The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  With Charles’s promotion, the family moved into School House in Castle Street. At first Graham shared a room with the always-crying baby Hugh, then with Raymond – they quarrelled daily and he tried ‘very hard’ to kill Raymond with a croquet mallet.46 In calmer moments, Graham was entranced by the walled garden and its clouds of butterflies. In the larger of two greenhouses were Charles’s rare orchids, one worth more than £300; they all died one night when a drunk gardener allowed the temperature to drop. Charles bore the loss and allowed the gardener to keep his job. A white cat inhabited an adjoining cemetery and Charles told Graham it was the ghost of an absentee headmaster from the eighteenth century.47

  As a young man, Graham was dismissive of his father, but once he had children of his own he realized that his father’s affection for him and interest in him had been authentic.48 However, it does seem that Charles was a little out of touch with the world. A classmate of Graham’s, W. A. Saunders, remembered the headmaster making an announcement: ‘ “I have here a request from some boys who want to see the film ‘Tarzan of the Alps’,” said Charles breathing over the note. Masters to right & left & rear lean toward him and gratingly whisper, “Apes”.’49

  Graham’s affection for his mother, whom he and his siblings called ‘Mumma’, is not difficult to see, as hundreds of his candid letters to her survive. However, he was ultimately more critical of her than of his father. She was a snob while he was not. Graham remembered her absorption in news of the royal family, and her disgust when the daughter of a tripe-seller married a member of the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps (OTC) stationed in Berkhamsted.50

  The school had its own snobberies, which Graham learned about when he entered the new Junior School in the summer term of 1912, just before he turned eight. For years, local boys had been charged £6 per year in tuition fees and boarders £9. In 1907 the governors raised the fee to £12 for everyone, while setting up a system of scholarships, and bursaries for boys who needed them.51 The writer Peter Quennell, Graham’s contemporary at the school, recalled the pecking order: ‘Below an aristocracy of boarders lay a middle-class, which included myself, of easy-going day-boys, and, yet lower, a despised proletariat, the “train-boys”, so called because they arrived by train from various adjacent towns.’ Also called ‘train bugs’, this last group attended the school with financial assistance and were mocked for their accents, bad clothes, and supposed smell.52

  Some sixty years later, in his memoir A Sort of Life, Greene wrote of the caning of such a boy, whose name he could not remember.53 After it was published, he received a letter from a county councillor and governor of the school, Hilary Rost, speaking of how her father, Arthur Mayo, had been traumatized by his years at Berkhamsted. Greene remembered then that this was the boy who had been so severely caned. Mayo’s daughter told him of her father’s experience with one master in particular who ‘would make the scholarship boys stand up, while he told the rest of the class that they must watch these characters carefully as their fathers were paying their fees and they should make sure that they were not wasting their money. They were verbally abused and most of the staff evidently condoned this.’ Her father had told her how Graham would make a point of coming up to him after these sessions and engaging him in discussions about some academic subject, ‘making it quite clear that he respected him and would have nothing to do with the invitation to bully’. At the time Rost contacted him, her father was in hospital. Graham sent a signed copy of the book to him, which he finished reading just before he died.54

  Charles Greene did what he could to make the train-boys feel at home by establishing a house for them, and tried to encourage a sense of social responsibility among the more privileged. Inspired by what Graham later called ‘rather noble old liberalism’,55 Charles gave his backing to the Cavendish Association, formed in 1913 to promote understanding between classes, and between capital and labour. He allowed them to recruit in the school, as they did at other public schools and at universities, and the school magazine carried an editorial supporting their mission: ‘A man who lives on a meagre diet in the slums of Whitechapel is neither physically nor mentally fit to perform his duties as a citizen. It is our duty to find a remedy for a state of affairs which permits this. Social service is as necessary for the welfare of our Empire as military service.’56 By today’s standards, the Cavendish Association was cautious and paternalistic, but it represented a generous social impulse.

