*
What comes through at first from his various accounts of that time is the impression that he had suffered a profound culture shock. Of the various strains in the Greene family, he would seem to have inherited the remoteness of character, the need for privacy and for the security of a warm family environment in which to develop his individuality. His instinctive reaction to his gradual involvement in the public and, in a sense, uncivilised world of school, has been demonstrated by his truancies, but he still had the family life to rely upon then. When he was sent to St John’s as a boarder, he was totally cut off from the secure life that had succoured him, but with many added and painful ironies. He had lost his home at School House and he was now living in what had been his home for his first six years, St John’s, but he was on the other side of the green baize door. He entered the house now by a side door ‘like a service entrance’, and the passage that was deceptively similar to the one he had known in childhood was now alien ground. There was no hope of returning through the green baize door. He was in those grim rooms he had not known existed where there was a schoolroom ‘with ink-stained nibbled desks insufficiently warmed by one cast-iron stove … stone stairs, worn by generations of feet, leading to a dormitory divided by pitch-pine partitions that gave inadequate privacy – no moment of the night was free from noise, a cough, a snore, a fart.’7
The seedy experiences of Anthony in England Made Me are based on those of his brother Herbert, but Anthony’s experiences at school come from Graham’s experiences at St John’s – the same physical surroundings, the same lack of privacy:
Feet on the stone stairs, running, scrambling, pushing, up to the dormitory … Not a moment of quiet even at night, for always someone talks in his sleep the other side of the wooden partition. I lay sweating … unable to sleep … waiting for the thrown sponge, the rustle of curtains, the hand plucking at my bed-clothes, the giggles, the slap of bare feet on the wooden boards.8
The force of these feelings has not diminished with time. Interviewed in 1979 by Marie-Françoise Allain about his experience at boarding school he burst out with the words: ‘But it was horrible … The promiscuity, the total absence of solitude, there was the horror.’
Certainly, it was a different world from that of the French and English gardens, the chintzy drawing-room, the secure life of family and nursery, the smell of books and fruit and eau-de-Cologne.9 It was a communal society which afforded no individual privacy, where even solitary walks were forbidden.10
He must also have felt that he had been abandoned and betrayed by his parents – young as he was for his age and used to a cultured, reasonably free and perhaps over-protective environment, one still enjoyed by his parents such a short distance away. And there were other emotional conflicts. He was isolated, disliked and distrusted since he was the headmaster’s son. Sir Cecil Parrott told me that all the Greenes had this difficulty at school. They were ‘Charles’s sons’ and the result was that nobody trusted them.11 Graham had the added disadvantage of not ‘fitting in’. He lived within himself, was book-orientated, looked younger than his years, and was ‘odd’. R. S. Stanier said: ‘Graham was a peculiar boy. There is no doubt about it. He had this rather funny voice, a bit of a lisp I think, and a sort of plummy utterance. Certainly people did make fun of him a bit. He didn’t play games well. He wasn’t in a school team or a house team. His physical participation was minimal. And Graham found games particularly unpleasant. He was naturally teased.’12 To his friend Claud Cockburn, Graham was indeed different: ‘He looked sort of a little separate – from his family certainly. I think this may have contributed to the view among the boys that he was a possible spy and so on, which he wasn’t and which most couldn’t have believed because he didn’t look in the least like any of his family. There is something strange in him, something unordinary, some element in his mind which is a governing influence … I don’t know what it is and I don’t think anybody else does.’ Personal characteristics made him different and therefore a target for torment simply because he was different – the pack drives out the ‘sport’; society finds its scapegoat.
