The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  He concluded, nearly weeping over the wheel, that they were ‘poor innocents’ (and they were!) and, drawing on his twenty-five years’ experience of Freetown, he next turned up early at their hotel with the best boys in Freetown outside waiting for orders. Greene confessed that, as the boys stared at him from the bottom of the hotel steps, he did not know what to say to them. Barbara recorded that nervously he addressed them in rather literary English. There was Amedoo, the head boy, who was also to look after Graham, ‘grey-faced and expressionless, holding his fez to his chest’; ‘Souri, the cook, a very old, toothless man, in a long white robe’; Laminah, who was to look after Barbara, ‘very young, in shorts and a little white jacket … with a knitted woollen cap on his head crowned by a scarlet bobble.’ ‘I couldn’t have imagined then’, Greene wrote, ‘the affection I would come to feel for them … Our relationship was to be almost as intimate as a love affair.’30

  Returning to Sierra Leone as a British Intelligence agent six years later, Greene sought out Laminah, no longer the little boy in shorts and a woollen cap with a scarlet bobble – ‘War had brought him prosperity and dignity.’ Greene had searched in vain for Amedoo and when he asked Laminah about him he broke into peals of laughter: ‘Old cook, he all right, but Amedoo he under ground.’

  *

  They left Freetown on the narrow gauge railway for Pendembu just in time, as Greene noted in his diary: ‘In the train to Bo [halfway to Pendembu] heard that day we left, Freetown was put into quarantine, a case of yellow fever among the whites [actually a young manfn1 from the educational department]. Attempts to stop arrival of aeroplanes.’ It was a slow journey, taking two days to cover 250 miles, and Greene and his cousin had never been so hot and damp – ‘if we pulled down the blinds in the small dusty compartment, we shut out all the air; if we raised them, the sun scorched the wicker, the wooden floor, drenched hands and knees in sweat.’31 As they travelled, Greene noticed that the price of oranges dropped from six a penny to fifteen a penny at Bo, and also at every station – and the train stopped at every station – ‘women pressed up along the line, their great black nipples like the centre point of a target.’32 They stopped for the night at Bo, and were met by the District Commissioner’s messenger, Sergeant Penny Carlyle, who took them to a rest house, squashed a beetle under his toes, clicked his bare heels, and dismissed himself.33 Greene was struck by the egrets, ‘like thin snow-white ducks with yellow beaks’, the total absence of vultures, the PZ stores which sold everything – clothes, food, ironware, and also advertised a ‘50 & 50 cure for gonorrhoea’, and again the naked breasts of the black women. Later, he would tire of naked bodies and feel he had lived for years with nothing but cows, but at first he was fascinated, watching the children taking their milk standing – ‘they ran to the breasts in pairs like lambs, pulling at the teats.’34

  At Bo, in spite of cockroaches larger than black beetles in the bathroom of the rest house, the dry, tasteless chicken, the hurricane lamps providing the only light, Greene felt happier: ‘It was as if I had left something I distrusted behind.’35 This he put down to the fact that they had left the Colony of Sierra Leone and were in the Protectorate, presumably implying a loosening of the white man’s control and a closer proximity to the true Africa. The white men up-country, he noticed, did not talk of ‘bloody blacks’ or laugh at them or patronise them. He suggests the reason for this was that the Englishmen up-country were dealing with ‘real’ natives, not Creoles, and that the real native was someone to love and admire. And he makes an important point. The white man knew about some things, but the natives knew about other things – ‘one’s gun was only an improvement on their poisoned spear, and unless one was a doctor, one had less chance of curing a snake-bite than they.’ Moreover, the Englishmen up country were a finer, subtler type than those on the Coast, ‘they cared for something in their country other than its externals, they couldn’t build their English corner with a few tin roofs and peeling posters and drinks at the bar.’36

  Another messenger met them next day at the station at Pendembu with a lorry and the paramount chief of the area, small and bow-legged, who spoke no English. Greene had an incomprehensible conversation with him. They were taken on to Kailahun, on the border with French Guinea, the local natives fleeing at the sight and sound of their unfamiliar vehicle, and were put up at the rest house. There were only two white men in the village – the District Commissioner who held the dangerous post (Greene recorded in his diary that three of his predecessors had died mysteriously, and Barbara was pleased to see that he ‘had all my cousin’s books in a row on his bookshelf’), and a Scottish engineer who was building a bridge.

