The Unquiet Englishman Page 2
He did suffer some of the gruesome medical practices of the time: when he was five, he had his adenoids and tonsils removed in an operation carried out at home – he saw a tin basin full of his own blood and remained fearful of blood, until he took on rescue work during the Blitz.4 As a child, he fell into the hands of a dentist who must have trained under Torquemada, and he later suffered from pleurisy, which left him with a fear of drowning.5
For all that, there is still a contrast between the outward facts of Greene’s early life and his grim descriptions of it in A Sort of Life. That memoir was actually begun on the instructions of a psychiatrist trying to avoid giving Greene electro-shock therapy for depression in the 1950s (see p. 369) – writing seemed the safer therapy. One can even hear in the remark about the dead dog an address to the psychiatrist. Nonetheless, Greene does allow, here and there, for comfort: ‘From memories of those first six years I have a general impression of tranquillity and happiness, and the world held enormous interest, even though I disappointed my mother on my first visit to the Zoo by sitting down and saying, “I’m tired. I want to go home.” ’ This passage is followed by an account of his terrors of birds, bats, and house fires, and a series of nightmares in which a witch digs her fingernails into his shoulders until finally he drives her off for good.6
‘If I had known it,’ he wrote, ‘the whole future must have lain all the time along those Berkhamsted streets.’7 A pleasant Hertfordshire market town with a population of about seven thousand,8 it had a large Norman church, St Peter’s, where Greene recalled a duke’s iron helmet, of which there is no other record,9 hung ‘on a pillar like a bowler hat in a hall’.10 The local magnate was Earl Brownlow, a member of the Egerton family. His 5000-acre estate, Ashridge Park, included extensive gardens, as well as woodlands where in spring bluebells still grow in dreamlike profusion.11 An important site in Greene’s early life and then in his fiction was the ruined Berkhamsted Castle on its high mound. Originally, it was built of timber after the Norman Conquest, and Thomas Becket rebuilt it in stone. In the fourteenth century Edward, the Black Prince, often stayed there,12 but by the twentieth century only sections of wall stood, like broken teeth.
The Grand Junction Canal ran through the town, and there was a constant traffic of barges carrying freight. But Graham feared the canal as there always seemed to be another drowning, and the many canal workers and their children struck him as grimy and menacing. Twice a day, commuters to London, clutching attaché cases, trudged up and down Kings Road like figures out of The Waste Land. In a remark that tells us more about Greene than about Berkhamsted, he said that anywhere in the world he would recognize people from the town, their ‘pointed faces like knaves on playing cards, with a slyness about the eyes, an unsuccessful cunning’.13
There was nothing sly about his father, Charles Greene, who came to Berkhamsted in 1888. He had studied at Bedford Grammar School and gone up to Wadham College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner in 1884, obtaining a third in Classical Moderations in 1886 and a second in Modern History in 1888. He was athletic, charming, and good looking, and had spent time in France, where he mastered the language. On their travels, he and a schoolmaster friend were approached in Naples by an oddly familiar man who asked to join them as they drank their coffee. He ordered something stronger and entertained them for an hour with his witty talk, then left them to pay for his drink. Only after he had gone did they realize that this was Oscar Wilde, not long out of prison. Charles would retell this story with the observation: ‘how lonely he must have been to have expended so much time and wit on a couple of schoolmasters on holiday’.14
Hoping to become a barrister in London, Charles took a temporary position at Berkhamsted School, but then stayed for thirty-nine years, serving as headmaster from 1910 until 1927. The school had been founded by Dr John Incent, a Dean of St Paul’s, in 1544. Although good things happened from time to time, its history reads as a series of cash-grabs by kings and by officials of the school looting the foundation. By the early 1800s, the headmaster did nothing but enjoy his perks since there was just one scholar enrolled.15 Things were gradually set right, and after 1864 a reforming headmaster decided that Berkhamsted should be primarily a boarding school16 – an arrangement, very common at the time, that would later cause grief to Graham Greene. This headmaster was succeeded in 1887 by the extremely energetic Thomas Charles Fry, a future Dean of Lincoln, who promptly hired his former student and relative by marriage Charles Greene. He was very generous to Charles, appointing him housemaster of the newly established St John’s House and grooming him to be the next headmaster.17 The impact he made on the small boy was long-lasting. He would later hear from his Oxford tutor Kenneth Bell that Fry was a flogger, and from Father George Trollope, who received Graham into the Catholic church, that he was harshly anti-Catholic. Still, Graham’s description of him as ‘sinister’ and ‘sadistic’ has mystified those who researched Fry’s life and found him, in general, benevolent. In any event, Graham recalled him vividly as a ‘Manichean figure in black gaiters’18 (buttoned gaiters still being part of the garb of senior Anglican clergy).
