England Made Me
Graham Greene
About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel, The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.
As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography – A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.
ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE
Novels
The Man Within
It’s a Battlefield
A Gun for Sale
The Confidential Agent
The Ministry of Fear
The Third Man
The End of the Affair
Loser Takes All
The Quiet American
A Burnt-out Case
Travels with my Aunt
Dr Fischer of Geneva or
The Bomb Party
The Human Factor
The Tenth Man
Stamboul Train
Brighton Rock
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
The Fallen Idol
Our Man in Havana
The Comedians
The Honorary Consul
Monsignor Quixote
The Captain and the Enemy
Short Stories
Collected Stories
Twenty-One Stories
The Last Word and Other Stories
May We Borrow Your Husband?
Travel
Journey Without Maps
The Lawless Roads
In Search of a Character
Getting to Know the General
Essays
Yours etc.
Reflections
Mornings in the Dark
Collected Essays
Plays
Collected Plays
Autobiography
A Sort of Life
Ways of Escape
Fragments of an Autobiography
A World of my Own
Biography
Lord Rochester’s Monkey
An Impossible Woman
Children’s Books
The Little Train
The Little Horse-Bus
The Little Steamroller
The Little Fire Engine
GRAHAM GREENE
England Made Me
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
TO VIVIEN
WITH TEN YEARS’ LOVE
1925–1935
Table of Contents
Cover Page
About the Author
Also by Graham Greene
England Made Me
Dedication
Copyright Page
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part IV
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part V
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part VI
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part VII
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Epub ISBN: 9781409020455
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Published by Vintage 2006
9 10 8
Copyright © Graham Greene 1935, 1962
None of the characters in this book is intended to be that of
a living person
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 1935 by William Heinemann
First published by Vintage in 2001
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PART I
1
SHE might have been waiting for her lover. For three quarters of an hour she had sat on the same high stool, half turned from the counter, watching the swing door. Behind her the ham sandwiches were piled under a glass dome, the urns gently steamed. As the door swung open, the smoke of engines silted in, grit on the skin and like copper on the tongue.
‘Another gin.’ It was her third. Damn him, she thought with tenderness, I’m hungry. She swallowed it at a draught, as she was used to drinking schnaps; skål, skål, but there was no one to skål. The man in the bowler hat put his foot on the brass rail, leant his elbow on the counter, drank his bitter, talked, drank his bitter, wiped his moustache, talked, kept his eye on her.
She stared out past the dusty door pane into the noisy dark. Sparks leapt in the thick enclosed air and went out, sparks from engines, sparks from cigarettes, sparks from the trolley wheels beating on the asphalt. An old tired woman swung the door and peered in; she was looking for someone who was not there.
She moved from her stool; the man in the bowler hat watched her, the waitresses paused in their drying and watched her. Their thoughts drummed on her back: Is she giving him up? What’s he like, I wonder? Jilted? She stood in the doorway and let them think: the de
ep silence of their concentration amused her. She watched the blue empty rails in front of her, looked up the platform to the lights and the bookstalls, then she turned and went back to her stool and was aware of their thoughts wilting again in the steaming air round the urns; the waitresses dried glasses, the man in the bowler hat drank his bitter.
‘It never rains but it pours. Take silk stockings for example.’
‘Another gin.’ But she left the glass on the counter, after barely touching it this time with her lips, and began hurriedly to make-up, as if it had been a duty she had been too excited to remember. Now, in the deep conviction that he would not come, she had one lonely hour to remember in all the things she had neglected: mouth, nose, cheeks, eyebrows. ‘Oh damn,’ she said. The pencil snapped, and she ground the charcoal end into the floor with her toe; ‘Oh damn,’ she said, caring not a hang that she was surrounded again by curiosity, alien and unfriendly. It was as if she had broken a mirror; it was unlucky; it was inefficient. Her self-confidence was shaken. She began to wonder if she would recognise her brother if, after all, he came.