  As the Greenes were drinking warm cocktails with the D.C., a third white man strolled into the bungalow wearing dirty trousers and a singlet, his head shaven and with a black tuft of beard. The D.C. immediately took him to be a Liberian messenger who was reported to be in the area having been sent to guide the Greenes on the next stage of their journey. Consequently, he was not asked to sit down or offered a drink but was given instructions to show the Greenes the way to Bolahun and the Holy Cross mission in two days’ time. The man agreed to this, saying that he had just come from there. When, eventually, he was asked whether he was the Liberian messenger, he said that he was not. He was German, had come from Liberia and was returning there and simply wanted a bed.

  The bland, enigmatic German appeared next day in a clean shirt, a pair of fawn trousers, a round white topee and carrying an ivory-headed stick and a long cigarette-holder. According to Greene’s diary, his name was Heydoern, and he was profoundly struck by the man and his reticence. Greene, a total amateur in jungle travel, tried to elicit information:

  Had he ever been to Africa before he came out to the Republic two years ago? No never. Hadn’t he found things difficult? No, he said with a tiny smile, it had all been very simple. Would one have trouble with the Customs at the frontier? Well, of course, it was possible; he himself had no trouble, but they knew him. Should one bribe them? That was one of the questions he didn’t answer, putting it aside, smiling gently, tipping the ash off his cigarette on to the beaten earth of the floor. The cockchafers buzzed in and out and he sat with lowered head smoking. No, he wouldn’t have another biscuit.37

  But he did tell them that the Liberian Commissioner at Bolahun was a scoundrel; that he could make things unpleasant; that a permit of residence was necessary, and then Heydoern ‘walked briskly away, twirling his ivory-headed stick’. It was not until they were a further week on their journey, had crossed the border and were going full-out on their trek that, during a stroll, Heydoern explained why he was in that part of the world. He had spent some years wandering about from village to village, learning old customs and the various dialects.38 He was gathering material for a dissertation at Berlin University and hoped to make a grammar of the various languages.39

  Greene was beginning to learn the ways of the country, sending a letter a day’s journey ahead of them to the mission at Bolahun in Liberia by messenger, and sending a runner by night, with a fill of paraffin for his lamp, a dagger hanging over his shoulder as he ran out into the dark bush, and the letter stuck in a cleft stick.40 But by 26 January 1935, when the Greenes really began their safari, Graham had to come to grips with the country he was travelling through; he had to become a leader, dealing with all kinds of difficulties and unexpected events. It was a twenty-mile trek from Kailahun to the mission in Liberia to which they were going. He had ordered two lorries to pick up Barbara, himself and the German at seven o’clock, but only one turned up, ‘and it was an hour and a quarter late.’ He was vexed by the delay – looking ahead, and taking into account possible delays at the Customs post, he was hoping to reach the mission before dark.

  It was his first encounter, as a man of precise and orderly habits, with ‘the idea that time, as a measured and recorded period, had been left behind on the coast … watches couldn’t stand the climate. Sooner or later they stopped.’ He was stil
l thinking in European terms, confident that he could plan his journey according to a timetable, thinking that they were going from Bolahun to the capital, Monrovia, and that they would be there in a fortnight, with no idea that in four weeks’ time they would be more or less lost in the middle of Liberia. He did not have the money for such a long journey. The problems came upon him in many different ways, in terms of real difficulties and dangers and images, all forcing him to take command, to become the leader he had never wanted to be (or thought he could be) at school.

  He was later to conclude that his anxiety about timetables and destinations was that of an ‘unpractised traveller’. He ‘got used to not caring a damn, just walking and staying put when I had walked far enough, at some village of which I didn’t know the name, to letting myself drift in Africa.’

