But Mr Hands wasn’t listening … his old tired grey face had peculiar nobility. For nearly seventy years he had been believing in human nature, against every evidence … He was a Liberal, he thought men could govern themselves if they were left alone to it, that wealth did not corrupt and that statesmen loved their country. All that had marked his face until it was a kind of image of what he believed the world to be. But it was breaking up now … his son had begun to come – regularly – home with his excuses and breezy anecdotes and unjustified contempt.37
Then suddenly there seemed hope for Herbert in Rhodesia. His father must have provided financial assistance; a tobacco farm became a possibility late in 1926, and the following year he returned home to marry Audrey: ‘Audrey seemed very well and cheerful,’ writes Greene to his future wife. ‘She sails on Thursday. She must have a good deal of courage really – and she hasn’t seen him for about a year. One would have thought she’d have cooled a bit.’38
Felix Greene, then nineteen, visited Herbert in Rhodesia in 1928, and of course Herbert had come unstuck again. Felix remembered him kindly: ‘… long talks with him in his place in Rhodesia.’ It was Felix’s view that Herbert had really been ‘shipped out there as in the old days they would ship out the black sheep they don’t want around. He’s a trouble, send him off.’
According to Herbert’s wife, the tobacco farm collapsed, so they moved nearer to Salisbury (now Harare) and started next, with further financial help from home, a chicken farm, but all the chickens died of TB. As Felix commented: ‘Yes. He was one of the unfortunates in this world.’
Herbert was charming and crooked, having what Greene called, in another context, depraved innocence. Postcards and telegrams would arrive at the home of his parents in Crowborough – he had resigned; honour had really been involved (exactly as in the case of Anthony and Hands); he really could not explain that.
There are one or two other interesting aspects of the ‘Herbert’ figure. According to Kate Farrant, her brother Anthony likes his girls common and in his digs she smells the scent of an older woman on his pillow and finds the photograph of another girl who has now left him, signed, ‘With Love from Annette’. In 1930s’ slang, he explains: ‘She was the goods, Kate … She hasn’t been here for a long time now. I haven’t had any money, and the kid’s got to live. God knows where she is now. She’s left her digs. I tried there yesterday.’39
Graham has told us in Ways of Escape that he had shared many of Anthony’s experiences and gives us one short example: ‘I had known Annette, the young tart whom Anthony loved. I had walked up those forbidding stairs and found with the same emotion the notices.’40 So we have an autobiographical sequence in England Made Me:
When I pushed the button no bell rang, and the light on the landing had been disconnected. The wall was covered with pencil notes: ‘See you later’, ‘Off to the baker’s’, ‘Leave the beer outside the door’, ‘Off for the week-end’, ‘No milk this morning’. There was hardly one patch of whitewash unwritten upon and the messages were all of them scratched out. Only one remained uncancelled, it looked months old, but it might have been new, for it said: ‘Gone out. Be back at 12.30, dear’, and I had written her a post-card saying that I would be coming at half-past twelve. So I waited, sitting there on the stone stairs for two hours, in front of the top flat and nobody came up.41
Greene here fills out the details of the relationship with Annette in a way that his diary, with its secretive brevity, does not. However, Anthony’s unsuccessful wait for Annette certainly reflects Greene’s own unsuccessful, and more anxious wait: ‘to A’s. No answer. Went and had another drink and returned: no answer. Went to Imhof’s … took a taxi and returned to A’s.’ Not getting an answer, he remarks later in his diary: ‘I hope A is not finally lost.’
Greene’s Berkhamsted School experiences also play an important part in the novel – the stone stairs, the hated cubicles, the noisy nights which are recorded in his autobiography and in his unpublished first novel, ‘Anthony Sant’, reappear in England Made Me:
Pale-green dormitory walls and the cracked bell ringing for tea, my face bandaged and I listening to the feet on the stone stairs going down to tea. I could hear how many waited by the matron’s room for eggs marked on the shell with their names in indelible pencil, and the cracked bell ringing again before the boot-boy put his hand on the clapper. And then silence, like heaven …
Feet on the stone stairs, running, scrambling, pushing, up to the dormitory … and the room full and the prefects turning out the lights. 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 gently unable to sleep, forgetting the pain under my eye, 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 …
Voices whispering in the dormitory: ‘Someone has left a vest in the changing-room. Honour of the House,’ running the gauntlet of the knotted towels, noise over the roof-tops, paper screens trembling, spoilt tea, shooting in the streets, ‘honour of the firm.’42
The details are similar, the situation the same, in the novel and in The Old School – in one case a vest, in the other a gym shoe left in the changing room, the involvement of the Honour of the House and running the gauntlet of knotted towels.
