* * *
fn1 Rodney Dennys, later married to Greene’s sister, Elisabeth, became a successful head of station, section 5 in Cairo, then went to Turkey, where he was the senior SIS officer at the time of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean’s flight to the USSR.
8
Return to Africa
Under the cope of storms, with waves disputing
On the free crossway of the sea.
– ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
GREENE ARRIVED IN Liverpool on 8 December 1941, the day the Japanese landed in Thailand and north-east Malaya, and the United States declared war on Japan. He spent the night at that vast Liverpool hotel, the Adelphi. He had last stayed there in January 1935 at the start of his remarkable journey to Sierra Leone and Liberia with his cousin Barbara, which resulted in his brilliant travel book, Journey Without Maps. Then he had thought the Adelphi was designed without aesthetic taste but with the right ideas about comfort and a genuine idea of magnificence: ‘Beneath the huge cliff-like fall of its walls, the idea of an English inn existed; one didn’t mind asking for muffins or a pint of bitter, while the boats hooted in the Mersey and the luggage littered the hall.’1
In the journal he kept during his second voyage to West Africa, he wrote briefly (often using a telegraphic style), but the feeling engendered, even in wartime conditions, was still the same: ‘Breakfast in the Adelphi – the great comfort and security’;2 then the taxi drive ‘through battered streets to the dock. Empty Sabbath-like wastes with nobody about to ask the way. The difficulty of finding something as large as a ship. At last the ship. The bright clean little staterooms.’3
There were only twelve passengers on the unnamed Elder Dempster cargo ship: ‘The passengers: two fleet air arm officers: two RNVR; a Naval officer who had only twice been at sea in his life – as far as Hamburg; also an odd foreigner in the strangest plus fours and very little English – a great square face and square plus fours, and two oil men who keep together.’4 One in particular, because of the red-carpet treatment he received, was carefully noted by Greene. He reappeared as a character in The Comedians a quarter of a century later: ‘W., a rather mysterious elderly American travelling under the wing of the F.O.: farewell party in London as [Averell] Harriman’s guest. Fetched by car by the port admiral – and yet the great authority on Byzantine art. Speaks Arabic, knows Turkey very well and possibly bound there, a vegetarian.’ In a letter to his mother from Lagos, Greene again referred to the mysterious elderly American in a more direct manner: ‘Nice old Professor Wittemore of Harvard, who was my shipmate, and a friend of the Matthews brothers, had looked [Elisabeth] up in Cairo. He recognised her immediately she came to his hotel by her likeness to me! This is very nice for me, but less so for E.’5
At about 2.30 p.m. they left port to anchor in the Mersey. The submarine menace was an ever-present concern and boat drill a serious rehearsal for what might well happen: ‘I am No. 1 boat with the Fleet Air Arm officer, two or three blacks, etc.’ and ‘all day two rafts are suspended on a slope each side of the ship ready to be cut loose … On the poop the anti-aircraft men in khaki and any old sweater keep watch round the Bofors gun … Every passenger is morally compelled to volunteer for submarine and machine gun watches.’6 He ends his first day: ‘Tonight one will sleep safely quiet in the Mersey.’7
The journey was not a pleasure cruise. This was war and passengers had to man three four-hour watches during the day, two men on machine-guns above the deck for aircraft, and two below the bridge for submarines. The sailor who showed the passengers how to fire the guns had been on the ship’s previous convoy and told Greene that on that convoy two ships had been torpedoed the first night out of the Mersey. The warning to boat stations was seven short blasts of the siren and one long.