  Logistical problems faced him at Biedu where, for the first time, he saw ‘the full extent’ of their luggage spread out down the centre of the village: ‘six boxes of food, the two beds and chairs and mosquito-nets, three suitcases, a tent we were never to use, two boxes of miscellaneous things, a bath, a bundle of blankets, a folding table, a money-box [the money was all silver coins, though he discovered that those with Queen Victoria’s head were unacceptable since she was dead], a hammock.’ He was shamed by the fact that each of his servants carried only a small flat suitcase, and he knew that a German botanist had made a ten-day trek without a hammock, without provisions, without even a bed or mosquito nets – ‘he slept on native beds, ate native food’, but he also died of dysentery.

  At Biedu, he decided he must take on twenty-five carriers – a District Officer never travelled with fewer even on a short journey and the Greenes were going into unknown territory. Moreover, four carriers would be needed for Barbara’s hammock. Graham decided to walk and so save 7s.6d. on a larger hammock with six carriers. That thorn in his flesh, the experienced Heydoern, usually travelled on a chair slung on poles and doubted whether, with only one hammock, the Greenes would reach Bolahun before night. He could not conceive of white people walking and scrambling along with the men. The carriers were asking 1s.6d. each and though Greene knew they were poor he also knew that Heydoern paid only 6d., and so he beat them down to 1s.3d.

  The three travellers faced a journey of twenty miles to the Holy Cross mission, run by American Episcopalian monks at Bolahun, and it involved crossing the border into Liberia.

  A typical day’s march was eight miles. Greene was to average twelve miles a day over the next four weeks. On starting, he gave orders to the carriers, feeling like a subaltern facing his platoon for the first time. He could not believe that twenty-five men would obey when he commanded, ‘Set in motion’: ‘I stood back and watched them with … an absurd sense of pride.’ They were like a long mechanical toy striding out of the village. The German, in his chair, went ahead of Graham’s column,41 Graham walked and Barbara followed in the hammock. At first the track was wide and then it narrowed into a path through elephant grass. The first stream crossed, they were among woods and clearings and woods again. In his diary Graham records: ‘Started after German. B[arbara] in hammock. A good deal of elephant grass, bridges made out of tree trunks.’42

  *

  They arrived at the Liberian frontier about midday – three or four huts, a few riflemen in scarlet fezzes with a gold device, the Liberian flag (a star and stripes), and a little man with a black moustache and a yellow skin and a worn topee who came out into the clearing and greeted them.43

  In his diary Greene reveals more anxiety than he shows in Journey Without Maps: ‘Smoked with one customs man and tried to be agreeable. German passed through. Had to sign 8 forms … Entirely in their power. Left my invoice and £4.10.0 in guarantee. Had heard of our coming. Denied having any weapon and ammunition. Both hidden in money box under shoes.’44 A child brought specially to see white skins screamed in fright. They were pleased to enter the Republic but they had not seen the last of that customs officer.

  The next day, when they had already arrived at the mission at Bolahun, he sent a soldier to demand a further £6.105. Greene could ill afford the money and sent the soldier back empty-handed, but the customs officer himself came, ‘borne in a hammock, the long rough path from Foya with four carriers and a couple of soldiers … He swaggered across the verandah, a little sour, mean, avaricious figure, grinning and friendly and furious and determined. He got his money, drank two glasses of whisky, smoked two cigarettes; there was nothing one could do about it; it was impossible to bribe an official who probably took a lion’s share anyway of what he exacted.’45 In any case, Greene noted in his diary, he was: ‘Scared lest he should follow me and see the automatic in the money box.’46

  They left Foya at the hottest time of the day, just after midday, and climbed steeply, yet they enjoyed the first day’s trek in the Republic. They were on the edge of the immense forest which covers Liberia to within a few miles of the coast.

