Ways of Escape by Graham Greene
The Great Blitz of Wednesday, April 16
This was the worst raid Central London had ever experienced.
The sirens which usually don’t go before ten went at nine. I was drinking with Dorothy Glover, in the Horseshoe. We went out and tried to get dinner. Corner House full, Frascati’s closed. Victor’s closed. At the York Minster the chef was about to go home. Ended in the Czardas in Dean Street. Sitting next the plate-glass windows we felt apprehensive. By ten it was obvious that this was a real blitz. Bomb bursts – perhaps the ones in Piccadilly – shook the restaurant. Left at ten thirty and walked back to Gower Mews. Wished I had my steel helmet. Changed, and went out with D, who was fire-watching. Standing on the roof of a garage we saw the flares come slowly floating down, dribbling their flames: they drift like great yellow peonies.
At midnight reported at the post and went out on the north side. At a quarter to two nothing had happened in the district, and I planned to sign off at two thirty. Then the flares came down again right on top of us, as the Pole, Miss S (of Bourne & Hollingsworth) and I stood in Tottenham Court Road at the corner of Alfred Place. A white southern light: we cast long shadows and the flares came down from west to east across Charlotte Street. Then a few minutes later, without the warning of a whistle, there was a huge detonation. We only had time to get on our haunches and the shop window showered down on our helmets.
Ran down Alfred Place. A light shone out in a top flat at the corner of Ridgmount Gardens: we shouted at it and ran on – the windows must have been blasted. Then confusion. Gower Street on both sides seemed ravaged. Never realised the parachute bomb had fallen behind on the Victoria Club in Malet Street where 350 Canadian soldiers were sleeping. Women bleeding from cuts on the face in dressing-gowns said there was someone hurt on the top floor above RADA. Two other wardens and a policeman – we ran up four littered flights. Girl on the floor. Bleeding. Stained pyjamas. Her hip hurt. Only room for one man to lift her at a time. Very heavy. Took her over for two flights, but she had to be changed three times. In pain, but she apologised for being heavy. Stretcher party came and took her away from the ground floor. All down Gower Street they came out in their doorways – many unhurt, but so many bleeding in a superficial way in squalid pyjamas grey with debris dust. These were the casualties of glass.
Confusion. Not enough stretcher parties. Went back to post and the blackout boards blew out and we went down on the floor. Out again to find something to do. That was the odd difficulty.
Jacobs had become Incident Officer with a blue light beside him at the corner of Gower Street and Keppel Street. This was indeed local and domestic war like something out of The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Ordered round to the Victoria Club.
All stretcher men and no wardens visible. What are a warden’s duties? The lectures no longer seemed clear. Soldiers still coming out in grey blood-smeared pyjamas: pavements littered by glass and some were barefooted. Everybody suddenly seemed to have cleared from the front. A soldier came out and said there was a man trapped on the stairs. We took a stretcher and went in. On one side a twenty-foot drop into what seemed the foundations of the building. One wished that things would stop: this was our incident, but the guns and bombs just went on. Came on what was apparently a body: only the head and shoulders visible and a clot of blood by the head. Quiet and slumped and just a peaceful part of the rubble. ‘Is this him?’ ‘No. He’s a goner.’ But another stretcher party seemed to be working out of sight on the stairs. My companion couldn’t find what he was looking for, so we had to make do with the corpse. (Perhaps it wasn’t a corpse.) Time went very slowly and I wanted to get out: the whole place seemed to be held together with wishful thinking. Shouted for stretcher-bearers and at last got them: lighted their way out with the body. Outside there seemed to be flames all round the shop. Then another stick of three bombs came whistling down and we lay on the pavement – a sailor on top of me: broken glass cut my hand which bled a great deal – so I went back to have it dressed at the post under the School of Tropical Medicine.
A street accident is horrible and fortuitous, but all this belonged to human nature.
As I was having my hand dressed another stick of three came down. Down again on the floor of the post. At the first the windows blew in. One really thought that this was the end, but it wasn’t exactly frightening – one had ceased to believe in the possibility of surviving the night. Began an Act of Contrition. Then it was over. Went out again.