That first day was bitterly cold: ‘The sea getting up: soldiers in Balaclavas by the Bofors.’ Greene noticed the ‘black steward making water in the bilge’. In his journal he wrote that ‘even a bird can look like a periscope’. At dinner the chief told them that in weather like this it was easy for a submarine to follow a ship unobserved during the day above water and submerge at night for the attack. The hour with the machine-gun was less cold: ‘One climbs a short vertical steel ladder into a kind of conning-tower containing a gun with steel shield.’ He was less uncomfortable there: ‘The steel shields like the wings of black angels’, and perched up above the deck, ‘one hears the wind in the wires like choral singing from inside a church’.8
The passengers listened every night to the news on the steward’s radio and that first day heard the desperate report of a great victory by the Japanese, the sinking of the British carriers the Prince of Wales and the Repulse with terrible loss of life. Coming so soon after Pearl Harbor, and with the Germans only five miles from the Kremlin, the news left each listener with an overwhelming sense of the forces now aligned against the Allies. In an unpublished part of his journal, Greene recorded: ‘At 6 listened to the wireless in the Chief Steward’s cabin. Germany’s declaration of war on America, following on the loss of our warships made me feel suddenly sick.’9
At tea, Greene felt a different kind of sickness: ‘Awful prospect – duty while seasick,’ and in the biting cold of the bows, he recited ‘Hail Marys’ to try to distract himself. About midnight, the sirens woke him. He counted seven blasts but no long blast. It was the approach to Belfast:
Little white lighthouses on stilts: a buoy that seems to have a table tied to it: a sunken ship right up in the dock. Cranes like skeleton foliage in a steely winter. The flicker of green flame in the bellies of building ships. Hundreds of dock-yard workers stop altogether to see one small ship come in.10
At Belfast they waited for other ships to join the convoy; perhaps they gained a modest sense of safety. Greene noted with some astonishment the general anxiety to get ashore in so dull a place. Nevertheless, he went ashore too, thinking it wise to go to Confession before facing the submarine-filled Atlantic. It was difficult finding a Catholic church in Protestant Belfast, but he came across one, a hideous structure:
At the Presbytery a tousled housekeeper tried to send me away when I asked for a confession. ‘This is no time for confession,’ trying to shut the door in my face. The dreadful parlour hung with pious pictures and then the quiet nice young priest who called me ‘son’ and whose understanding was of the simplest.11
Later Greene and two others plus the purser (whom Greene had known on the David Livingstone when he first sailed to Sierra Leone) went ashore again after dinner to the Globe, an oyster house where they had a dozen and a half of Galway oysters and a pint and a half of draught Guinness.
They left Belfast on 13 December, but lay all day in the lough. Gathering there were a dozen cargo ships, smaller than their 5,000 tonner, plus a destroyer, a cruiser and a little corvette, which steamed round the ships in the late afternoon taking charge. They discovered that the fourth engineer had skipped ship. He was ten pounds in the company’s debt and couldn’t get a drink until the debt was paid off. Greene wrote in his journal: ‘How oddly dramatic ships are. My last voyage [when he returned from his trip to Mexico, which led to The Power and the Glory] – in a German ship from Vera Cruz – the cook committed suicide rather than return home.’12
The little ship now travelled in the direction of Greenock. It was cruelly cold: ‘Leave the lough and join a line of about seven ships. Submarine watch 9 to 10.15: with the machine-gun 10.15 to 11.30, and then after a rather scanty lunch relieved someone at the gun from 1 to 1.30. The last watch high wind and icy sleet. Couldn’t get warm afterwards. Lay down.’13 The next two days, 15 and 16 December, were rough for Greene. The ship was making no more than four knots against a head wind going south-west. Greene was sick both days. Coming off duty from the well of the ship, he slammed the door of the cabin and caught his thumb: ‘The whole nail will go. Bled a good deal and felt like hell. Luckily my left but difficult enough [to write].’14
As usual, writing was Greene’s most important activity, a
discipline never to be relaxed, even on board. Although involved in the daily protection of the ship, and often seasick, he used the time between the day watches to write a short book called British Dramatists. He had signed the contract in April 1941 (his payment was only £50 for the world rights), undertaking to write no more than 12,000 words. The quality of the book, which is now out of print, is greatly in excess of the sum of money offered. His journal reveals the effort he made to write. 11 December: ‘So far in spite of nausea and watches I have kept up an average of 500 words a day on British Dramatists.’ 15 and 16 December: ‘Rough both days … No writing either day.’ 22 December: ‘disposed of Congreve in British Dramatists’. He wrote of the great Restoration dramatist: ‘Shadwell had more life, and Wycherley more stagecraft – Congreve like the smooth schoolboy stole the prize.’15 Greene completed the manuscript before he landed at Freetown: ‘I finished off the British Dramatists’, he wrote to his mother, ‘on the ship without reference books & typed it laboriously on a machine with a French keyboard when I got to Lagos.’16
Greene’s journal reflects his fascination with character. On 19 December he recorded the second steward’s conversation:
The second steward – the cracked one – was a prisoner for two years in the last war – according to him in Siberia … He explains his paunch by it. ‘I hate them,’ he says, blocking the way in his white jacket. ‘I’d kill a German child that high. I’d kill a German woman who was pregnant with one. If I’m alive, you’ll hear of me after the war in Lord Beaverbrook’s paper … And if I die, I’ve left a letter for my two daughters – they’ll carry on. There’ll be two rebels in England if they try to let them off this time.’