  Barbara Greene recalls her cousin walking on in front at a tremendous speed. It was the habit Greene started from day one and it was carried on until much later when he fell ill. They never walked together, though Barbara could use the hammock for only five or ten minutes each hour – apparently to save money on the carriers (in any case it was very uncomfortable). Greene recorded in his diary: ‘This is a long trek … B’s hammock broke at one point. Had to hoist it over about 4 streams. Appallingly hot … the fruit the men ate. Their cheerfulness and running conversation. Final race with the dark.’47 Later Barbara had to walk all the time. They walked hour after hour, the bush thick enough to block out every view. Barbara confided: ‘I did not notice the trees or the plants. If we went through any villages I did not see them.’48 The ground was steep and difficult and sometimes they had to scramble on all fours. Greene wrote: ‘Over the worst part, the precipitous rocky paths down and up.’49

  Away from the luxury of her Chelsea flat and on her first trip through jungle, walking and scrambling on the hot, mountainous, enclosed track, it is not surprising that Barbara should be under such strain that she did not notice the villages she passed through. In contrast, Graham’s vigilance never faltered: ‘However tired I became of the seven hour trek through the untidy and unbeautiful forest, I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the night,’ he wrote,50 and he had absorbed their typical geography, layout and interiors – even coming to an understanding of the community life: the villages (in the Banda territory) made up of circular huts with pointed thatched roofs and set on the hilltops ‘on several levels like medieval towns’; the paths to them dropped down to the stream where ‘the villagers came to wash their clothes and bathe and rose abruptly up a wider beaten track out of the shade to a silhouette of pointed huts against the midday glare.’ Each had ‘its palaver hut and forge, the burning ember carried round at dark [to light the individual fires], the cows and goats standing between the huts, the little groves of banana trees like clusters of tall green feathers.’ The fire in the middle of each hut, he noted, kept out mosquitoes, fleas, bugs and cockroaches – but not the rats.

  He saw the villages as ‘small, courageous’ communities ‘barely existing above a desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits’; ‘love’, he concluded, ‘was an arm around the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts … religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay … a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials.’51 ‘This’, he wrote, ‘never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors.’ They were tender to each other and to their children, ‘they never revealed the rasped nerves of the European poor in shrill speech or sudden blows.’ They had ‘a standard of courtesy.’ He even came to admire his carriers and to accept their smell.

  Though white ‘twisters’ claimed that a ‘black boy will always do you down’, he never found any dishonesty in his boys or the carriers or the natives in the in
terior, ‘Only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one would not have found, or dared to assume was there, in Europe.’52 He was astonished by the fact that he was travelling through unpoliced country with twenty-five men who knew that his money box contained what would be a fortune to them in silver which they could easily have stolen and disappeared with into the bush, but they never did.

  On the last dark and wearying trek to the mission, he remembered Souri, the old cook, in his long white Mohammedan robes flitting ahead and carrying a trussed chicken, the smoke from fires blowing across the narrow paths between huts and ‘the little flames … the African equivalent of the lights behind red blinds in English villages’.53

  The last village before the mission was Mosambolahun, nearly two hundred huts packed together on a thimble of rock, standing in its own pagan dirt, the Christian garden village of Bolahun in the cleared plain below. The chief of Mosambolahun himself came to them in a swaying hammock with a noisy group of men. Ninety years old – he was the puppet of younger men – ‘he quivered and shook and smiled … He was swept away again by his impatient hammock-bearers, waving his dried old hand, smiling gently, curiously, quizzically …’ He had over two hundred wives; the same ones were sold to him over and over again and he was too old to keep count.

  Even when they reached Bolahun village there was a further walk of two more miles to the mission.

  Both Greenes record their utter exhaustion and that of their carriers when they reached the Holy Cross Mission. In his diary Greene wrote, ‘Carriers entering faint fallen on ground: plummy smell’, their loads dumped outside the long bungalow, Barbara sunk on the steps, ‘only the white eyeballs of the carriers were visible where they squatted silent on the verandah.’54 Greene was now in a mood to see good everywhere. Listening to the low murmur of Benediction inside the church, and watching the priests, white robes stirring in the cold hill wind as they came out, Greene felt that ‘the sound of the Latin represented a better civilization than the tin shacks of the English port, better than anything [he] had seen in Sierra Leone’;55 he was for the first time unashamed by the comparison between white and black – the mission ‘at least wasn’t commercial. One couldn’t put it higher than this, that the little group of priests and nuns had a standard of gentleness and honesty equal to the native standard. Whether what they brought with them in the shape of a crucified God was superior to the local fetish worship had to be the subject of future speculation.’56