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Authors: Graham Greene
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threatened me with an action for libel when I wrote a review of his autobiography.
Chapter 3
1
I HAD passed thirteen and things were worse even than I had foreseen. I lay in bed in the dormitory of St John’s, listening to the footsteps clatter down the stone stairs to early prep and breakfast, and when the silence had safely returned I began trying to cut my right leg open with a penknife. But the knife was blunt and my nerve was too weak for the work.
I was back in the house of my early childhood, but the circumstances had changed. The garden across the road, France across the Channel, was now closed to me: I could no longer set foot in the chintzy drawing-room where my mother had read aloud to us and where I had wept over the story of the children buried by the birds. In those early days I had not even been aware that there existed in the same house such grim rooms as those I lived in now. Even the door by which I entered the house was a different one, a side door like a service entrance, though no servant would have endured the squalor we lived in. 1 There was a schoolroom with ink-stained nibbled desks insufficiently warmed by one cast-iron stove, a changing-room smelling of sweat and stale clothes, 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. Years later when I read the sermon on hell in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist I recognized the land I had inhabited. I had left civilization behind and entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties: a country in which I was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature, known to have dubious associates. Was my father not the headmaster? I was like the sonof a quisling in a country under occupation. My elder brother Raymond was a school prefect and head of the house – in other words one of Quisling’s collaborators. I was surrounded by the forces of the resistance, and yet I couldn’t join them without betraying my father and my brother. 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, so that I felt the less sympathy for him when he was later imprisoned, without warrant or reason, in the second German war under Regulation 18b. Injustice had bred injustice.
Though children can be abominably cruel, no physical tortures were inflicted on me. If I had possessed any skill at games I might even have won a tacit acceptance into the resistance movement, but I hated rugger only one degree less than I now hated cricket – a sport which at six years old I had loved as a game. ‘Runs’ I enjoyed, for then I could be alone in the solitude of the countryside, and at this period of my life I loved the country. It was my natural escape-route. On the wide stretches of Berkhamsted Common, seamed with the abandoned trenches of the Inns of Court O.T.C . among the gorse and heather, and in the Ashridge beechwoods beyond, I could dramatize my loneliness and feel I was one of John Buchan’s heroes making his hidden way across the Scottish moors with every man’s hand against him.
I grew clever at evasion. Truancy was impressed as the pattern of my life. To avoid fielding-practice I invented extra coaching in mathematics after school; I even named the master who I said was teaching me and curiously enough my story was never investigated. I would slip out of St John’s with a book in my pocket while others were changing and make my way a little up the hill where a small lane branches off into the countryside. It was one of the most solitary lanes I have ever known; not even courting couples were to be seen there, perhaps because it was hardly wide enough for two to walk abreast. On one side was a ploughed field: on the other a ditch with a thick hawthorn hedge which was hollow in the
Chapter 3
1
I HAD passed thirteen and things were worse even than I had foreseen. I lay in bed in the dormitory of St John’s, listening to the footsteps clatter down the stone stairs to early prep and breakfast, and when the silence had safely returned I began trying to cut my right leg open with a penknife. But the knife was blunt and my nerve was too weak for the work.
I was back in the house of my early childhood, but the circumstances had changed. The garden across the road, France across the Channel, was now closed to me: I could no longer set foot in the chintzy drawing-room where my mother had read aloud to us and where I had wept over the story of the children buried by the birds. In those early days I had not even been aware that there existed in the same house such grim rooms as those I lived in now. Even the door by which I entered the house was a different one, a side door like a service entrance, though no servant would have endured the squalor we lived in. 1 There was a schoolroom with ink-stained nibbled desks insufficiently warmed by one cast-iron stove, a changing-room smelling of sweat and stale clothes, 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. Years later when I read the sermon on hell in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist I recognized the land I had inhabited. I had left civilization behind and entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties: a country in which I was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature, known to have dubious associates. Was my father not the headmaster? I was like the sonof a quisling in a country under occupation. My elder brother Raymond was a school prefect and head of the house – in other words one of Quisling’s collaborators. I was surrounded by the forces of the resistance, and yet I couldn’t join them without betraying my father and my brother. 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, so that I felt the less sympathy for him when he was later imprisoned, without warrant or reason, in the second German war under Regulation 18b. Injustice had bred injustice.
Though children can be abominably cruel, no physical tortures were inflicted on me. If I had possessed any skill at games I might even have won a tacit acceptance into the resistance movement, but I hated rugger only one degree less than I now hated cricket – a sport which at six years old I had loved as a game. ‘Runs’ I enjoyed, for then I could be alone in the solitude of the countryside, and at this period of my life I loved the country. It was my natural escape-route. On the wide stretches of Berkhamsted Common, seamed with the abandoned trenches of the Inns of Court O.T.C . among the gorse and heather, and in the Ashridge beechwoods beyond, I could dramatize my loneliness and feel I was one of John Buchan’s heroes making his hidden way across the Scottish moors with every man’s hand against him.
I grew clever at evasion. Truancy was impressed as the pattern of my life. To avoid fielding-practice I invented extra coaching in mathematics after school; I even named the master who I said was teaching me and curiously enough my story was never investigated. I would slip out of St John’s with a book in my pocket while others were changing and make my way a little up the hill where a small lane branches off into the countryside. It was one of the most solitary lanes I have ever known; not even courting couples were to be seen there, perhaps because it was hardly wide enough for two to walk abreast. On one side was a ploughed field: on the other a ditch with a thick hawthorn hedge which was hollow in the
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