Dallas, the big white factory in Ridgmount Gardens, was ablaze. Behind every window on every floor a wall of flame blowing up. Not much more than an hour had passed since the first bomb in our area. It seemed a long while.
One forgets the progression of small incidents. A man fetched me to a friend in a house opposite Dallas – a large fat foreigner. One foot was crushed and bloody, and he was the only person I saw that night whose nerve had gone. He was whimpering and crying to be taken to hospital. But what a weight he was. We crossed hands and got him to the corner of Gower Street. Then we had to rest in spite of his cries. It was broad daylight at three fifteen from the flares. Jacobs and Lewin, the Deputy Chief Warden, came up. Jacobs said, ‘You must stop there. There are people more injured than you,’ but the man began to cry and moan. His friend had slipped away, so Lewin began to help me with him towards the Ministry of Information, which had become a temporary dressing station.4 But we gave out again in Keppel Street and he fetched a soldier to help. All the time we waited the man leaned his weight on me and moaned to be taken to hospital. An awful journey into the basement of the M of I, the passage cluttered with Ministry people. It turned out later that the man had internal injuries and fought the doctor who tried to give him morphia.
Out again, after three minutes spent in what had seemed a lovely solid secure building. The fire brigade had still not come for Dallas (it didn’t come for three hours), and Jacobs sent me with a message to the post. Going down the iron steps into the well round the building I heard another bomb coming down. Crouched and heard it fall well away.
Out again, and a soldier fetched me. An old man in a basement in Gower Street. The back wall had been blown out, exposing Dallas and the flames, but he didn’t want to stir. He was reasonable and didn’t make a fuss. A daughter helped him with his clothes. He was old and white-bearded and very concerned about waistcoats. Just out of hospital with a tube in his bladder, told he would never walk again. He was worried about the tube – not nice for people to see it hanging out, but he forgot it walking across Gower Street, he was so delighted at having proved the hospital wrong.
Called in at the shelter in Gower Mews where Dorothy acted as shelter warden. She was very cheerful, but glad to see me. A warden had told her that he had seen me in the Victoria Club. ‘I think he was all right. He was covered in blood, but I don’t think it was his blood.’
That was really all there was to remember: the raid died away, and at five, while I was counting stretcher cases from Warwick House and forgetting to take the number of the ambulance, the ‘raiders past’ went. It turned out that there had been another parachute bomb at the end of Bloomsbury Street, and on my own beat and not reported at the time an HE on the Jewish Girls’ Club in Alfred Place behind Dallas (many days later they were still getting out the bodies – more than thirty killed)5 and another taking away the side of the Embassy Cinema in Torrington Place. A house gutted opposite the Spectator in Gower Street, and part of Maple’s burnt out.
Other people’s stories: a girl from my post was told that a man was trapped on the top floor of a building. She went up and found him pinioned but not badly hurt. Two soldiers stood in the room doing nothing – just laughing.
Father Gervase Mathew, the Byzantine historian. He was called out twice – to the Aperitif restaurant in Jermyn Street and to a gun emplacement in Hyde Park – which was hit by a parachute bomb – to give a conditional absolution. The soldier in Hyde Park when he asked if there were any Catholics said, ‘I’m a Catholic, Father. Haven’t been t
A young priest – a friend of GM – was called to a wrecked public house where the landlord, his wife and daughter, all Catholics, were trapped. He cleared the way to a billiard table, got under it, and was then near enough to them to hear their confessions. A voice above his head suddenly asked, ‘Who’s that?’ and he heard himself making the odd statement, ‘I am a Catholic priest and I am under the billiard table hearing confessions.’ ‘Stay where you are a moment, Father,’ the voice said, ‘and hear mine too.’ It was a rescue-party man.
Looking back, it is the squalor of the night, the purgatorial throng of men and women in dirty torn pyjamas with little blood splashes standing in doorways, which remains. These were disquieting because they supplied images for what one day would probably happen to oneself.
I had to take a train later that morning to Oxford where I had promised to talk to the Newman Society, but I hadn’t time to shave. At Oxford I went into a chemist and asked for a packet of razor blades. He glared at me in fury. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ he asked.