‘Don’t talk of dying.’
‘I’ll never die. I live by prayer, I pray at sunrise and sunset like a Mohammedan.’ (He is a Catholic.)17
In his published account of the journey, Greene called one troublesome fellow ‘Glasgow’ for obvious reasons. He was the drunk traditionally found on board every West Coast boat. He had a ‘hooked bird’s nose and his sudden tipsy release of mental activity was like a minor prophet’. Early in the voyage ‘Glasgow’ had everyone penned in the small smoking room:
Well, gentlemen … we’re going to be together for five or six weeks, and there’s going to be a wonderful interchange of mind … We’ve come into this ship all thinking different things, but when we go out of that door we’ll all think the same … I’m not interested in what you think: I’m interested in what I think … It will be the most wonderful experience of my life, the deepest experience. I’ll impose on you all what I think. I won’t disguise it from you, gentlemen, I’m a drinker. I buried my wife last August and since then poor Joe’s had nothing to do but get drunk.18
‘Glasgow’ is often quoted directly in Greene’s journal: ‘“I’m drunk and proud of it. I hate criticism. Why shouldn’t I be drunk? It feels good to be drunk and it sharpens the intellect.” The Fleet Air Arm warrant officers watch him disapprovingly.’ Apparently, ‘Glasgow’ was joining a friend at Basra as second in command of all naval transport through the Persian Gulf.19
On 21 December the weather was rough and though they had left the Mersey eleven days before, Greene doubted they had reached the latitude of Land’s End. On 22 December some of the convoy turned off over the ‘south-western horizon’. Soberly, Greene added, ‘We missed their presence.’ The day before, with the heavy mist and visibility of only 100 yards, the ships’ sirens were blowing different tones. When the mist rose at 8.15 the next morning, each ship was still in its exact place, chugging slowly on. To frighten off possible submarines, the destroyer dropped depth charges and later raced towards the head of the convoy. It was at this point that Greene discovered from the chief steward that, in addition to the cargo of aeroplanes, they carried TNT. The ‘CS’ was nervous: ‘this is his first trip after being torpedoed and his cabin looks exactly like the previous one’. He felt ‘jittery at night. Hasn’t gone to bed but lies on his couch. The cargo of depth charges and TNT under his cabin.’
The chief steward had every reason to be afraid. Between June 1940 and March 1941 German submarines sank two million tons of shipping, sinkings which if continued would have prevented England from feeding her population. U-boats off West Africa attacked not only at periscope depth by day but by night on the surface, making use of their greater surface speed. They were hunting convoys down in ‘wolf-packs’. Beyond the range of air cover, the available escorts could not protect convoys from terrible losses from such mass attacks.20
Despite the concern about submarines, there were constant parties. On 18 December it was stormy again, but that did not stop the revelry: ‘Party began in chief steward’s cabin when I went to get thumb dressed at 10 and continued till I went to duty on guns at 12.30. The second engineer played the piano, the purser tried to sing, and the second steward served what he called 3d. cocktails – rum and milk – giving a dramatic recitation in a tin hat.’21 That day, the American professor related an anecdote about Gertrude Stein. Asked at a lecture why it was that she answered questions so clearly and wrote so obscurely, Stein replied: ‘If Keats was asked a question, would you expect him to reply with the “Ode to a Grecian Urn”?’