  The most active recruiting was military. The OTC enlisted two hundred boys, half of the school, in the last year of peace. There were plenty of musketry competitions, and the reason was no secret: ‘Exactly the same preparation is required to ensure success in the Messum Cup as is necessary for success in war.’57 The school magazine carried a letter from a colonel in the Royal Artillery asking school leavers to join up.58

  When war was declared in August 1914, the Greenes were at Harston. Soldiers marched past. The boys seized on every scrap of news that suggested the fighting would go on for years and that they might have a part in it. In fact, only Herbert signed up and he did not see action. In November, the school magazine reported that almost four hundred Old Berkhamstedians were already in service and it pressed the ‘imperative claims of OTC’, including five parades per fortnight. It added bluntly, ‘as the war drags on its slow course still more of us will go forth to take the places of those who fall’.59 By now, all the boys in the senior school were enlisted in the OTC. There was always some group of boys marching on the Common or crawling through the trenches carved into it.

  It took a long time for the boys to grasp what was going on, especially as they did not know many of the OBs who were going to the front. The first was killed on 30 October 1914,60 and by March 1915 there were still just three dead and thirteen wounded.61 In June, there was an example of great valour to report: twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Inglis Miller had been found with two wounds on the battlefield at Cambrai, surrounded by dead and dying Germans; he died in August.62 By December, forty-three had been reported dead.63 The slaughter intensified during the Battle of the Somme, as forty-six died between 1 July and 17 November 1916.64 On Founder’s Day, 22 July 1918, Charles Greene reported that of 1145 OBs who had by then entered service, 184 had been killed and 177 wounded; 121 had been mentioned in despatches, seventy-eight had received the Military Cross, seventeen the Distinguished Service Order, and twenty-eight had been granted foreign and other honours. There was one recipient of the Victoria Cross.65 There were terrible sorrows, too, in Berkhamsted as three brothers named Sprunt, respectively aged twenty-four, twenty-two, and twenty-one, were all killed.66

  2

  FLIGHT

  ‘If you pushed open a green baize door in a passage by my father’s study, you entered another passage deceptively similar, but none the less you were on alien ground. There would be a slight smell of iodine from the matron’s room, of damp towels from the changing rooms, of ink everywhere. Shut the door behind you again, and the world smelt differently: books and fruit and eau-de-Cologne.’

  That door marked the border of separate countries, home and school: ‘I had to remain an inhabitant of both countries.’1

  Unlike his popular and athletic brother Raymond, who was at home on either side of the baize door and eventually became a prefect, Graham felt an exile in the school. The other boys thought he must be a Judas – betraying them to his father, the headmaster. Bookish, he was frequently excused games because of his flat feet – this too marked him as an outsider. And once the war started, there were plenty of objective reasons to find the dormitories and classrooms grim. Many of the best masters enlisted and their temporary replacements were, often enough, the dregs of the profession, even brutes. The quality of the food fell off – different dormitories had different systems of rationing but eventually everyone had to accept porridge as a substitute for bread.2 Depression was in the air.

  At thirteen, Graham had a difficult year. He spent a term at the bottom of his form, suffered a la
pse in confidence, and was experiencing depression. He entered the senior school in the autumn of 1918, when he was about to turn fourteen. His parents sent him to board at St John’s House, where he had spent his earliest years. Their intentions are not clear, but perhaps they thought the experience would bring him closer to the other boys. Herbert and Raymond had been sent away to Marlborough College, and they hated it.3 For Graham, there was evidently no question of another school.

  Torn between loyalty to his father and to the boys in the dormitory, Graham was guilt-ridden and alienated, and so became a loner. The Lawless Roads, his account of a persecution of the Catholic church in Mexico, starts with a brief description of his own school life and the cruelties committed by boys against one another. Like Mexico, he saw the school as a place ‘of lawlessness’ where no one is cared for or protected.4 And in this atmosphere of harm, Graham attempted self-harm. One morning, he listened to the other boys heading down the stairs for early prep or breakfast, and took a dull knife to his knee. He did not have the nerve to cut deeply,5 but worse things were to follow.