2
Evelyn Waugh once wrote to me that the only excuse he could offer for Brideshead Revisited was ‘spam, blackouts and Nissen huts’. I feel much the same towards The Heart of the Matter, though my excuse might be different – ‘swamps, rain and a mad cook’ – for our two wars were very different.
In the six years that separated the end of The Power and the Glory from the start of The Heart of the Matter my writing had become rusty with disuse and misuse (the misuse included the innumerable telegrams and reports from Freetown in Sierra Leone to my headquarters in London). I began the book soon after the war was over in 1946, three years after I had closed my small office and burnt my files and code-books. For reasons of security I had been unable to keep a proper diary in West Africa, but looking at the few random notes which survive I seem to have been already, between telegrams and reports, playing with the idea of a novel – though not the novel I eventually wrote.
There had been a chance encounter during one of my journeys up-country with a Father B whom I have now completely forgotten, though I must have been remembering him when I wrote in The Heart of the Matter of Father Clay whom Scobie met when he went out to Bamba to inquire into young Pemberton’s suicide. ‘Poor little red-headed north country boy neglected by his fellows,’ I read in my notebook. ‘His account of the blackwater fever. “I walk up and down here.”’ (These were Father Clay’s very words.) ‘£38 in cash at the Mission when he arrived, but a £28 bill. Apparently no interests. 6 year tour – 3½ done. The old raincoat over a dirty white shirt.’
I had no idea of Major Scobie in those days. It was the young north country priest who grew in my imagination, so that I find a few lines in faded pencil beginning his story.
‘If I were a writer, I would be tempted to turn this into a novel. I imagine this is what writers feel – the haunting presence of an individual whom they wish to understand. But I haven’t the time or the skill for such work and all I have been able to do is to gather the impressions that this man made on others who knew him, the documents as it were in the case of Father –. I am afraid a character can hardly emerge from such a collection as this. In the reviews I have read novelists are praised or blamed for their success or failure in creating a character, but such characters usually seem to bear about the same relation to life as the pictures in this country that you see painted on the mud walls of the native huts. A train is represented by a row of rectangles, each rectangle balanced on two circles. So a ‘character’ is simplified by the novelist: the contradictions you find in human beings are pared or explained away. The result is Art – which is arrangement and simplification for the purpose of conveying a mental condition. This book cannot pretend to be art because the compiler has left in all the contradictions: its only purpose is to present as truthfully as possible an enigma, though I daresay it is an enigma common to most of us if every man had his own case-book.
‘My name is … I am a line-agent for …’
The name and the firm were never filled in and the novel went no further. It was just another object abandoned on the Coast like the old guns on Bunce Island in Sierra Leone River. I am glad to put this small memorial to what might well have been a better book than The Heart of the Matter.
Looking through my old notebook I find stray incidents and characters which could have been included in my novel; they formed part of the routine life of an SIS representative in Freetown, and some of them may have found a hole or corner in the book which came to be written – but I don’t want to search for them now.
‘The German agent’s letters. The list of ships which have called. Tell so-and-so he’s too optimistic when he says no ships can call here. The touch of pacifism: “What would Livingstone have said?”’
Who was that agent? Forgotten as deeply as Father B.
‘The small brown kid dead in the middle of the road between the shops, and the vulture hopping round, hopping back towards the gutter when cars came by.’
‘The suitcase of the suspect – the squalor and intimacy of a man’s suitcase.’
‘The funeral party going home outside – I had thought it was a wedding. The crowd of women in bright native dress wearing a kind of black apron and overshirt. The trombone players going Dum, dum, dum, and the women making little dancing steps and posturing and shouting to the soldiers in the camp as they went by. All a little tipsy. At the house young men were kicking a football. The last mourners seem sedate and sombre, carrying handkerchiefs. One woman in white European dress walking alone.’
