TThis page last updated Monday 23 July 2012

The Graham Greene Trail—Part II
original leaflet text by Sylvia Hall, photographs and some additional text for this web version by Peter Such

Part !—Trail leaflet numbers 1–4
 

5. St Peter's. The Parish Church of Great Berkhamsted, as the parochial notice board proclaims—one of the few prominent institutions in the town to still use Berkhamsted's proper name. Yes, there is a 'Little Berkhamsted'.

"The building of the church began in c.1220. As part of the school community, the Greene family would usually have attended services in the School Chapel rather than the Parish Church. Nevertheless, Graham was familiar with the Church and refers sometimes in his stories to the helmet belonging to a crusader: 'Then a sonic boom… rattled the crusader's helmet' on its pillar. However, R. A. Norris, in his history of the Church, states that it was the funeral helmet of Sir Adolphus Cory, Knight, who died in 1609. It was stolen in the 1970s and has not yet been recovered." The picture below is taken from the High street, opposite Chesham Road, looking towards School House (Old Hall).

6. The High Street. Sylvia Hall states that Graham Greene's use of the High Street in several of his works makes the High Street central to these descriptions. See The Berkhamsted Heritage Trail (section 3 and section 4) for views as well as The Town Hall Trust site where there are picture links to the street markets and a history page of the town's market origins.

7. The Hall. "This Georgian mansion was sited close to Swing Gate Lane at the east end of the High Street. The Hall was occupied by Graham Greene's uncle, Edward Greene, whose initials can be seen on the shops opposite the Primary School. The family were known as the 'rich' Greenes, as opposed to Graham's family, the 'intellectual' Greenes. Graham talks of his cousins' family in A Sort of Life: 'the whole family had an intimidatingly exotic air' and it was with one of them, Barbara, that he says he made 'the rather foolhardy journey through Liberia', recorded in his Journey Without Maps." In the 'Seasonal Berkhamsted' series on this web there is a view across to the site of The Hall, now a well-established residential area called 'Hall Park'.

8. St John's, Chesham Road.

Pictures of St John's (above left), its garden (above right), looking towards St Peter's Church, below. The left-hand picture  (pair below) provides another view of the parish church.

The picture on the right of the pair looks straight up Chesham Road, showing the 'chasm-like' features that clearly separates  the opposing sides. It was this that provided Greene with the 'exciting sense of travelling abroad' (cf. the green plaque above). 'The Swan' is on the right on the corner of Chesham Road. Sylvia Hall writes. "Built in 1890, St. John's was one of the boarding houses of Berkhamsted School.  It is now a girls' boarding house for the Berkhamsted Col-legiate. Here, on the 2nd October 1904, Graham was born. His father, was the Housemaster and Second Master of the School, having first joined the staff as a temporary Classics master in 1889.

The family remained at St. John's until 1910, when they moved to School House. One of Graham's early happy memories of living at St. John's is of 'the extra piece of garden we had across the road' (later known as 'Incent's Lawn' where the family would play 'with the exciting sense of travelling abroad'. He later thought of the two gardens as resembling England and France with the Channel [Chesham Road] between' [cf. plaques].

Graham was to return to St. John's as a boarder in the autumn of 1918, just before his fourteenth birthday. To him his time there appears to have been a nightmare, launching him from his sheltered, privileged home into a feared, untrusting outer world, with devastating psychological effects. Greene says: 'Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark in the tunnel'. Whether it was his 'loneliness… conflicting loyalties', lack of privacy, or his sense of 'great betrayal' that caused this unhappiness, even he seems to have been at a loss to explain. However, his experiences as he went through the senior school helped him to create some of his most realistic literary characters, such as Minty, 'the seedy unscrupulous journalist' in England Made Me and 'a priest, a policeman and a Judas figure' in The Power and the Glory."

