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

one occasion we were told to learn any poem we chose by heart, and I got a certain undeserved credit for learning a long ballad about the brave Lord Willoughby, but it was the only poem in the anthology that I found of any interest. ‘Horatius’ had too many classical allusions, and I was too young to appreciate ‘After Blenheim’. ‘Barbara Frietchie’ was better, but ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ was awful, so awful that it has crept into several of my stories, an inescapable symbol of fatuity.
    My severe attitude towards ‘Horatius’ all the same must have been adopted later at school, for I have come across a questionnaire which I answered when I was seven years old in the School House Gazette . (Apparently I received the second prize for my ‘confessions’ – twelve tubes of watercolours.)
    What is your greatest aim in life ? To go up in an aeroplane.
    What is your idea of happiness ? Going up to London.
    Who is the greatest living statesman ? Don’t know any.
    Who is your favourite character in fiction ? Dixon Brett.
    What are the qualities you most admire in men ? Good looks.
    In women? Cleanliness.
    What is your favourite pastime ? Playing Red Indians.
    What is your pet hobby ? Collecting coins.
    What is your favourite quotation ? ‘I with two more to help me will hold the foe in play.’
    Who is the author you like best and which book ? Scott. The Talisman .
    Who is the cricketer you most admire ? Herbert Greene.
    Which is your favourite holiday resort ? Overstrand.
    Aeroplanes . I have mentioned our failure to see Blériot on the London to Manchester flight, so that perhaps the first aeroplane I actually saw was one I watched through the nursery window above the school playing-fields. Suddenly it nose-dived. I heard later that the pilot was an old boy of the school (his name I think was Wimbush). His younger brother was on the playing-fields, he knew his brother was in the plane, and he saw it crash. He walked quickly away down the hill to the school, saying nothing. Often since then watching planes cross the sky, I half-expect to see them fall to earth, as though it were my gaze which had caused that first crash.
    Once an airship, captained by an old boy, came down in the grounds of Berkhamsted Castle and remained there for some days on show. The stationer even made picture postcards of it. It was long before I saw another airship, though I can remember being woken and wrapped in blankets and brought to a bathroom window to see a blaze in the night sky from a Zeppelin which had been shot down over Potters Bar.
    Being in London . Once a year we were all taken to Peter Pan . I loved it wholeheartedly. My favourite scene was the one where Peter Pan fought alone against the pirates with his sword, and narrowly second to it was the moment of enjoyable horror when the green-lit face of Captain Hook appeared at a service hatch and put poison in Peter’s glass. The dying Tinker Bell touched me, but never would I consent to call out with the audience that I believed in fairies. It would have been dishonest, for I had never believed in them, except for the period of the play. There was one scene with attractive mermaids which to my great disappointment was cut, for reasons, I think, of war-time economy, from later productions. I could have dispensed more easily with the house in the tree-tops, for I never cared for Wendy, but ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ was a line which echoed through all my adolescence; it only really faded from my mind when death became for all of us a common everyday risk. At a later age, when I was twelve, I was taken to a revival of The Admirable Crichton . The heroine, Lady Somebody or other, who dressed in animal skins on the desert island, disturbed me for many nights, and she is one of my earliest sexual memories. Was it CathleenNesbitt who played the part? If so, those disturbed nights had been experienced not long before by Rupert Brooke, but it was not ‘mother