The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  From here the port was always beautiful; the thin layer of houses sparkled in the sun like quartz or lay in the shadow of the great green swollen hills … The destroyers and the corvettes sat around like dogs: signal flags rippled and a helio flashed. The fishing boats rested on the broad bay under their brown butterfly sails.28

  Greene was deeply moved to return to Freetown after seven years: ‘It felt odd & poetic & encouraging coming back after so many years. Like seeing a place you’ve dreamed of. Even the sweet hot smell from the land – is it the starved greenery and the red soil, the smoke from the huts in Kru town, or the fires in the bush clearing the ground for planting? – was oddly familiar.’29 The printed version of his journal adds this final sentence: ‘It will always be to me the smell of Africa, and Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.’30

  Greene’s first visit to Africa had been made primarily as an antidote to boredom, an escape from Western civilisation. This time he came as an intelligence officer, a member of MI6 involved in counter-espionage against the German enemy:

  landing in Freetown from a slow convoy four weeks out of Liverpool. I felt a strong sense of unreality: how had this happened? … The red Anglican cathedral looked down on my landing … Nothing in the exhausted shabby unchanged town of bougainvillaea and balconies, tin roofs and funeral parlours, had changed, but I never imagined on my first visit [in 1935] that one day I would arrive like this to work, to be one of those tired men drinking pink gin at the City bar as the sun set on the laterite.31

  Greene was back. For a second time, he was to lose his heart to West Africa.

  9

  The Soupsweet Land

  I speak of Africa and golden joys.

  – SHAKESPEARE

  EVERY PASSENGER AFTER a voyage longs to get ashore and stay ashore. Greene touched dry land but did not stay there. He was waiting to be contacted by someone (for the nature of his job and the reason for his presence had to be kept secret) – but by whom? His journal shows that he was not claimed for six days and continued to sleep on board ship.

  Still, on arriving in port, he scrambled ashore like the rest of the passengers as his confusing journal entry reveals: ‘The restlessness, the contrary rumours, the buttonholing of passengers in a port who want to get ashore. Finally after lunch gatecrashed with the launch which brought back the captain. The surly E[lder] D[empster] agent, the Field Security business: “This action is serious. Some people who thought it wasn’t are in Freetown Gaol now.”’1

  The town in the bright sunlight, crowded with sailors and soldiers, looked a little less seedy than he remembered, though the kites still circled in the sky on the watch for carrion: ‘The Sunday clothes. The Port. The officers’ club – no alcohol between 2 & 4: in the port invasion ships, hospital ship, etc.’2

  Journal entries following his arrival suggest that Greene was on the lookout for material for novels. His stay aboard gave him time to collect material for a book he never wrote, but he was watching and listening: ‘The food of the men while we have been having soup, fish, two meats, sweet & perhaps a repeat: they had crackling off the roast pork we had for lunch & two small potatoes & a small bit of pudding.’3

  One source, ‘the shadow in the companionway with the pleasant, but rough accent’, tells how half a dozen blacks got on board the previous night when he had left his watch for just a moment. The blacks could steal things through an open porthole by using long sticks with rubber at the end, or fish hooks. The same seaman was on the Arandora Star when she was sunk. Apparently, a prisoner kept putting his head out of the porthole while the boats were being lowered. The crew shouted to him to keep it in, but he took no notice and a falling raft took his head clean off. This started a panic among the other prisoners and seven were shot. The seaman was on a raft for seven hours before being picked up. ‘“This West Coast route is the worst,” he said.’4

  Greene did not find all the crew as pleasant as the ‘shadow by the companionway’:

  The third engineer, tall & slim with curly fair hair & conceited eyes, leans over rails & exposes everywhere with complacency his bottom in [position of] bugger absolute. A curious kink in his brain makes him talk as if he fought on the Somme, though his signing-on papers give him as 30 & he looks no more … Always the faint supercilious smile, the pathetic pose & the unreliability.5

  Greene also went ashore the day following his arrival, a Sunday, but on the Monday waited all day for the RAF launch, which never arrived. In contrast Kitzkuran went ashore that day:

  He was seen sitting in the park with two little black boys … The boys were offering him singing and dancing.