  He was not often attacked apart from being jabbed with a pair of dividers, but was subject to sly verbal abuse and was tagged with nicknames. He became friends with a boy named Lionel Carter, his Visconti, who secured his trust by gestures of friendship then played on his troubled loyalties to a degree that Greene later recalled as torture. Having written about Carter in A Sort of Life, Greene was interested in his old schoolmate W. A. Saunders’s recollection: ‘pale red hair, snake-like skull who curled the lip & distended the lip at the approach of buggy Saunders et al.’6 Greene’s memories of this whole episode were intense, but uncertain – the details he set down in A Sort of Life are consistently mistaken, as if blurred through decades of retelling and myth-making. He was reassured to learn from Saunders that Carter was indeed the boy’s name, and not one he had himself invented along the way. He had referred to him as Collifex in The Lawless Roads – presumably an effort to avoid a libel suit.

  Carter had a sidekick named Augustus Wheeler, and the two of them caused Greene enormous pain when he was between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is not clear what forms the bullying took, but Greene saw in Carter’s cruelty a kind of ‘finesse’, an implied promise that the pain would end and friendship become secure. It appears that Wheeler was hurtful in a cruder way, deserting Greene on several occasions for friendship with Carter. Wheeler came from a military background; his father was dead and his mother had sent him to boarding school – this mixture could easily lead a boy into bullying. For years afterwards, Greene yearned to settle scores with Wheeler. But when, by a weird coincidence, the opportunity finally arose around Christmas 1950, he did nothing (see p. 202).

  Greene spent eight terms, of thirteen weeks each, as a boarder at St John’s House. He performed badly at the weekly OTC parade, where he was goaded by Carter and Wheeler. Solitary and often a truant, he gave up on the OTC, and as the headmaster’s son he got away with it; Peter Quennell was also given permission to leave, but very few others. As Colonel Wilson, who oversaw the OTC, recalled: ‘There were only four boys in the School who were not members of the Corps. Two of them were cripples, and one was the son of the headmaster.’7 Although bucked up by a kindly matron and a master, Greene was experimenting with methods of suicide. He later said that he consumed ‘hypo’ (presumably hyposulphite of soda), a bottle of allergy drops, and deadly nightshade gathered on the Common, and that he swallowed a fistful of aspirin before getting into the school baths.

  Many years later, he was diagnosed as manic depressive (bipolar) by an accomplished psychiatrist named Eric Strauss, and there is no reason to dispute the diagnosis. While he was at school, the mental illness was beginning to assert itself. Over the years, he was always restless and inclined to boredom; suicidal depressions would sometimes give way to euphoria; he was thrill-seeking, promiscuous, and hard drinking; he misused drugs – common enough features of the illness. Late in life he remarked: ‘I have always been cyclothymic. In the past, I used to go through bouts of deep depression, followed by a period of great euphoria. It appears that I have now reached a plateau.’8 Cyclothymia is a variation on bipolar illness, but the symptoms are not so intense or long-lasting.9

  We do not possess Greene’s psychiatric records, so caution needs to be exercised. And yet there is no denying that his moods were extreme and variable – he could be by quick turns irritable, wildly playful, urgently sexual, or suicidally depressed. Journalists looking for easy copy have sometimes condemned Graham Greene’s character, but the disasters, especially of his marriage and sexual life, are generally more pitiable than culpable. Indeed, his survival itself is something of a triumph, for, as Dr Kay Redfield Jamison, an expert on bipolar illness, has observed, given his early behaviour it is remarkable that he did not succeed in killing himself.10

  Eventually, Greene made a run for it. A Sort of Life offers an unreliable account of what happened, placing events at the end of the summer of 1920, after his eighth term as a border – which would in fact have been Easter 1921. A different timeline, compiled by David Pearce, a former master at Berkhamsted School, reconciles most of the existing evidence.11 In A Sort of Life, Greene says that after breakfast on the last day of the summer holidays he left a note for his parents under the whisky tantalus, saying that he would remain hidden until they promised he would never have to live in St John’s again. He says that he planned to conceal himself in the trenches that had been dug on the Common and eat blackberries, ‘an invisible watcher, and a spy on all that went on’.12 Greene describes the Common in late summer in considerable detail and the notion of eating blackberries would belong to that time of year.