It is probable that Graham’s failure, where physical prowess was concerned, was exacerbated by the fact that his elder brother Raymond was such a success at school, seemingly in all he attempted. J. B. Wilson said:
Look, I would say this honestly. Raymond and Ben Greene held their own. They were perfectly normal as regards athletics and everything else. Graham was abnormal. There was no question about it. His brother Raymond – we called him Raye or Rayay – we admired and looked up to. He was head of the house, was in the Rugger XV, was a pretty good runner and all the rest of it. Graham was nowhere to be seen.13
Raymond took on every duty, performing with relish, not only as a senior prefect, but as honorary secretary of the school’s Debating Society, where he stood no nonsense, as a letter in The Berkhamstedian shows. There he suggested that unless more interest was shown in the Society, he would ‘move the dissolution’ of it.14 He was an ardent debater, but also a successful editor of The Berkhamstedian, where he urged students to ‘forsake the jelly for the press’ since rumours had reached him ‘of wits, of poets, of novelists, of journalists, all at hand within the School itself’.15 Even in a field where you would think his presence and forcefulness would not aid him – poetry – he succeeded in winning the school’s Arnold Medal for the poem ‘Great Gable’.fn2
Graham had shown none of his brother’s or his father’s competence, powers of command and leadership in the small society of the School. It is no wonder that his sense of failure brought about a breakdown.
*
Some of the mental agony brought about by his lack of popularity and consequently his difficulty in finding companions for the Sunday walks, was relieved when his parents gave him permission to spend Sunday afternoons at home. But it was a temporary relief. In the evening he had to rejoin his companions tramping into the school Chapel and up the hill to St John’s, and then at night the stone stairs to the dormitory.16 It must have separated him still further from the other boys, for was he not receiving a special dispensation because he was ‘Charles’s son’? And if he tried to gain popularity would that not mean betraying his father? At the same time, his sense of failure in coping with the institution and its standards – which were those of his father – must also have been strong, and in a way a further betrayal. He was, after all, the son who could not deal successfully with his father’s world.
When we use the term ‘Greeneland’ to describe the characteristic landscape of his novels we usually have his concern with betrayal in mind. He treats betrayal obsessively, its source, its nature, its prevalence in the world as a malady, its necessity the unstated part of every man. His first published novel derived from his finding, in an account of nineteenth-century smuggling, an example of betrayal. Writing to his future wife about it in 1926 he describes ‘a gorgeous long cold-blooded letter by an anonymous informer to the Admiralty’ which gave him the subject of The Man Within – ‘the hero of the novel has got to be an informer’. The letter must have taken him back instinctively to the betrayals involved in his time at St John’s.
But he did not betray his tormentors. The determination of the youth in his short story, ‘End of the Party’, ‘not to lay bare his last secrets and end reserve between his mother and himself’ suggests the reason why he did not take the easy way out and confess to someone – his brother or his father or mother – the difficulties he was experiencing and his deep unhappiness.
*
In his recollections of that period, Graham Greene makes a distinction between physical and mental torture and demonstrates what was for him the ‘genuine quality of evil’. And yet what he writes of his experiences does not suggest that he was subjected to great evil. Indeed he wrote in A Sort of Life: ‘Though children can be abominably cruel, no physical tortures were inflicted on me.’17 This suggests, of course, that for him it was a mental cruelty which was, in his case
, worse. In the earlier The Lawless Roads, there is a different emphasis and an increase in emotive language:
In the land of the skyscrapers [this was his name for the new structures Dr Fry had had put up], of stone stairs and cracked bells ringing early, one was aware of fear and hate, a kind of lawlessness – appalling cruelties could be practised without a second thought; one met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil. There was Collifax, who practised torments with dividers;fn3 Mr Cranden with three grim chins, a dusty gown, a kind of demoniac sensuality; from these heights evil declined towards Parlow, whose desk was filled with minute photographs – advertisements of art photos. Hell lay about them in their infancy.18
This trinity, Collifax, Mr Cranden and Parlow, represented for Graham a descending order of evil at Berkhamsted and I shall try to determine the names and characters of the originals who stand behind these figures.