Central also is Anthony’s running away from school, slipping out with his clothes under his dressing-gown, his walk of freedom, meeting in a barn his sister, who sends him back to school and regrets sending him back, ‘to conform, to pick up the conventions, the manners of all the rest. He tried to break away and I sent him back.’43 She tries to make up for it by finding him a job in Stockholm. In varying degrees, Anthony Farrant, Hands, Herbert and Graham were all failures of the system – in the system’s terms.
Hands is an unusual name, but there was, in Greene’s day, a master at Berkhamsted called Hands. The indefatigable schoolboy diarist, J. B. Wilson, made the following entries:
June 12. Hands 100 lines for forgetting to put my cubicle straight.
June 16. 250 lines in French for Hands, the tick.
July 8. Sit at side table in dining room for a week. Hands. I don’t know what it was for.
Hands sometimes appears in the diary as ‘Hoof’ or ‘Hands the Hoof’. The April 1919 edition of the Berkhamstedian reported in the column ‘School News’: ‘We regret the absence of H. S. Hands, Esq. who is away owing to illness.’ The event was recorded by J. B. Wilson:
January 20, 1919: Hoof was sacked by Charles [Greene] last Thursday, what for I don’t know and Scribbens is in a most frightful row, part of which is that Little B [nickname for head of the house, Mr Herbert] in clearing out Hands’ room – the dirty little swine – read a letter which Scribbens had written to Hoof in the holiday. Scribs had written in the hols discussing Little B. This the tick took to Charles and there was a hell of a row. Hoof has been absent since Wednesday and has I believe gone home today. I don’t know what’s up with him. As far as I know he’s only got a scab on account of which he told us not to rag Harold.
It is impossible to get to the source of this storm in a teacup after so many years, except for Hands’s special relationship with a Scribbens and a boy called Harold. Possibly there were suspicions of a homosexual group, and Little B and Charles Greene thought they might have a dangerous situation there. If Greene was recalling this event in using the name Hands, it must only have been that he saw Hands, like Herbert, as a loser.
*
In the novel, the Herbert figure is killed off. Anthony is drowned through an accident in mist but there is a strong suspicion that he was in fact drowned by Krogh’s henchman, Hall. The notion of a drowning which might have been suicide was probably in Greene’s mind as early as 1925 when he wrote to his mother: ‘Did I tell you of my other excitement about a week ago, seeing a body carried up out of the Thames as I was crossing Albert Bridge? All very dramatic, deep dusk, the two lights burning on the
little quay below the bridge and a couple of policemen carrying the covered stretcher across to the embankment steps.’
The details of Anthony’s cremation suggest that Greene had in mind his mother-in-law’s cremation: ‘Minty stood at the door, took the names, noted the wreaths … The coffin slid smoothly along its runway beneath the angular crucifix. The doors opened to receive it; the flapping of the flames was picked up by the microphone beside the altar and dispersed through the great bleak building. Minty crossed himself: they might just as well have left the body in the water. He had a horror of this death by fire.’44
*
Characteristically, Greene wrote to Hugh, then in Berlin, on 26 November 1934: ‘I was frantically busy, finishing The Shipwrecked [a discarded title for England Made Me which was used for an American edition], doing a short story which is supposed to be coming out in a limited edition, and getting ready for Liberia. Now there’s a slight calm before the storm.’ But there wasn’t. Vivien was coming towards the end of her pregnancy.
