Free A Sort of Life by Graham Greene

centre and in which I could sit concealed and read my book. What book? I cannot besure now. The days of Henty were over – my body was leading my brain in unfamiliar directions. I found extraordinary beauty and passion, I remember, in Sir Lewis Morris’s Epic of Hades , and perhaps I was reading lines like these spoken by Helen of Troy:
    Was it love
    That drew me then to Paris? He was fair,
    I grant you, fairer than a summer morn,
    Fair with a woman’s fairness, yet in arms
    A hero, but he never had my heart.
    It was not he seduced me, but the thirst
    For freedom, if in more than thought I erred,
    And was not rapt but willing. For my child,
    Born to an unloved father, loved me not,
    The fresh sea called, the galleys plunged, and I
    Fled willing from my prison and the pain
    Of undesired caresses, and the wind
    Was fair, and on the third day as we sailed,
    My heart was glad within me when I saw
    The towers of Ilium rise beyond the wave.
    Today the lines seem pinchbeck, and yet they retain the secret smell of my hiding-place.
    One comes to literature by devious routes, and it was often Stephen Phillips’s Paolo and Francesca which I carried with me into hiding, just as another boy may be playing truant now with the verse-plays of Christopher Fry. There were lines in that banal drama which faltered on the edge of poetry: ‘The last sunset cry of wounded kings’, ‘the childless cavern cry of the barren sea’, and I was not critical in the hawthorn hedge.
    The danger of discovery lent those hours a quality of excitement which was very close to momentary happiness. Scent to me is far more evocative than sound or perhaps even sight, so that I become attracted without realizing it to the smell of a floor-polish or a detergent which one day I miss when I open my door and home seems no longer home. So in my sixties I seem able to smell the leaves and grasses of my hiding-place more certainly than I hear the dangerous footsteps on the path or see the countryman’s boots pass by on the level of my eyes. I remember how in 1944 I spent a rather guilty night of security in Berkhamsted away from the fly-bombs and the fire-watching with my brotherHugh. Asleep in the Swan Inn I dreamt of the W. H. Smith bookshop down the High Street from which I had stolen The Railway Magazine all those years ago, and I smelt the individual smell of the shop which was like the smell of no other Smith’s that I have ever known. In my dream I found a book for which I had long been searching on a particular shelf, and so in the morning, before I had breakfast, I walked down the street to see whether my dream might prove true. I was disappointed, the book was not there, but what I noticed at once on entering the shop was that the familiar smell had gone, and without the smell the shop was not the same. I inquired after the manager whom I remembered well: he had died the year before, and I suppose the new manager had changed whatever was the source of the smell which had so long haunted my imagination.
    On Sundays we would go for walks, by order, in threes, and the names had to be filled up like a dance programme on a list which was hung up on the changing-room door. This surely must have had some moral object, though one which eludes me today when I remember how deftly the ‘Emperor’s Crown’ used to be performed by three girls at once in a brothel in Batista’s Havana. Three can surely be as dangerous company as two, or were the authorities cynical enough to believe that in every three there would be one informer?
    The housemaster in my first year was Mr Herbert, an old silver-haired bachelor, whose formidable sister cared for him better than she did the boys. To add to my inextricable confusion of loyalties he happened to be my godfather, mysteriously linked at my birth to look after my spiritual well-being with that formidable gouty Colonel Wright of Number 11, who owned the chamber-pot in the dining-room cupboard. Mr Herbert was certainly not a