At the end of 1895 Charles married his cousin, the slim, elegant, six-foot-tall, intellectual, and somewhat remote Marion Greene.19 Charles was the grandson and Marion the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Greene, the brewer of Bury St Edmunds, whose name lives on in pints of Greene King IPA. Benjamin had thirteen children, so the bloodlines are hard to follow. One line of descent includes the novelist Christopher Isherwood.20 Benjamin had business on St Kitts in the West Indies, and, in a discreditable episode in the family history, owned 225 slaves there, as well as another six in Monserrat, according to the records of compensation paid in 1834 to masters under the Slavery Abolition Act.21 One of his sons, Charles, is said to have fathered about thirteen children in St Kitt’s before dying at the age of nineteen22 – the mothers were evidently former slaves still living in a form of servitude. In the 1960s, Graham’s younger brother Hugh researched this branch of the family and published an article frankly disclosing the history of slaveholding and sexual exploitation.23 Following up, Graham himself visited the island and met some of his very distant cousins in 1970.24
The marriage of the cousins, Charles and Marion, rolled the dice on inherited illnesses. Charles’s father, William, suffered from what Graham judged, very reasonably, to be manic depression, a disease long known to run in families – it has now been established that in a family where one person has the disease the likelihood of others suffering from it increases tenfold.25 William died on an impulsive visit to St Kitts, after long absence from the island, in 1881. Marion’s father, the Reverend Carleton Greene, also had a mental illness; he suffered from extreme guilt, and as Graham wrote, ‘when his bishop refused his request to be defrocked, proceeded to put the matter into effect himself in a field’. That is, he stripped naked before the watching villagers.26 ‘We were never told anything about that grandparent and I had always assumed he was dead before I was born.’27 In fact, he survived until 1924, and Graham later supposed that this man posed ‘a living menace’ to his daughter’s family.28
A more cheerfully embraced piece of family history was that Marion’s mother, of the Scottish Balfour family, was a cousin of the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. The young Graham Greene liked to think of Stevenson’s great adventure novel Kidnapped, with its young hero, as taking place on ‘the wild, open stretches’ of Berkhamsted Common. Marion may have met Stevenson when he came to visit her mother;29 she certainly knew his friend and editor Sidney Colvin, and the child Graham was once permitted to play bagatelle – a game like billiards – on a board that had belonged to Stevenson.30 His own fiction was influenced in important ways by Stevenson, and in 1949 Heinemann commissioned Greene to write a biography of him; he soon abandoned it as another author was working on a similar book.31 Greene gestures towards that abandoned project in The End of the Affair, when the novelist Bendrix decides to write a biography of Gordon of Khartoum.
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sp; Charles and Marion Greene had six children: the first, Alice Marion, known as ‘Molly’ (1897–1963), went on to live a quiet domestic life after falling off a mountain she was climbing into the arms of a man below, who became her husband; Herbert (1898–1968) was athletic in youth but alienated much of the family with his drinking, idleness, and fascist opinions; Raymond (1901–82) became a leading endocrinologist, and his life included a successful ascent of Mount Kamet in the Himalayas in 1931 and a nearly successful attempt on Everest two years later; Henry Graham, the future novelist, came as the fourth child on 2 October 1904; Hugh (1910–87) was a journalist of formidable intellect and eventually became Director-General of the BBC; and Elisabeth (1914–99) served in Admiralty intelligence through the war and in later years became Graham’s private secretary.