We shall not easily discover the true name of the least evil (‘from these heights evil declined towards Parlow’), but that such a boy existed I have no doubt since, in the surviving typescript of Graham’s first novel, ‘Anthony Sant’ (later called ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’ unknown and unpublished and written when Greene was a student at Oxford), Parlow, his name changed to Porter, has the same repository of photographs. ‘Some disguised their lack of enthusiasm and like Porter, whose chief interest was in his picture gallery of naked ladies, feigned an interest in games.’19 A further clue lies in England Made Me. There the reporter, Minty, dislikes the military attaché Gullie and ‘nothing could have more stirred his malice than the sight of Gullie poring over the photographs of naked breasts and thighs’.20
Gullie derives from a person Graham knew at school, but what was the real name? Graham calls him successively Parlow, Porter and Gullie. There is a clue to his identity since the other fact about Gullie, apart from his fascination with the female form, is that he was an amateur painter of ships: ‘little pictures … hung two deep round the white walls: small ships of every kind, barques, brigantines, frigates, schooners …’21 Now there was a prefect in St John’s when Graham was there called Henslowe and this rhymes with the name Graham first gave to his young voyeur, Parlow. Could Henslowe be the true name of Parlow? Henslowe was an excellent amateur sketcher, not of ships but of aeroplanes: ‘He had always a crowd of youngsters round his desk asking him to draw a Spad or an SE2 or some other esoteric aircraft,’ an Old Boy recalled.
Would Greene make such a simple change from Henslowe to Parlow? Possibly. We know, for example, that the hero of The Heart of the Matter, Major Scobie, is based on a police official called Brodie with whom Graham worked in Sierra Leone during the Second World War.
*
Graham wrote many years later in A Sort of Life about Mr Cranden, his three grim chins increased to four, and called him by his real name, Dr Simpson. It is a milder portrait, probably because Graham felt he could no longer speak of a ‘demoniac sensuality’ once he was giving the man’s true name:
A popular master in charge of one of the junior houses was called Simpson. He was never properly shaved, the five o’clock shadow was there at morning prayers, and he had four chins, although he was not otherwise a fat man. He rubbed his hands together in a gloating manner when in form he caught one who belonged to his house in a punishable offence. He would refer jocularly to beatings and he very obviously enjoyed them. In a strange way this made him popular. It seemed to me even then that his boys were collaborators in a pleasure.22
Many Old Boys have spoken about Dr Simpson. One was highly critical of Graham’s description of him. He described T. Dale Simpson (‘Simmy’), who was in charge of Overton House, as being like a farmer in spirit who did wonders in the garden growing vegetables during the war, and whose wife was red-faced and sold the boys bantam eggs for tea. Simpson played the double bass in the school orchestra and was memorable for his readings (with an impeccable Cumbrian accent) of ‘Owd Bob’ by Alfred Oliphant. But he was a flogger: ‘Simmy was a disciplinarian and laid about him with a cane left-handed.’ He remembered Simmy coming into the class of a woman teacher, who was in tears trying to control the boys, and sending her home and in the next hour beating the whole house. The young ones were caned in the dormitories in their pyjamas, the older boys in the study.
Another Old Boy recalled that Simpson’s punishments in his study were with a heavy cane known as ‘The Board’ which he ‘chalked’ carefully before the first stroke to provide an aiming mark for those to follow. At night he patrolled the dormitories (but not at fixed hours) silently in rubber-soled shoes and carrying a light, flexible rattan cane up his sleeve which was known as ‘The Twitcher’. This was ready for instant use on any pyjama-clad bottom when someone had erred. Simpson greatly enjoyed the nightly chase and the frequent ‘kills’ which resulted.