  ‘Gentleman & Ladies?’

  ‘Schoolgirls.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Oh fourteen to twenty-four.’

  ‘And drinks?’

  ‘Whisky & gin & port.’

  ‘Expensive?’

  ‘All drink expensive now.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can do?’

  ‘There are ladies.’

  ‘Expensive?’

  ‘Cheaper than London.’

  ‘Ten shillings.’

  ‘Oh no. You no get girl for 10/- in London.’

  ‘Fifteen shillings?’

  ‘Yes all right.’

  He went off with them.6

  On Tuesday Greene was able to go ashore to buy tropical trousers: a cockroach ran out of every pair he touched. He was alive to any gossip which might be useful both as intelligence officer and novelist: ‘The passenger agent at E.D.’s showing off his friendship with a man called Coleman, son of Coleman’s mustard: asking another agent about him he replied: “Oh, he’s rather a big man here. We don’t know quite what. A parcel to him came undone & it contained a lot of Tommy guns.”’7

  On the Wednesday (7 January) he was again left on board and played chess with Kitzkuran: ‘All religions say a man must have woman two times a week.’8

  *

  Greene was eventually offered accommodation, until arrangements could be made to fly him to Lagos for a further three months’ training: ‘Difficulty of accommodation solved by my intro. to Dr. John Martyn, Food Controller, who invited me to stay with him from Friday.’9

  Even though he was indebted to Dr Martyn, Greene was watchful, and witheringly cool in his examination of the Food Controller’s character: ‘A pompous little man very inclined to show off: monocle dubiously unnecessary. Known in certain quarters as Filthy Freddie. Gave him lunch at the City [hotel] & it only cost 6/-. Everywhere he goes they charge him cheap prices. He can’t stop them.’10

  That Friday, Dr Martyn’s launch fetched him at about noon: ‘The cook arranged a musical farewell as I got on the launch: the gong, tinpans, etc.’ In an article years later Greene added further detail: ‘A kitchen orchestra of forks and frying pans played me off the Elder Dempster cargo ship into a motor launch where my temporary host … awaited me, expecting something less flippant.’11 Greene left his tin boxes with the customs, and had lunch with Dr Martyn at the City Hotel, and afterwards sat in the park for a while watching a fountain. Then Dr Martyn drove him to the hill station, where a family called Mackenzie were staying. Greene’s observing eye is ever apparent: ‘Mrs M. a tall pretty blonde girl who looked as if the climate was just beginning to pull down – inclined to a grumbling tone. M. a young man with a rather new moustache which he fingers a lot – intelligent. M. drove me round the station – the European hospital, the reservoir in a cup of the enormous nipple like hills. Very lovely up here with the excessive vegetation, the little sea birds the size of a wren with a long beak.’ Back at the club Greene watched Martyn, Mackenzie and a Royal Naval volunteer play snooker, and he noted: ‘Mrs M. a little tight & ever so much nicer when we left.’12

  It seems as if Greene was casually offered temporary accommodation by Dr Martyn following an accidental introduction. An entry in his journal suggests otherwise: ‘Dr. M[artyn] while we were
out driving suggested I should take on the job at present done by one of his people an intelligence officer from the French Guinea & Liberian border, liaison with Wagon [MI5 agent under Martyn].’13 In 1940, in a letter to Anthony Powell, Greene had expressed a private ambition to do propaganda work in French Guinea and the Ivory Coast from a base in Liberia,14 and, a little over a year later, the same proposal was secretly but officially made to him.

  In spite of his innocuous reference to Dr Martyn in his journal, Greene was waiting for someone to approach him, and Martyn must have been his contact, a contact which had to be kept secret because enemy agents were alert in Freetown: new arrivals were watched.