By 23 December the ship had moved at last out of the cold into warm sun and blue sea. As an additional diversion, Greene began to play chess with a Polish passenger, Kitzkuran. ‘It is not to be avoided. If I lie down in the afternoon, he pokes his shaven Mongolian head through the cabin door and says, “Check?” During the game he sings all the time to himself: “Good. Very good. It is very good,” and tries to take back his pieces.’22 Kitzkuran turned out to be a confirmed polygamist. He explained the advantages of three wives: ‘One wife, she rule. Three, I am king.’23
As Christmas approached, there were more parties: ‘24 December: Warmer and sunnier. Passing between the Azores in sight of land. A party again with the steward, the purser and “Glasgow” before lunch. The steward showing how to test a French letter.’24 Greene started Christmas Eve with a half-bottle of champagne, then had Beaune for dinner followed by port and brandy. He went down to the steward’s to help with Christmas decorations and another party developed, which lasted until 2.30 a.m.:
French letters blown up the size of balloons and hung over the captain’s chair. The black steward Daniel’s gentle song, his shyness … stands on his hands and put his feet round his neck. Sinclair bossy & too free with his patronage, Fraser noisy, ‘Glasgow’ himself. The Fleet Air Arm’s songs – ‘Danny Boy’, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ … and the like. The cracked second steward became boring with over-repeated turns: we had heard so often already the poem in praise of the Merchant Service said to be by his eleven-year-old daughter – the recitation in a tin helmet … Cookie, in his dirty white apron, thin consumptive fanatical face with long razor nose and three days’ beard. His magnificent ballad about the E.D. ship which went down, & Captain Kerry …
Major Cripps’s circular letter to all officers & men: ‘Remember what you have been told about V.D. & do your duty in the lifeboats.’25
Christmas Day was uneventful; Greene decided to start at eleven in the morning with a bottle of champagne to cure his hangover. At lunch the passengers heard the Empire broadcast followed by the King’s speech on the radio. They enjoyed a generous Christmas menu and made toasts to the King, Churchill and Roosevelt, as well as the Polish leader Sikorski, included because of Kitzkuran. The drinking and partying went on till midnight when they sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
It was not until 30 January 1942 that Vivien heard from her husband about his Christmas activities (such was the delay in transporting mail during the war): ‘It was simply intoxicating to hear from you – your lovely long Letter I, which was forwarded to Sidmouth [Vivien had taken the children to Sidmouth for a holiday so that they could convalesce after chicken pox] & I loved reading about your Christmas. The champagne (which you can’t spell) sounds helpful but I know that the mere presence of the man [Pro
fessor Wittemore, the mysterious American scholar] who knew Henry & William James would irradiate any voyage.’26
On 28 December, his daughter’s birthday, Greene drank champagne in her honour before lunch, split two bottles of claret at night, and attended a party in the chief steward’s cabin afterwards. A week before their scheduled arrival in Freetown, Greene wrote in his journal: ‘I feel as if I’m just coming out from under an anaesthetic, & am scared of how lonely I shall feel when I leave the ship.’ On the 30th more parties took place in the steward’s cabin before lunch and before dinner:
The usual West Coast tales are starting up like plants in the heat. How one remembers them from eight years back. The doctor who cuts a tumour off a black girl’s breast and tosses it to her waiting relatives: ‘Here’s a dash [gift].’ The colonel & his girl in Lagos – of about 40! ‘Soon as she saw me, she turns up her skirt behind.’27
At 10 p.m. that night the sighting of glimmering light on the horizon – caused either by a lighted ship or an island – generated excitement. It was the first time lights had been seen out of doors since leaving Belfast. The following day they saw their first real sign of land and a Sunderland flying boat above them took a look round for submarines. It gave everyone confidence as if they had up till now ‘been lost on the empty sea’. Finally, the convoy divided. Some ships with railway engines on deck made for the Cape, and they were left to carry on alone. They felt the isolation and loneliness.
On 3 January 1942, shortly before noon, the ship entered the port of Freetown. The beauty of the scene as viewed from the ship was recalled in The Heart of the Matter.
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 13