  His mother later described the episode: ‘I cannot date when the crisis occurred but between 19 & 20 I think. Graham was not well the morning he should have gone back to St. John’s – slight temperature & eyes peculiar. Doctor could not understand eyes. I kept him in bed. Went to do house-keeping & returned to find he was not there & a note to say he could not go back to St. John’s – had tried to poison himself with eye-drops (accounts for eyes) in vain & had gone & we should not see him again. You can imagine how we felt. We did not want to go to the police at once. Uncle Eppy set his bailiff whom he could trust to hunt along canal. Dr. McB. took me all over golf-links in his car – we searched woods calling all the time. Then after lunch Molly said she had a feeling she could find him & taking Miss Arnell & some food they set out. And they found him sitting in the little wood where M. thought he might be. They brought him home & I put him to bed & told him he should never go back. Said why had he not told us.’13

  Charles tried to understand what had happened. Graham spoke incoherently of ‘filth’ at St John’s, meaning chiefly that boys were farting all the time. Charles thought he was referring obliquely to sex and concluded that Graham had been somehow victimized by a circle of masturbators. According to Graham, this was a bizarre misunderstanding as he had not yet discovered the practice. We have to accept his word that he was not sexually abused, as there is no other evidence to call on. Charles launched enquiries through the school, putting on the spot boys who had nothing to do with Graham’s troubles: it is likely that these enquiries began after the late-summer flight to the Common. In his memoir, Graham downplays all this as a ‘comedy of errors’ – there may have been errors, but it was no comedy. Indeed, Greene generally writes with a suave flippancy of his inclination to suicide, and it is never really convincing. If Marion’s recollection of the events was right, Graham could easily have ended up in a coffin.

  Charles evidently persuaded him to go back to the boarding house, where he would remain for two more terms. In the late summer of 1920, Charles could reasonably promise that things would be better in the coming year. Graham would have less to do with Carter and Wheeler, as he had passed his School Certificate in June and was entering the sixth form while they were stranded in the fifth. It seems that some good things happened that Michaelmas Term. The
improvement in his state of mind, later attributed solely to psychoanalysis, must have owed something to the liberties of the sixth form – he was engaged in more independent study and he had more literary companionship with people like Quennell. He was older and growing more worldly.

  He was also open to hope, but of an odd sort. He described a particular Saturday night, perhaps 14 December 1920.14 Loitering near School House, he could hear from across the quad the school orchestra playing Mendelssohn – he was supposed to be with the other boys listening to it. But for now he was alone on the croquet lawn. He could hear a rabbit in its hutch. For the first time, he felt that prayer was possible and that God was near: ‘And so faith came to me – shapelessly, without dogma, a presence about a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way.’ He could only imagine Hell, not yet a heaven, and it was founded on the squalor and hopelessness of the dormitories: ‘The rabbit moved among the croquet hoops and a clock struck: God was there and might intervene before the music ended.’ That night he was standing on a border between home and school: ‘When people die on the border they call it a “happy death”.’ But death was not the solution. He went back to his dormitory.15

  It is likely that Hilary Term 1921 was difficult for Greene and that he was again depressed around Easter. His parents put him on suicide watch in the spare bedroom next to their own. However, one good thing happened: Lionel Carter left the school at the end of term. But this was not quite the fall of Flashman, as he kept in touch with the school and played cricket for the Old Berkhamstedians.16 We will likely never know whether his departure owed anything to the headmaster’s enquiries into sexual practices in the school. It is possible that he was quietly told to leave and the matter hushed up. In any event, it must have been a relief to Graham Greene to be rid of his tormentor.