  In an article, ‘The Soupsweet Land’, written ten years later, Greene described quite a different meeting with his contact. Here Dr Martyn (unnamed) is simply his host and quite unaware that he has an MI6 man in his midst:

  The sense of unreality grew stronger every hour. A passage by air had been arranged to Lagos where I was to work for three months before returning, and I thought it best to warn my host that he would be seeing me again. ‘What exactly are you going to do here?’ he asked, and I was studiously vague, for no one had yet told me what my ‘cover’ … was to be.15

  His contact approaches him secretly. A major with a large moustache drops in for drinks and suddenly asks Greene to ‘Come for a walk’ in the middle of the day when the heat is greatest. Greene is struck by the oddity of the request at that hour. They set off walking down the road in the haze caused by the dry dusty wind from the desert. Suddenly the major swerves sideways into the garden of an empty house, whose owner has gone on leave. Sitting on a large stone together, the major provides Greene with his cover:

  ‘Signal came in last Friday. You’re an inspector of the DOT. Got it?’

  ‘What’s DOT?’

  ‘Department of Overseas Trade,’ he said sharply.

  Ignorance in this new intelligence world was like incompetence.16

  Greene was now able to answer ‘Filthy Freddie’s’ query: ‘“As a matter of fact,” I said to my host, “I can tell you, though it’s not been officially announced yet, that I am to be an Inspector of DOT.”’17

  This must be a fictional account since his journal proves Martyn was MI5 and knew Greene as MI6. He could not have been happy with Greene’s arrival since, for the first time, an interloper from the hated MI6 was to be active in his territory – there would be terrific wariness on both sides. Kim Philby mentioned to me the MI5 agent in Freetown, though not by name: ‘What seemed to impress Graham most about Freetown was rain on the tin roofs and his MI5 opposite number, a tropical boozer of sub-homicidal tendencies which surfaced when he suffered visits of inspection from HQ in London.’18

  *

  In a backwater out of the danger and excitement of the war, with the intrigue of intelligence minimal, Greene’s journal reveals a contempt for the colonial lifestyle of West Africa. Although he enjoyed his first afternoon (fishing with two colleagues of Martyn), the evening appalled him by its triviality. He went to a pantomime, Royal Robes, given by a medical unit with the help of two nursing sisters: ‘Felt terribly depressed at the thought of life here – snobbery, sex & games I have no skill at.’19

  The thoughts of his hero in The Heart of the Matter trying to cope with conditions in the terrible heat of the tropics are surely Greene’s: ‘Scobie walked rapidly back into the lounge. He went full tilt into an arm-chair and came to a halt. His vision moved jerkily back into focus, but sweat dripped into his right eye … He told himself: Be careful. This isn’t a climate for emotion. It’s a climate for meanness, malice, snobbery …’20

  On Sunday, 11 January 1942, Dr Martyn took a party in his launch up-river first to Tasso Island, a swamp reclamation, and then to the famous Bunce Island, an old Portuguese slavers’ fort. In his journal, Greene noted the disintegrating epitaphs found in the ‘steamy graveyard’:

  10 guns lying on the grass stamped with George III’s arms … the little steamy graveyard – the ship’s cup … ‘18 years devoted service set up by the proprietor … se . . rus . . from Surrey, chief agent, renowned for his humanity’ then the record breaks off ‘A Danish sea captain married to the virtuous lady …’ who bore him ‘two good-natured daughters’.

  Ten years later Greene wrote: ‘The phrase “The White Man’s Grave” has become a music hall cliché to those who have never seen the little crumbling cemeteries of the West Coast like that on Bunce Island in Sierra Leone river.’

  The party consisted of Martyn, Greene, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic and her two charming daughters (aged about seventeen and nineteen), and an old convoy commodore: ‘A sumptuous lunch before we got to Tasso & a lavatory rigged up on board for the ladies – the Commodore’s failure to realise why they had gone on board alone. Note: the debased devil dancer at Tasso with just a sack on his head & exposing his body.21 Afterwards the club … The club library has 3 of my books – It’s a Battlefield, A Gun for Sale, & The Power and the Glory.’22

  The Heart of the Matter also reveals an almost physical revulsion for the white colonials: ‘His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach … the Colonial Secretary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.’23