But she knew him at once by the small scar under the left eye, the round face which had always looked as if only that day it had lost its freshness, like a worn child’s, the bonhomie which even a stranger would not trust. ‘Kate,’ he was all contrition, ‘I’m sorry I’m late. It wasn’t my fault. The fact is –’ and at once he became sullen, prepared not to be believed. And why, she thought, as she kissed him and touched his back to assure herself that he was there, that he had really come, that they were together, should anyone believe him? He can’t open his mouth without lying.
‘Have this gin?’ She watched him drink it slowly and was aware how her own brain recorded unerringly his anxiety.
‘You haven’t changed.’
‘You have,’ he said. ‘You’re prettier than ever, Kate,’ and charm, she thought, charm, your damnable accommodating charm. ‘Prosperity suits you.’ She watched him more closely and examined his clothes for any sign that the years had been less prosperous for him. But he always possessed one good suit. Tall and broad and thin and a little worn, with the scar under his lower lid, he was the mark of every waitress in the room. ‘A bitter, please,’ and a waitress tore along the counter to serve him, and Kate watched the automatic charm glint in his eye.
‘Where shall we eat? Where are your bags?’ He turned cautiously from the counter and one hand straightened his school tie.
‘The fact is –’ he said.
‘You aren’t coming with me,’ she said with hopeless certainty. She wondered for a moment at the depth of her disappointment, for he belonged to this place, to the smoke swirling beyond the door, to the stale beer, to ‘Guinness is good for you’ and ‘Try a Worthington’, he had the bold approach, the shallow cheer of an advertisement.
‘How did you know?’
‘Oh, I always know.’ It was true, she always knew; she was his elder by half an hour; she had, she sometimes thought with a sense of shame, by so little outstripped him in the pursuit of the more masculine virtues, reliability, efficiency, and left him with what would have served most women better, his charm. ‘They aren’t going to give you the Stockholm job then?’
He beamed at her; he rested both hands (she noticed his gloves needed cleaning) on the top of his umbrella, leant back against the counter and beamed at her. Congratulate me, he seemed to be saying, and his humorous friendly shifty eyes raked her like the headlamps of a second-hand car which had been painted and polished to deceive. He would have convinced anyone but her that for once he had done something supremely clever.
‘I’ve resigned.’
But she had heard that tale too often; it had been the yearly fatal drumming in their father’s ears which helped to kill him. He had not been able to answer a telephone without anxiety – ‘I have resigned’, ‘I have resigned’, proudly as if it had been matter for congratulation – and afterwards the cables from the East tremblingly opened. ‘I have resigned’ from Shanghai, ‘I have resigned’ from Bangkok, ‘I have resigned’ from Aden, creeping remorselessly nearer. Their father had believed to the end the literal truth of those cables, signed even to relatives with faint grandiloquence in full, ‘Anthony Farrant’. But Kate had always known too much; to her these messages conveyed – ‘Sacked. I am sacked. Sacked.’
‘Come outside,’ she said. It would have been unfair to humiliate him before the waitresses. Again she was aware of the deep listening silence, of eyes watching them go. At the far end of the platform she began to question him. ‘How much money have you got?’
‘Not a sou,’ he said.
‘But surely you’ve got a week’s pay. You gave them a week’s notice.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, striking an attitude against his smoky metallic background, against a green signal lamp burning for the East Coast express, ‘I left at once. Really, it was an affair of honour. You wouldn’t be able to understand.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘Besides, my landlady will give me tick until I’m in funds again.’
‘And how long will that be?’
‘Oh, I’ll get hold of something in a week.’ His courage would have been admirable if it had not been so feckless. Money, he had always been certain, would turn up, and it always did: a fellow he’d known at school noticed his tie in the street, stopped him, gave him a job; he sold vacuum cleaners to his relations; he was quite capable of selling a gold brick to an Australian in the Strand; at the worst there had always been his father.
‘You forget. Father’s dead.’