The children saw a good deal of Marion’s sisters Maud and Nora (known as ‘Nono’), and in the summer holidays stayed at the home of Charles’s unmarried elder brother Sir (William) Graham Greene at Harston Hall, Cambridgeshire. Sir Graham himself hated children so fled to London during the visits. He rather resembled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Mycroft Holmes, the elder brother of Sherlock – he was an expert at everything. A close associate of Winston Churchill, he had a hand in setting up naval intelligence and advised on defence matters until the end of his life. In old age he survived falling under a train on the London Underground by remaining very still until he was rescued. At the age of ninety-one he fell, without great harm, from a tree he was pruning. It was apparently a garden chair that finally killed him: he tripped over it, injured a foot, and gangrene took hold – the sign that he was at the end was a toe that came off with his sock.32
Uncle Eppy – Charles’s younger brother Edward – who had made a fortune in the coffee business in Brazil, also set up home in Berkhamsted with his German wife Eva, in a house with seventeen bedrooms. Arriving in 1910, they became known as the ‘Hall Greenes’ in contrast to the poorer and more bookish ‘School Greenes’. Eppy and Eva also had a brood of six: Benjamin, the eldest, was something of a dreamer, and in adult life he dabbled in extreme politics and was detained in 1939 as a possible Nazi sympathizer; Eva, called ‘Ave’, on whom Graham had a crush in his teenage years; and Barbara, who would save his life when they later trekked together through the Liberian jungle; Edward, or ‘Tooter’, who was a month younger than Graham and his closest friend among his cousins; the brilliant but erratic Felix, who became a journalist, pseudo-mystic, and apologist for Mao’s Great Leap Forward (Graham despised him); and Katharine, a late child. The Hall Greenes learned German from their mother, and had ways that seemed strange to the School Greenes.33
Until Graham was six, his home was the red-brick St John’s House in Chesham Road, which Charles had purchased in 1896.34 According to the practice of the time, he ran the house as a business. David Pearce, a former master of the school, observes: ‘That was why the characters of the housemaster and his wife were so important. A skinflint could keep his boys on thin rations, whereas a generous couple would become renowned for keeping a good table.’35 St John’s was a busy place. A matron and six female servants looked after more than forty borders in the somewhat severe dormitories with their pitch-pine partitions.
The Greene children were looked after in the family quarters by a much-loved nurse from Wiltshire named Annie Hyde. Graham remembered her as an old woman with a white bun holding a sponge over him in the bath. She had been hired when Molly was born and remained for many years, until her cantankerousness made her impossible and she was let go with a pension. There was also a series of nursery maids who did not hold up against Annie’s temper. Graham wrote: ‘I never remember being afraid of her, only impressed by that white bun of age.’36
The children would be brought down to play with their mother for an hour after tea, Graham fearing that his mother would tell them, yet again, the story of the Babes in the Wood, in which children are abandoned and birds cover their bodies with leaves – the story would make him cry. Remembering this, he later remarked: ‘My tear-ducts in childhood, and indeed for many years later, worked far too easily, and even today I sometimes slink shame-faced from a cinema at some happy ending that moves me by its incredibility.’37 This is the same writer who fashioned the dark ending of Brighton Rock and tried to stamp out sentimentality in his fiction as if at war with something in himself.
Although the adult Graham Greene disliked children, portraying them often as cruel and treacherous, he was himself a pleasant little boy, especially after he had his adenoids and tonsils out. Alice Greene, another of Charles’s sisters, visited at Christmas 1909 and wrote of the five-year-old:
. . . how shall I describe little Graham? He is an utterly different child – evidently since that operation. Can you imagine little Graham with Raymond’s charm? He is bright, sunny & gay, chatters all day long, has pretty manners, & a certain pretty little serious grace of his own which is altogether charming. I expect you have heard how he once said to his mother ‘I am for Votes for Women,’ & now I have seen him I can quite realize him saying it.