  During his short stay, Greene felt an increasing dislike for ‘Filthy Freddie’: ‘The dim Dr. Mac for dinner again, & a young Trinidadian officer from East Africa whose anecdotes of the Abyssinian campaign only temporarily deflected Dr. Martyn from sex – baring a girl bathing, etc.’ Greene had an instinctive objection to lewd insinuations. When twenty-one and staying in Nottingham, he left his digs because of ‘an awful man whose mind is the lowest cesspool of dirt I’ve ever come across … the hearty talks filth’. Sexual vulgarity dismayed him, though later entries in his journal, when he was partying in Lagos, show that he became a little more tolerant: ‘The story of the toffee apple’; ‘Stick your wooden leg up your arse’; ‘Dinner … with S. Rather boastful, but many interesting professional stories. Petting the [waitress?] brings all to an end’; ‘T’s farewell party. Additional jokes. The frozen midget with the rigid digit. The massive vassal with the passive tassel. Obscene jokes have an unnecessary social elan, and the only way I can remember them is to note them down. Otherwise one has to remain dumb for they run out of my head at once.’24

  Before Greene left for Lagos, he hoped to take a plane to spy out the land covering his area of operations, but on 12 January the plane failed to turn up. The next day Mackenzie drove Greene to Airways House, but again his name did not appear on the Pan-American passenger list. Greene, needing to make an initial survey of his territory, forced his way on to a Hudson and flew as far as Takoradi. Over Monrovia, he photographed the river and the Firestone aerodrome: ‘The Ivory Coast thick bush. The Gold Coast – the long stretch of sand & bush lawn-like rectangles out of the bush.’ From Takoradi, he hoped to find transport to Lagos. Right up to the last moment because of hold ups, he felt he’d have to return to Dr Martyn’s, but a lucky chance gave him the last seat on a plane.

  His note before leaving refers to Dr Martyn: ‘By British Airways to Lagos. Arrived about 2.30. Very congenial coy after Filthy Freddie.’25

  *

  Greene spent his days in Lagos coding and decoding in an office and his nights with a colleague in a disused (but not displeasing) police bungalow on a ‘mosquito-haunted creek’.26

  Three days after arrival, he received TAB jabs (‘arm v. painful’) and took the afternoon off, spending it in the bungalow. It all seems halcyon: ‘A little boat with blue sail goes gently by outside window.’27 ‘This is really a very nice & luxurious place very different to Freetown,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘There are lavatories that flush & you can drink water from the tap – two luxuries I shall miss. I share a bungalow right over the lagoon: the water laps ten yards away at the
bottom of the garden & we can see the ships coming into the port.’28

  For those few months of further training in Lagos, Greene lived in comfort (but notice the identity of the man sharing his bungalow is kept secret): ‘I & the other man have one boy [servant] each – & share a “small boy”.’ Both agent trainees lived well, and suffered the tedium of an orderly existence, as he wrote to his mother:

  We get our meals at the club for 5/- a day … We are woken with orange at 6.30 in the morning (also tea & sweet biscuits … even bourbons). Cold bath … walk to the club (two & a half miles) for breakfast … by car onto the office till 12.30 (orange juice at 11), then back to the club for lunch … to the bungalow for a siesta till 2.30 – back to office – tea at 4 … knock off any time according to work, between 5 & 7: back to another tea of our own in the bungalow – more fruit … warm bath: drink: back to club at 8 for dinner … then either to an open-air cinema or back to a quiet evening under the mosquito net with another grapefruit to end up the day.29

  But he committed to his journal less quiet evenings:

  After dinner with S. prowled around with L.P. & C. The Sugar Babies: little forced embraces. Black tarts have much the same manners of serving drinks & chatting with customers as white ones. The Royal Hotel roof garden – up one in the social scale. The lavatory palm frond open to the stars & George Formby’s voice coming through on a microphone. The attempted seduction of the shy & excited L.P.30

  While Greene was enjoying life in Lagos, at home Vivien received a disturbing note from an inspector of taxes which frightened her:

  I understand [Tax Inspector Doyle wrote on 8 January] that your Husband received two thousand pounds for copyright from Alex Korda Film Productions during the year ended 5 April 1941 and also £1,331.8.6. literary royalties from Messrs Pearn, Pollinger, & Higham. As the total receipts shown in your husband’s return for 1941–42 amounted to £1,193 only, it seems likely that the above mentioned items were for some reason not included. I shall be obliged if you will ask your husband to let me have an explanation and also his agreement to the assessment of these items in due course.