a message to his wife: ‘Dear, dearest love. I love you so. Ten years ago next month [since Graham first saw Vivien]. The first anniversary that we’ve been apart since we married, but I’ve never, never loved you more dearly or more longingly and deeply than on this silly trip. I’m so hopefully longing at this moment (8.20 p.m.), to be with you again. I’ve thought of you so much.’80

  On 27 February, after an eight-hour trek, they reached Gyon: ‘Inhospitable,’ he recorded. ‘More than 3 hours before we could get into houses … One spoonful of whisky in tea found to be excellent restorative. Dog tired.’ They were down to their last half-bottle of whisky which they now rationed out in teaspoonfuls.

  Next day, in a place Greene thought was called Darndo, he met the ugliest Liberian he had seen and felt a deep affection for him. He wore dirty pyjamas, his face was yellow, his few teeth decaying and he had a glass eye, but he brought them chairs to sit on and large bitter oranges and limes – the first fresh fruit they had seen for weeks – and arranged a hut for them. He came to believe that Greene was a member of the British Royal Family. He was a tax collector. Greene gave him a dozen pages out of his notebook which he used to write a report on a member of the British Royal Family he had found wandering through Liberia.

  That night a sick man dragged himself across the coffee beans spread out to dry to ask Greene for some white man’s medicine to cure his gonorrhoea. It was, as Barbara records, the last straw – Graham turned green and went off to bed without supper. The rain came down in a solid wall.

  Another two days’ trek would bring them to King Peter’s Town, and they heard in advance that only a day’s further marching to Harlingsville would lead them to a truck which, if permission were granted, could take them down a new road to Grand Bassa. The carriers had never seen a truck before, but had heard of its magic: ‘We sat and grinned at each other, blacks and whites, closer in this happiness than we had been all through the trek.’ In their relief of spirit there was no longer any need to control the temper, and to the carriers’ joy Greene broke out with a flow of obscenity he had not known was at his command at a guide who refused to guide. ‘This was the greatest happiness of all: to feel that restraint was no longer necessary.’81

  Greene sent a note by messenger to the only white man living in Grand Bassa, the manager of the PZ store, asking if the truck could meet them: ‘The messenger stuck the note into a cleft stick, and with some of the last of our oil in his lamp set off to walk to Grand Bassa all night through the forest … the little lantern bobbing away from us between the trees.’82 Greene was determined to press on until he reached Grand Bassa, but fortunately some five miles on from King Peter’s Town they reached a Seventh Day Adventist mission, arriving there on a Saturday, with the bell ringing for church. The mission was a cluster of white buildings on a hilltop, and the German missionary took them in where his wife, an old-fashioned German Hausfrau, welcomed them with gingerbread and iced fruit drinks; and ‘little paper serviettes to wipe their roughened fingers’.

  Barbara was almost moved to tears by this meeting. The woman put her hand softly on Barbara’s head and said, ‘Mein armes Kind’ (My poor child), a phrase Barbara’s German mother had used to her as a child when she felt sad. Barbara, realising that they had almost reached the end of their memorable journey, wanted more than anything to be petted and spoilt and made a fuss of, but Graham only wanted to get out of the jungle and into Monrovia.

  Although the German missionary doubted that the truck would meet them, it did. After another long trek, they came out of the jungle into open country – a grassy path and long, rolling downs – and expected to see the sea. For Graham it was like breathing again, but Barbara felt unsheltered and shy as if she had suddenly cast off her clothes.83 They found the truck waiting. ‘It was wonderful,’ Barbara recalled, ‘like waking up as a very small child on Christmas morning and finding that Father Christmas really had been.’ She was dumb with joy and wonder.

  Even Greene’s more phlegmatic personality was deeply touched. He wanted to laugh and shout and cry. It was the end – the end of the worst daily boredom, of the worst fear and the worst exhaustion he had known. They had been walking, almost without missing a day, for four weeks and had covered three hundred and fifty miles through dense jungle. Starting out as ‘poor innocents’, they had proved themselves as explorers and after one short truck ride they would have reached Grand Bassa.

  Greene recalled how the carriers, on seeing their first truck, drew back in dread and hid their faces in the banks, then according to Barbara they examined it from every side, chattering like magpies. It took them some time to understand that the truck would carry them and all the equipment they had hoisted throughout the journey, without any physical effort on their part. For Greene the journey which had begun with the stink of petrol ended with the same smell. For Barbara, the drive in the old truck, as it rattled along, carrying thirty-two human beings, was one of the most utterly satisfying experiences she had ever had. For the carriers, it was a mystery. Greene’s diary records briefly: ‘found lorry waiting, and so joyously down to G.B., the P.Z. stores and iced beer.’ The iced beer they had longed for throughout the trip had at last come to them. It was 2 March.