‘What do you mean? I’m not going to sponge.’ He believed quite sincerely that he had never ‘sponged’. He had borrowed, of course; his debts to relatives must by now have almost reached the thousand mark; but they remained debts not gifts, one day, when a scheme of his succeeded, to be repaid. While Kate waited for the express to pass and shielded her face from the smoke, she remembered a few of his schemes: his plan to buy up old library novels and sell them in country villages, his great packing idea (a shop which would pack and post your Christmas parcels at a charge of twopence a parcel), the patent hand warmer (a stick of burning charcoal in the hollow handle of an umbrella). They had always sounded plausible when he described them; they had no obvious faults, except the one fatal flaw that he was concerned in them. ‘I only want capital,’ he would explain with a brightness which was never dulled by the knowledge that no one would ever trust him with more than five pounds. Then he would embark on them without capital; strange visitors would appear at week-ends, men older than himself with the same school ties, the same air of bright vigour, but in their cases distinctly tarnished. Then the affair would be wound up, and astonishingly it appeared from the long and complicated pages of accounts that he had not lost more money than he had borrowed. ‘If I had had proper capital,’ he would explain, but he blamed no one, and no one was paid back. He had added to his debts, but he had not ‘sponged’.
His face, she thought, is astonishingly young for thirty-three; it is a little worn, but only as if by a wintry day, it is no more mature than when he was a schoolboy. He might be a schoolboy now, returned from a rather cold and wearing football match. His appearance irritated her, for a man should grow up, but before she could speak and tell him what she thought, her tenderness woke again for his absurd innocence. For he was hopelessly lost in the world of business that she knew so well, the world where she was at home: he had a child’s cunning in a world of cunning men: he was dishonest, but he was not dishonest enough. She was aware, having shared his thoughts for more than thirty years, felt his fears beat in her own body, of his incalculable reserves. There were things he would not do. That, she told herself, was the amazing difference between them.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave you here without money. You’re coming with me. Erik will give you a job.’
‘I can’t speak the language. And anyhow,’ he leant forward on his stick and smiled with as much negligence
as if he had a thousand pounds in the bank, ‘I don’t like foreigners.’
‘My dear,’ she said with irritation, ‘you’re out of date. There are no foreigners in a business like Krogh’s; we’re internationalists there, we haven’t a country. We aren’t a little dusty City office which has been in the family for two hundred years.’
There were times when he did seem to share her intuition, to catch directly the sharp glitter of her meaning. ‘Ah, but darling,’ he said, ‘perhaps that’s where I belong. I’m dusty too, he remarked, standing there with uncertain urbanity, with an uneasy smile, in his smart, his one good suit, ‘And besides. I haven’t a single reference.’
‘You said you had resigned.’
‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ They stepped back to let a trolley pass. ‘I’m damned hungry,’ he said. ‘Could you lend me five bob?’
‘You’re coming with me,’ she repeated. ‘Erik will give you a job. Have you got your passport?’
‘It’s at my digs.’
‘We’ll fetch it.’ The lights of an incoming train beat against his face, and she could watch with hard decided tenderness his hesitation and his fear. She was certain that if he had not been hungry, if he had not been without five shillings in his pocket, he would have refused. For he was right when he remarked that he was dusty too: the grit of London lay under his eyes, he was at home in this swirl of smoke and steam, at the marble-topped tables, chaffing in front of the beer handles, he was at home in the one-night hotels, in the basement offices, among the small crooked flotations of transient businesses, jovial among the share pushers. She thought: If I had not met Erik, I should have been as dusty too. ‘We’ll find a taxi,’ she said.
He stared through the window at the bicycle shops of the Euston Road; in the electric light behind the motor horns, behind the spokes and the tins of liquid rubber, autumn glimmered, lapsed into winter as the lights were put out and the bicycles were taken in for the night. ‘Oh,’ he sighed, ‘it’s good, isn’t it?’ Autumn was the few leaves drifted from God knows where upon the pavement by Warren Street tube, the lamplight on the wet asphalt, the gleam of cheap port in the glasses held by old women in the Ladies’ Bar. ‘London,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing like it.’ He leant his face against the glass. ‘Dash it all, Kate, I don’t want to go.’
