Graham Greene

 Graham Greene

A Sort of Life (autobiography)

Greene walks the reader through his memories of notable sights in his hometown of Berkhamsted, with its chapel, canal, and renowned boarding school.  

Greene describes his first day of school as the 

 

The curtain wall and yard of the old castle that Graham Greene says was built by Chaucer in the 13th century.

The castle bailey is site of a modern alms house.

 

Berkhamsted School

Berkhamsted School in 1907, when Greene was 3 years old and living at St. John's , one of the campus boarding houses, where his father was housemaster.  He would later become headmaster of the school.   When Greene returned to St. John's as a boarder at age 13, he writes that "most of [his] memories (and very unhappy ones they are) of the time date back to that time."  Indeed, boarding at school must be an awful existence for the children.  School can be bad enough without having to live there, too.  Photo courtesy of Hertfordshire Genealogy website.

St Peter's "great flinty Norman" Church

On "[his] end" of High Street were several Tudor era half-timber houses, as well as what Greene calls "a great, flinty Norman church."  This is St. Peter's.  Greene recalls "the helmet of some old Duke of Cornwall unremarked on a pillar like a bowler hat in a hall."  This was the funerary helmet Sir Adolphus Carey.  The helmet was stolen in the 1970's and has never been found.

Northchurch

At the far end of the long High Street was the village of Northchurch and an old inn, the Crooked Billet.  The name, perhaps because of some event which had happened there and had left an ambiguous impression in my mind from veiled adult conversation, always had for me a sinister ring (in the inn I was sure travelers had been done to death), and this gave the whole village of Northchurch an atmosphere of standing outside the pale:  a region of danger where nightmare might easily become reality.  (Chapter 1, page 15)

Childhood memories are often powerfully laced with emotion and dread for reasons existing only then and alter in impressions.  Greene speaks much of such "veiled" memories, whose accuracy and order in time are mostly unknown to him.  He makes much of the sinister atmosphere of the Crooked Billet, as well as the immediacy of innumerable dangers his childhood mind associates with the Canal.  The menace of the brutal canal workers, with their coal blackened faces, he says, the gypsy wives, the ragged children, uttered insulting words to the passing middle class children.  Indeed, to children, menacing adults can be terrifying and can long haunt memory.  Fear of drowning in the murky magnetic waters, too, particularly around the submerged machinery of the locks.

The neighboring village of Northchurch.

There is a pub there called the Crooked Billet, where murder and dismemberment and murder were thought by the children to take place at a whim.  The Crooked Billet 

(A different Crooked Billet pub in Henley-on-Thames welcomes the Andy Crowdy Led Zeppelin Project band.  Not bad.  I'd add this to my list of places to visit if it's a regular gig.)

The Canal

There was another walk too which we never took when we were in charge of our old crotchety nurse or the nursemaid, and that was the walk along the towing path by the canal.