Read Online A Sort of Life by Graham Greene - Free Book Online Page A

without the foray to the High Street, in the afternoon, and recklessly I carried my truancy on until the last day of term. I was in the form of a Mr Davis and my father, who was making a rapid tour of the classrooms on the last day, was asked by Davis how my illness was progressing. It must have been quite a shock for my father who knew of no illness in his family. He came back home and out to the shelter where I was discovered … or rather I think he sent my mother. (Perhaps the search was proceeding in many directions at once.) I was told to go to bed, and when I was in my nightshirt my father came up and caned me.
    This is the only beating I can remember, but at school I would invent apocryphal stories of having been cruelly flogged – it gaveme the status which a headmaster’s son lacked. I was in the middle of some story of brutal cruelty during a break between classes in the quad when a ‘scrumming’ took place. This was a strange kind of lemming drive which at intervals afflicted the lower school. A rumour would start that an extra half-holiday was going to be given (which happened fairly frequently during the war, whenever an old boy had been decorated with a D.S.O . or an M.C . A V.C. ranked as a whole holiday, but this only happened twice.) The rumours, however often they proved to be wrong, caused the whole junior school to press up against the terrace during a break and stay crammed there until my father would appear and send us packing. Occasionally the rumour proved true and so confirmed the idea that we had actually caused the half-holiday by our scrumming.
    Magic and incantation play a great part in childhood. There was a tuckshop by the fives-court which was only open, because of war-shortages, to boys of the senior school. As a junior I would stand outside reciting an accepted formula, ‘Treat I’, to any older boy as he came out, and occasionally one would detach a morsel of bun and hand it over. The favourite purchase was a penny currant bun with a bar of chocolate inside, though it was seldom that any chocolate was included in the exiguous treat. I suppose we were always a little hungry in the war years. There were no potatoes and little sugar and we grew deadly tired of substitutes – rice and honey-sugar. My sister Elisabeth, who was around two at the time, would have hardly eaten anything at all during our nursery meals if I had not named each spoonful after a war-leader, though what their names could possibly have conveyed to her I cannot imagine. ‘This is General Joffre,’ I would say, popping in a dreary spoonful of suet, ‘and this is General French … Hindenburg … Allenby.’
    The clouds of unknowing were still luminous with happiness. There was no loneliness to be experienced, however occupied the parents might be, in a family of six children, a nanny, a nursemaid, a gardener, a fat and cheerful cook, a beloved head-housemaid, a platoon of assistant maids, a whole battalion of aunts and uncles, all of them called Greene, which seemed to bring them closer, and invariably at Christmas that old bachelorfriend who in those days formed part of any large family gathering, a little mocked in secret by the parents, a little resented in secret by the children. The six birthdays, the Christmas play, the Easter and the summer seaside, all arrived like planets in their due season, unaffected by war. Only in the clouds ahead I could see that there was no luminosity at all. Yet anything, I felt, anything, even a romantic death, might happen to save me before my thirteenth year struck.
    1 I noticed with pleasure one year when I was travelling in the restaurant-car between Hankow and Pekin that there was a fly-swatter beside every place, but alas! there were no flies left to swat. I remember a glorious day in Freetown in 1942 when I closed the windows of my little office and slaughtered more than three hundred flies in a timed four minutes.
    2 I plead guilty to ingratitude. Thirty years later Noyes