9. The Swan. "'And now for a good lunch at 'The Swan'', which Baxter thoroughly enjoyed and for which the Captain failed to pay. It is no longer an inn but now houses the 'Swan Youth Project' [and provides a location for young people to gather of an evening without alcoholic beverages]."
The view above of 'The Swan' shows the three ancient pubs. 'The Swan was built in the fifteenth century and 'The Crown' (two doors along) in the seventeenth century. Next door to 'The Crown' is the 'King's Arms' (showing in fact the arms of Queen Anne).

10. The 'King's Arms' is well known to Festival visitors as the venue for our special dinners. Inside pictures are available at our 2001 Festival archive pictures, where there are more pictures of the High Street.

"Graham and his brother, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, came to the King's Hall—once the inn's stables, now an office block—in August 1974 at the invitation of the Berkhamsted Citizen's Association to talk about their childhood in the town. In The Ministry of Fear, one of the characters talks of 'the main street of a small country town… outside the inn yard of the King's Arms and… the barn in which dances were held', which also is mentioned in The Captain and the Enemy.

11. The Court Theatre (cf. 'The Rex' in the Heritage Walk) has been replaced by Tesco's supermarket. "Named after the Inns of Court Officers' Training Corps (cf. 'Kitchener's Field') whose soldiers were billeted in Berkhamsted throughout World War I, this cinema was known unofficially as the New Cinema—see the opening of Greene's A Sort of Life—and had an unusual Moorish dome which Graham described as an abuse to the dignity of the High Street.

Greene enjoyed the cinema from a  young age and often visited the Court. Later in his life he was to become a respected film critic for the Spectator, a way of life which in Ways of Escape he says he 'adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun'. In the same autobiographical work he talks of how his writing of a play or a script helped his characterisation in his books, through learning to focus more sharply on a limited number of characters in a particular situation.

12.  W. H. Smith. The previous site of this store was almost opposite in the double-fronted building (now a hairdressing salon) and this was where Graham's 'smell of innocence' once deserted him. He tells us of one or more occasions when his 'purpose was to steal something to read from the local W. H. Smith's' including The Abbess of Vlaye and The Railway Magazine."

13. The Town Hall is well known to Festival visitors as one of the venues we use. Past Festival archives: 2001, and the Town Hall Trust site itself will provide both external and internal pictures, as well as day and night pictures and further views of the High Street from its windows.

"In 1975 Graham, his brother Sir Hugh Carlton Greene and others wrote to The Times seeking the restoration of the Victorian Market House and its Community halls which had been closed because they failed to comply with fire regulations and were becoming derelict. A new Trust to restore the Town Hall was established in 1981 and of this both Graham and Hugh became patrons. Graham visited the partly-restored Sessions Hall in 1985 and mentions the Town Hall in The Innocent."

14.  King's Road. "The King's Road has a particular place in three of Graham Greene's stories. The main character in The Human Factor, Maurice Castle, lives up the King's Road in a small semi-detached house which Graham had based on one occupied by his aunt Mary, an artist. Graham Greene Country by Paul Hogarth R. A. is a book of illustrations of settings (some of which were used (with permission) in the 2003 Festival programme) used by Graham in his works.

When the artist came to look for Castle's house, he found Mary Greene's had been demolished, so he chose 'one of two pairs of suburban semis circa 1935' situated beyond the school, which proved to be 'of exactly the same type'. Paul Hogarth was commissioned by Penguin Books to prepare the jacket designs for their new editions of Greene's writing in 1962.

Doctor Crombie, Graham's short story of that name, also lived in King's Road, but perhaps Greene's most personal memories are put into the words of the narrator in The Innocent, who brings his girlfriend to spend a night in Bishop's Hendron—very obviously Berkhamsted. He is overcome by 'the sense of the first twelve years' and walks along teh High Street. He had forgotten 'a steep villaed hill' (King's Road) but seeing it reminds him of his first intense love for a girl of eight, whom he met when they attended dancing classes up the road."
 

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