‘My boy’s brother’s dying. Of gonorrhoea. My boy too has had g. “Cured now.” “Injections?” “No.” He makes an expressive gesture with his hands. “Doctor throw it out.” His stilted walk with buttocks projecting and the smell of drink. “You drink if you see your brother – own father, own mother – lying on bed, not seeing you. You drink to keep water out of eyes.” He cannot yet tell his brother’s wife. If people know he’s dying they’ll all come in and steal his things. All night he’s going to have a party at his brother’s, drinking so that water doesn’t come out of his eyes, and quietly checking on his brother’s belongings and getting his small brother to write them down. Next morning he tells me with interest that there are two sewing machines – but his brother isn’t dead yet.’
This must have been my first unsatisfactory ‘boy’, a Mende, the one my mad cook had tried to kill with a hatchet. I thankfully lost the boy when he went to prison for perjury, an offence beyond his comprehension, though I had him defended before the absurd bewigged English judge by the best black lawyer in Freetown. I was a little unfortunate with the law. My cook was later accused of taking money for witchcraft and not fulfilling his promise. I found my house deserted one night when I returned from a long trek, with no one to cook me an evening meal. The cook, I learnt from a neighbour, was in prison. When I visited him there I couldn’t bear to see him in his grim cell. I got in touch, but it wasn’t easy in wartime, with a Vichy district commissioner across the border in French Guinea and had him returned to his native village where he would end his days well looked after, at liberty except for an iron ring round his ankle to show that he had been afflicted by God.
‘The letter to the African agitator in his internment who has married again. In England he seems to have had relations with an ardent humanitarian Englishwoman who financed him. The letter is from an African in the Gower Street – Gray’s Inn district. First about letting him have collars left at the laundry. Reference to the agitator’s new romance. “Oh, she will be jealous when she hears the news. You are a real heart-breaker.” The photo of the heart-breaker on the files. The respectable humanitarian names chiming in the right places – Victor Gollancz, Ethel Mannin …’
‘The Court Messenger at Yengema (the headquarters of the diamond mines) with his senseless face and his bandy legs suffering from ju-ju. (He had to be sent back to his native village to be treat
‘The mammas in the market wrapping up their fruit and vegetables in confidential telegrams from the secretariat files.’
‘The Commissioner back subdued from a hanging. “I can’t eat meat for a week after a hanging.”’
There was another event which I couldn’t put down in the notebook and which sickened me – the interrogation of a young Scandinavian seaman from Buenos Aires who was suspected of being a German agent. I knew from a report about the girl he had loved in Buenos Aires – a prostitute probably, but he was really in love in his romantic way. If he came clean he could go back to her, I told him, if he wouldn’t speak he would be interned for the duration of the war. ‘And how long do you think she’ll stay faithful to you?’ It was a police job, an M15 job again. I was angry that I had been landed with it. It was a form of dirty work for which I had not been engaged. I gave up the interrogation prematurely, without result, hating myself. He may even have been innocent. To hell, I thought then, with M15.
My experiences in Sierra Leone were rich enough, but I have never been satisfied with what I made of them. My critics have complained, perhaps with justice, that ‘I laid it on too thick’, but the material was thick. The real fault, as I have written, lay in the rustiness of my long inaction. What I was engaged in through those war years was not genuine action – it was an escape from reality and responsibility. To a novelist his novel is the only reality and his only responsibility. Like the man suffering from ju-ju I had to go back to my proper region to be cured.
In 1946 I felt myself at a loss. How had I in the past found the progressions from one scene to another? How confine the narrative to one point of view, or at most two? A dozen such technical questions tormented me as they had never done before the war when the solution had always come quickly. Work was not made easier because the booby-traps I had heedlessly planted in my private life were blowing up in turn. I had always thought that war would bring death as a solution in one form or another, in the blitz, in a submarined ship, in Africa with a dose of blackwater, but here I was alive, the carrier of unhappiness to people I loved, taking up the old profession of brothel-child. So perhaps what I really dislike in the book is the memory of personal anguish. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘A writer’s temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.’ I was even contemplating one night the first move to suicide when I was interrupted in that game by the arrival at ten in the evening of a telegram (I had never known they delivered telegrams so late) from someone whom I had made suffer and who now felt anxious about my safety.