There is an interesting postscript to this account of Simpson, who was close enough to the Greene family to be present on 13 November 1904 when Graham was baptised. Early in August 1974, Graham Greene and his brother Hugh were invited by the Berkhamsted Citizens’ Association to answer questions about their early lives at Berkhamsted School. During the proceedings, a daughter of Dr Simpson stood up in the body of the hall and said she had travelled a long way from Eastbourne to question Graham’s description of her father, Dr Simpson, whom Graham deemed a flogger. Groans came from the Greenes. Both brothers then gave examples of Dr Simpson beating boys for such misdemeanours as being without a cap. It caused laughter when she admitted that she herself had had a birching when caught listening at her father’s door. Sir Charles Parrott told me that the girl watched her father flog boys and was in turn flogged.23
*
Who was Collifax, practising ‘torments with dividers’, who bore about him the genuine quality of evil? Collifax’s real name was Carter, and it was he who, with the help of a boy called Wheeler, turned Graham’s life into a hopeless misery. Because Wheeler was still alive when A Sort of Life was published, Greene called him Watson. In 1981 the acting secretary of the Selangor Turf Club, Kuala Lumpur, Kaka Singh, wrote to me: ‘It is with deep regrets that we inform you that Mr A. H. Wheeler has left us to be with the Lord many years ago.’
Greene mentioned Collifax’s real name as early as 1951 in The Lost Childhood. Speaking there of the books of his childhood he discusses Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan, and tells us that the story of the war between Visconti (Duke of Milan) and della Scala (Duke of Verona) crept in and coloured and explained ‘the terrible living world of stone stairs and the never quiet dormitory’:
It was no good in that real world to dream that one would ever be a Sir Henry Curtis, but della Scala who at last turned from an honesty that never paid and betrayed his friends and died dishonoured and a failure even at treachery – it was easier for a child to escape behind his mask. As for Visconti, with his beauty, his patience, and his genius for evil, I had watched him pass by many a time in his black Sunday suit smelling of mothballs.fn4 His name was Carter.24
Who was this Carter, who was able to torment Graham and change him from being a trusting child into an untrusting man? Who helped, along with the living conditions at St John’s and his sense of having been deserted by his family, to bring him to the point of escaping behind the mask of della Scala? How could Graham have come to see this boy who was only a few months older than himselffn5 as Visconti, as one who gave him his first insights into the way of the world: ‘… perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done’?25
Graham, in every respect, was a sitting target for a person like Carter who ‘perfected during [his] fourteenth and fifteenth years a system of mental torture based on [Graham’s] difficult situation’. Carter had an adult imagination. He could conceive the conflict of Graham’s loyalties, loyalties to his age-group, loyalty to his father and brother. ‘The sneering nicknames were inserted like splinters under the
nails.’26 The pressure on Graham was to side with the ‘forces of resistance’ – the schoolboys – against his own family, a betrayal which could bring him acceptance and popularity, and he did understand and sympathise with his school-fellows for rebelling: ‘Inexorably the others’ point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocent.’ Later in life he wrote that ‘it has always been in the interests of the State to poison psychological wells … to restrict human sympathy’ and therefore it is the storyteller’s task ‘to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.’27 In A Sort of Life, he claimed that his cousin had succumbed to temptation: ‘My cousin Ben, a junior prefect, one of the rich Greenes, had no such scruples and worked covertly against my brother, gaining much popularity in consequence.’fn6
It is probable that Graham also was tempted, that he toyed with the idea of betrayal in order to gain release from his situation. ‘It is impossible’, says the obsessed Rowe in The Ministry of Fear, ‘to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.’28 Betrayal could have earned Graham the trust of ‘the forces of resistance’, and in A Sort of Life he admits that Carter continuously tempted him with offers of friendship which were ‘snatched away like a sweet, but leaving the impression that somewhere, some time the torture would end’.29 And he had a reluctant admiration for Carter:
I admired his ruthlessness, and in an odd way he admired what he wounded in me. Between the torturer and the tortured arises a kind of relationship. So long as the torture continues the torturer has failed, and he recognizes an equality in his victim. I never seriously in later years desired revenge on Carter.30
To a certain degree he succumbed to the torture by inventing stories of having been cruelly flogged in order to clamp down the suspicions against him and redeem his poor status in the eyes of the other boys – presumably without success.
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 11