  In the courtyard of the store, close to the beach with the surf breaking beyond, Greene paid off the carriers, feeling ‘sorry for the end of something which was unlikely ever to happen again. One was never likely to live for long in company so simple and uncorrupted.’ Their eyes ‘were full of excitement and wonder at Grand Bassa’; they had never seen so many stores, the sea, a motor-lorry. Unfortunately, they did not know the way back to their homes. The manager of the PZ store advised them not to follow the beach to Monrovia in order to get in touch with the Holy Cross Mission – it was ‘the most dangerous road in all Liberia to travellers, because its people [had] been touched by civilization, [had] learnt to steal and lie and kill’.84 They should go away quickly – they were ‘too innocent to be safe in the town as long as they had money. They would be robbed and the police would take away all they had with many fictitious fines and taxes.’ As Barbara recorded, ‘The men looked bewildered, for they felt lost now without Graham, who had been their father for so long.’85 And that night Greene heard their drunken singing and shouts brought on by drinking cane juice, much less gentle than the palm wine they were accustomed to – ‘This was crude spirit and crude coastal drunkenness.’ Greene could hear the police coming up ‘to get their pickings’ and Vande, Graham’s headman, and Amah were ‘being persuaded towards the wooden [police] station’. Greene ‘thought of Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai.’ But Greene’s response is curiously negative. He does not go out and try to rescue Vande and Amah from the police or somehow help them in their return up country, instead he writes off-centre, refusing to deal with the problem at han
d now that the journey is over: ‘We were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire programme from Daventry, and after all it is home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built.’86

  But it is easy to speak from one’s armchair of what someone in Liberia should do or should not do. When I followed in Greene’s footsteps (visiting many of the stone age villages he visited) just before the coup that swept the then President to his death in 1980, I was aware of being in the most corrupt of countries where the police asked for bribes with a machine gun at the ready. Greene, at the end of his historic journey, had no money left to offer the police a bribe. Nothing else would have had the remotest chance of helping Vande and his carriers.

  *

  By an unexpected stroke of luck, the Greenes were not kept waiting a week with their servants, Amedoo and Laminah, for a Dutch cargo boat. The next morning, Barbara was awakened by Laminah saying, ‘Missis get up. Plenty fine boat. Go quick, quick, quick to Monrovia.’87 The PZ store manager, Shuttleworth, had discovered that a launch was leaving at 7 a.m. on her maiden voyage to Monrovia.

  Greene’s diary gives a description of it: ‘30 foot long launch bought for £18, repaired for £25. Two second hand automobile engines, Dodge and Studebaker, had been installed.’ It was already carrying 150 black opposition politicians bound for a presidential election in Monrovia, who justifiably shouted that there was no room for the Greenes and their servants, and Mr Shuttleworth tried to dissuade the Greenes from embarking, but they were squeezed on board. The launch tilted one way and another with the fear of her passengers, until the captain, a fat Kru in hat and singlet, shouted that anyone who moved would be put in irons, and, blowing on a little whistle, he put off and they slid away from the yellow sand of the African shore, the dark green forest they had walked through and the tin shacks of Grand Bassa.

  The voyage was to be as dangerous and as unpredictable and humorous as their long walk. They sailed 60 miles – seven and a half hours of lurching slowly over the flat, scorching, African sea in the company of black politicians, drinking bottle after bottle of cane juice, roaring drunk but forced to stillness – when they moved, the boat keeled over and the captain roared and threatened anyone who moved would be put in irons. The presence of Greene as the only white man on board convinced the politicians that the British were behind their party. A sudden crash, suggesting they had gone over a rock, brought panic, but it was just one of their party passing out, his head hitting the deck. Watching the ‘frieze of black heads’, Greene was aware that ‘five hundred yards away, the yellow African beach slid unchangingly by without a sign of human occupation.’88

  At last, the politicians slept almost to a man and woke almost to a man when, late in the afternoon, the promontory that shelters Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, came in sight. They put on their ties and waistcoats, ready to embrace the reception committee that was waving and cheering on the small jetty.

  *

  The Greenes stayed in Monrovia only nine days, but it seemed an unending time. ‘Liberia,’ Graham wrote, ‘whether to the diplomat or to the storekeeper, was about the deadest of all ends; there was really nothing but drink and the wireless, and of the two the drink was preferable.’89 In Monrovia there were only thirty whites – Poles, Germans, Dutch, Americans, Italians, French, English and a single Hungarian, store-keepers, gold smugglers, shipping agents and consuls, who went down regularly with fever – eight of them in the nine days the Greenes were there, according to Graham, nine according to Barbara. During their stay, ‘Once a week they played a little tennis at the British Legation or had a game of billiards, and once a week, too, the older men of the white colony shot with a pistol at bottles perched above the beach at the edge of the British Legation ground. That custom had been going on for years, every Saturday evening until the light was too bad to see.’90 In his diary Greene recorded: ‘Had tea at bishop’s home and then went to Yapp’s [I assume Yapp to be the British Consul at the British Legation]. Iced cocktails and champagne for dinner. Talked till 1. Tiddly.’91 In a letter to his mother, written on British Legation stationery, he speaks of the luxurious legation and of having ‘lashings of drink’.