In the earlier days of the pregnancy, Greene had referred to the expected child as ‘the amoeba’. He had planned to try to cross Lapland by reindeer with his friend Nils, though Nils became ill and this was called off, but Nils and his wife were willing to adopt ‘the amoeba’. As time went on, his attitude changed. On 15 October 1933, he sent Vivien earrings and addressed the envelope:
For My Most Darling
Broody Queen
on the 6th anniversary [of their marriage]
with all the love in
the world.
And going back to his earliest love letters, he drew a white star, their mutual sign for a loving kiss –
Christmas Day fell on a Monday in 1933. On Christmas Eve, Greene went to Midnight Mass and on Christmas Day, Vivien cooked the turkey. There was ice on the canal but it was gently thawing and, Greene recalls, ‘making a noise like dry straw’. All the barges collected together for Christmas at one lock and the children rolled tin motor cars from Woolworths down the gang planks. The Greenes opened their presents at tea-time. They had books from publishers – an anthology of Elizabethan prose, a limited signed edition of Maugham’s short stories, a collected edition of Edward Marsh’s La Fontaine, a limited and signed Masefield. Vivien gave her husband a 1686 edition of Thomas Flatman, a poet and painter of miniatures. Presents for Vivien were mostly connected with the forthcoming birth – a beautifully worked cot cover and a handsome pram cover among other things. What touched her most was the fact that their morning maid came all the way over from Kidlington and left a present for her outside the front door.
Vivien gave birth to a daughter, Lucy Caroline, on 28 December 1933. It was a terrible experience and one which she recalled vividly forty-six years later:
It was like a train running slowly into the buffers. You can see the accident from afar and then the birth comes. In those days no one told you. Lucy was born in that horrible Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. The Campden period was over, and Graham was just beginning to do well and we had moved to Woodstock Road. It was very bad anyway. In those days they didn’t look at you beforehand. Lucy was a really bad birth. It was very bad and they were very unfriendly, horrible nurses. They didn’t look at you, they didn’t weigh you or take your blood pressure. I think I saw the doctor twice before I had her and I was extremely ignorant. I remember asking, ‘Will it hurt much?’ and he said, ‘We’ll see.’ That was Dr Shurrock. It certainly did hurt. Chloroform, after a long, long time – 28 hours was quite enough. The gas and air went wrong. It had to be a caesarean and they were so brutal about the stitches. I remember that awful head nurse or sister coming to me and saying, ‘Oh this room smells’ and flinging open the window, and I said, ‘I can’t do anything about it – I can’t get up.’ And she came up and leant over me and said, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that!’ It was terrifying.
Though the child was born at 8.40 p.m. and weighed 7 lbs 11 oz., Graham was not allowed to see Vivien until the following evening. He walked back from the Radcliffe to Woodstock Close, tears pouring down his face (as he told Vivien afterwards) because of the pain she had suffered and the condition she was in.
Lucy Caroline Greene was baptised according to Roman Catholic rites on 27 January 1934, dressed in the christening robe which had been used in the Greene family since the days of Graham Greene’s grandmother and is still in use: ‘it would be safest’, Greene advised his mother, ‘if you sent it [the robe] to me, and I should not undo the parcel until it was required.’45 On 27 January he wrote to her:
The christening went off all right, Lucy protesting at each thing done to her, but not setting up a continuous howl. A much more elaborate ceremony than the Anglican; salt in the mouth (she didn’t mind this a bit), oil on each shoulder, on the back of the neck and the forehead, and of course, water over the head. She also had to catch hold of the stole and at one point a lighted candle!
fn1 Greene’s first title in his diary for England Made Me was ‘Brother and Sister’.
fn2 In 1969 Chatto and Windus joined up with Jonathan Cape and Hugh’s eldest son Graham Carleton Greene became joint Chairman of the group.
fn3 Minty, living in seedy Stockholm lodgings ‘watched by a spider under a tooth glass’, appears late in the novel. He still retains a schoolboy phrase, among others, ‘Oh, Holy Cnut’ which might well refer to King Canute or Cnut. However, since it is often on Minty’s lips and used as an expletive, it may also be a private joke of Graham’s, an anagram of Holy Cunt.
fn4 Sir Hugh Greene was 6 ft 6 in. Their cousin Ben Greene was 6 ft 8 in.