On Sunday afternoon Dr. Fry and Julia called. ‘So Graham would give Women the Vote?’ said Dr. Fry. ‘No, if he had them he would keep them for himself’ said someone & then Dr. Fry said ‘Come, Graham, you would give Women the Vote, would you not? You are for Votes for Women?’ Graham laughed uneasily, writhed a little when he realized that everyone was looking at him & said with a burst of charming frankness ‘I believe in them!’38
He was late learning to read. His parents, using such primers as Reading without Tears, found him resistant to all their efforts. Then, suddenly, on a visit to Harston Hall, he was able to penetrate ‘a real book. It was paper-covered with the picture of a boy, bound and gagged, dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with water rising above his waist – an adventure of Dixon Brett, detective.’ Not wanting to be discovered, he took it up to the attic. His mother seems to have guessed, and gave him a copy of R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island for the train home, but to keep his secret he determinedly stared at the book’s single illustration the whole way. In retrospect, he wondered whether he feared being sent to the preparatory school if it was known that he could read.39
Greene believed that ‘early reading has far more influence on conduct than any religious teaching’.40 As the son of the headmaster, he had access to plenty of books, and even as an old man he still had on his shelves many he had read in childhood. His imagination always drew on this bank of reading. It is commonly observed, for example, that his fascination with men on the run has its roots in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. When Greene revised The Ministry of Fear, he added a series of epigrams from The Little Duke by Charlotte M. Yonge. Before finishing The Human Factor, he went to the Transvaal see the Rain Queen, who figures in Rider Haggard’s She.41 Captain Gilson’s The Pirate Aeroplane contains a scene in which the young hero, expecting to be killed in the morning, plays cards with his captor; this influenced the portrayal of a game of cards in England Made Me, and, apparently, a key episode in The Power and the Glory, where the whisky priest spends the night in charged dialogue with the Lieutenant.
In their nursery, the Greene children pored over books by G. A. Henty, who specialized in heroic warfare and rejoiced in such titles as Under Drake’s Flag, With Wolfe in Canada, and With Clive in India. Henty’s books permeated the minds of boys in Britain a century ago, and while the adult Greene repudiated the lessons of Empire and noble warfare he remained obsessed with travel, believing life to be more urgent in troubled places. His conversation with Henty never quite ended.42
One book stood out among all the others, a historical novel set in Italy: ‘But when – perhaps I was fourteen by that time – I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf, the future for better or worse really struck. From that moment I began to write. All the other possible futures slid away: the potential civil servant, the don, the clerk had to look for other incarnations.�
�� He saw in the book’s villain, Visconti, the Duke of Milan, the cruelty and charisma of a bullying friend named Carter: ‘He exercised terror from a distance like a snow-cloud over young fields. Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey. I read all that in The Viper of Milan and I looked round and I saw that it was so.’ After reading that story, he began filling exercise books with similar tales; he was now launched on the life of a writer, and even sixty years later, the sinister Visconti would still fire his imagination as he gave the name to the war-criminal lover of Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt.
In the autumn of 1910, Thomas Fry resigned as headmaster in order to become Dean of Lincoln. Even though Charles Greene was Fry’s favoured candidate to succeed him, it took three ballots for the governors to elect him out of a field of thirty. Once it was settled, Fry, a small man with a large beard, was seen dancing for joy as he led Charles Greene into the school quadrangle. Although recalled as a ‘brilliant and inspiring’ teacher, Charles lacked Fry’s magnetism and his understanding of boys. But his colleagues admired many things about him, not least his lucid prose style. Moreover, he was an orator and could make a fine impression upon the parents; this was invaluable as sometimes other speakers made a mess of things. In an episode that brings to mind P. G. Wodehouse’s character Gussie Fink-Nottle, the Earl Brownlow gave out prizes on Founder’s Day in 1912 and offered this consolation to those who got nothing: ‘Some of the most successful men were stupid boys at school. Wellington’s mother used to say what a stupid boy he was . . . ’43 Perhaps his drink had been spiked.
From time to time, Charles brought in celebrities, such as Sir Ernest Shackleton who told the boys about polar exploration.44 Fascinated, Graham dreamed of joining an expedition to Antarctica. At the age of about ten, he wrote to the explorer William Speirs Bruce, correcting supposed errors in his book Polar Exploration. ‘I received a courteous and defensive reply’.45