  Both Greenes were bored – a natural reaction after their tremendous journey through the Liberian forests. Monrovia was a damp squib by comparison, and their urge was to be home. Every now and then there would be a rumour that a boat was expected, but a few hours later it would be denied. Barbara recalls that her cousin’s manners in this situation were better than hers – he did not show his boredom so much, but his diary entries are terse, the one dealing with their departure on 12 March being as brief as a telegram: ‘Caught the Macgregor Laird.’

  According to Barbara she went straight to her cabin and fell asleep, waking only when they reached Freetown, but this seems unlikely since the cargo ship took four days to reach Freetown. Barbara writes of their boys, Amedoo and Laminah, ‘hovering round us, ready to serve us to the last minute. They seemed heartbroken at the thought that we would have to part with them at Freetown; we were so used to one another now and knew each other’s little ways.’92 Greene does not mention this parting. He records his reflections about returning to ‘civilization’: ‘How happy I had thought I should be, while I was struggling down to Grand Bassa, back in my world … Of course I was happy, I told myself, opening the bathroom door, examining again a real water-closet, studying the menu at lunch, while out of the port-hole Cape Mount slid away, Liberia slid away … One had been scared and sick and one was well again, in the world to which one belonged.’93 But he also remembered the squalor of Kru town, the huts at Duogobmai, the devil’s servant fanning away the storm – ‘all gathered together behind the white line of the bar no European steamer ever crossed.’

  The differences between the two Greenes are revealed through their preoccupations on board ship. Barbara was aware of the dreariness of the journey, the condition of her clothes and of how unemotional and without immediate hope she felt on returning to England: ‘The days – indescribably dreary – passed by like a slow-motion picture. Soon we left behind the burning sunshine and plunged into storms and fogs. My only warm dress was filthy, the rats had eaten my stockings, and my mackintosh was torn beyond repair. I found I was tired of being dirty, and all day long I shivered with cold. I was incapable somehow of looking forward to the future with any excitement.’94

  Her cousin, relieved now of the daily responsibilities of that exhausting trek, observed those around him: ‘The captain leant over the rail, old and dissatisfied, complaining of his men: “Boil the whole bloody lot of the men in the ship together and you wouldn’t make an ordinary seaman”; he was looking back – to the age of sail.’95 In his diary, Greene described the first mate, who eyed him like an enemy: ‘The tipsy half-wit mate … “I’d send my master’s ticket to the Board of Trade & tell them to wipe their bloody arses with it … My dear friend.”’ At Freetown guests came on board and they all drank themselves free from Africa and the captain stuck his fingers down his throat, brought up his drink and was dead sober again, and the ship went out of harbour, out of Africa.

  *

  Barbara and Graham arrived in England, their small cargo vessel landing at Dover, on a bitterly cold April morning: ‘After the blinding sunlight on the sand beyond the bar, after the long push of the Atlantic sea, the lights of Dover burning at four in the morning, a cold April mist coming out from shore with the tender.’96

  According to Barbara they were turned promptly off the ship and they sat on their boxes in the customs house, silent and depressed, waiting for an official to come and let them through. It was in Dover that the two cousins parted, Graham going into Dover where he was staying, and Barbara waiting for a train to take her to London, the rain pouring down, the wind whistling round her, feeling lone
ly in the world. Then a railway porter took pity on her and offered her coffee beside a hot fire. The African journey, taken on so casually over a glass of champagne at Hugh Greene’s wedding, ended with coffee with a friendly porter.

  What did Greene do in Dover? A note on the last page of his diary, probably a draft of a telegram sent to his wife, reads simply: ‘Macgregor Laird arrives Dover. Wire ship where find you. Want suit overcoat.’ In a letter (28 October 1986), Vivien recalls that she met her husband in an hotel and not on the ship or wharf and that they went home together. ‘Out of mischief’ she bought a blonde wig (her hair was black then) ‘to surprise him’. A pleasant surprise, no doubt, after the black hair he had seen so much of during the past three months.

  *

  Was that all? Did the journey with Barbara and its experiences end in wind and rain and a cold, empty customs house? It would seem so, but in fact it was the beginning of another journey.

  *

  On his return, Greene began an exploration of his true motives for going to Liberia which continued for many years, and although in a review of 1952 he commented, ‘Men have always tried to rationalise their irrational acts … explanations … are as unconvincing as last night’s supper as the cause of our fantastic dreams’,97 he was still seeking reasons. He equates the writer with the explorer: ‘Is it that the explorer has the same creative sickness as the writer … and that to fill in the map, as to fill in the character or features of a human being, requires the urge to surrender and self-destruction?’ Basically therefore, there is the need to be a ‘farer’, as in the stanza from Auden’s poem printed at the beginning of Journey Without Maps, in which the ‘fearer’ suggests that the ‘farer’ will ‘discover the lacking/Your footsteps feel from granite to grass.’ The ‘farer’s reply is, “Yours never will.”’ The journey has to be made, the dangers encountered, the map filled in. And in the same review of 1952 he argues that West Africa, more than any other part of the continent, has cast a strong spell on Englishmen, not least for those very aspects that inspire fear – ‘the mists, the mangrove swamps, the malaria, the black water and yellow fever of the Coast’.