PART 7
Liberia to North Side
34
Champagne and Fate
How narrow is the line which separates an adventure from an ordeal.
– HAROLD NICOLSON
GREENE’S JOURNEY THROUGH Liberia was the first of his exploratory journeys into distant, dangerous, little-known places in search of adventure, experience and inspiration for a book. Not only was this trip extremely dangerous, it was his first trip out of Europe, and he made it with his twenty-three-year-old cousin, Barbara Greene. The adventure, he wrote later, in these circumstances, was ‘to say the least, rash’.1
In his customary way, he had begun early to obtain information and introductions but he had failed to find a travelling companion. ‘It all happened’, his young cousin blandly tells us, ‘after a wedding’: ‘“Why don’t you come to Liberia with me?” I was asked by my cousin Graham, and, having just had a glass or two of champagne, it seemed a remarkably easy thing to do. I agreed at once. It sounded fun. Liberia, wherever it was, had a jaunty sound about it. Liberia! The more I said it to myself the more I liked it … Yes, of course I would go to Liberia.’2
Afterwards, the party atmosphere gone, both of them had misgivings: ‘My invitation to her’, Greene admitted, ‘can only be excused because I had drunk too much champagne at my brother Hugh’s wedding and I never expected her to accept.’3 When the effect of the champagne wore off he panicked and sent his cousin a League of Nations account of the conditions in Liberia, hoping to discourage her. She regretted her decision because she was enjoying herself very much in London, but she felt sure her father would forbid her to go. However, when she told him what she had agreed to, his response was, ‘At last one of my daughters is showing a little initiative.’ The ‘champagne decision’ was to be held to, and for Barbara Greene it was to be fun. She set out for the Liberian jungle with no more seriousness than if she were going off on a weekend hike, with little planning or calculation – but that was what a wealthy debutante of the 1930s felt able to do and did. She was young and zany and up to any lark. The fun for her began when she gave an interview to a News Chronicle reporter which led to dramatic headlines:
BEAUTY OF 23 SETS OUT FOR CANNIBAL LAND
COUSIN AS ONLY COMPANION
TO BLAZE WHITE TRAIL IN THE JUNGLE
SLAVERY AND DISEASE
The report went on:
A girl leav
es London today to explore a wild country where no white man has ever trod before – the depths of the hinterland of Liberia (the Negro Republic of Africa) a land of cannibalism and witchcraft. This is her debut as an explorer. ‘I’m ashamed to confess I’ve never been on so much as a caravan trip before,’ Miss Greene told me yesterday in her Chelsea flat.4
Greene knew nothing of this and for him ‘fun’ had nothing to do with the expedition. Later, when asked why he went to Liberia he wrote, ‘like Everest, it was there.’ Not a satisfactory reason, though the fact that he equated Liberia with Everest might indicate the competitive direction of his thoughts, given his brother Raymond’s heroic failure to climb that mountain the previous year.
There were other reasons, not least his longing to escape from the pressure of writing. To Hugh he wrote: ‘[I’d] rather get bubonic plague than write another novel for a year.’5 No doubt also he wanted to escape the tasks of fatherhood. There was now a baby in the house and a wife inevitably caught up with mothering. But if he felt the intense need to escape from the writing of fiction, he had to write something – he had a family to support. More important, he had the financial backing of his publisher: ‘Charles Evans is enthusiastic over Liberia’, he excitedly told Hugh ‘and has offered to pay all my expenses in advance.’6 There was another factor: travel books by young authors who made ‘uncomfortable journeys in search of bizarre material’ (Peter Fleming to Brazil and Manchuria, Evelyn Waugh to British Guiana and Abyssinia) were popular.7
Liberia would certainly provide him with the dangerous, the unknown and the bizarre. The Republic originated in 1822 when an American philanthropic society bought land in Liberia from native chiefs and established a settlement there for freed American slaves with its capital at Monrovia. Eventually, as a Republic, it had a constitution based on that of the United States and descendants of the slaves became the ruling class. They already had, or adopted, English names and spoke English, according to Barbara, with a strong American accent.
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 64
