Free A Sort of Life by Graham Greene Page A

cynic. He was an innocent little white rabbit of a bachelor, dominated by the dark Constance, his sister; he must have possessed a passion for birds because he later became the private secretary to Lord Grey of Falloden in that statesman’s blind retirement. My only memory of him is seated at a desk in the St John’s schoolroom on the first evening of my first term there, while each boy in turn submitted to him, for censorship or approval, any books he had brought from home to read. The dangerwas in the source – home, where dwelt unreliable and uncelibate parents. Anything in the school library was acceptable – even the inflammatory blank verse of Sir Lewis Morris from whom I later learned of the carnal loves of Helen and Cleopatra.
    The methods of censorship are always curiously haphazard. In the 1950s I was to be summoned by Cardinal Griffin to Westminster Cathedral and told that my novel The Power and the Glory , which had been published ten years before, had been condemned by the Holy Office, and Cardinal Pizzardo required changes which I naturally – though I hope politely – refused to make. Cardinal Griffin remarked that he would have preferred it if they had condemned The End of the Affair . ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you and I receive no harm from erotic passages, but the young …’ I told him, and it was true enough, though I had forgotten the evil influence of Sir Lewis Morris, that one of my earliest erotic experiences had been awoken by David Copper-field . Our interview at that point came abruptly to an end, and he gave me, as a parting shot, a copy of a pastoral letter which had been read in the churches of his diocese, condemning my work by implication. (Unfortunately I thought too late of asking him to autograph it.) Later, when Pope Paul told me that among the novels of mine he had read was The Power and the Glory , I answered that the book he had read had been condemned by the Holy Office. His attitude was more liberal than that of Cardinal Pizzardo. ‘Some parts of all your books will always,’ he said, ‘offend some Catholics. You should not worry about that’: a counsel which I find it easy to take.
    School rules, like those of the Roman Curia, are slow to change, however temporary the ruler who inspires them may be. I think the censorship of books from home (which was strictly enforced only, like a customs examination, when one passed the border – parcels from home were exempt) was dropped with Mr Herbert’s retirement, but other relics of his government remained – the lavatories without locks, where each newcomer, anxious to perform his morning duty, had to call out ‘Number off’ in order to learn which of the compartments was empty; and that rule for Sunday walks which made certain that no one, under any circumstances, would ever walk dangerously alone.
    But I was not a member of the resistance – I was Quisling’s son. I had often to go begging that my name might be included in groups who had no desire for my company, until at last, after a term or two of purgatory, I received permission from my parents to spend Sunday afternoons at home. It was a relief for which I paid dearly in my nerves – a kind of coitus interruptus with the civilized life of home, for as evening fell I had to rejoin my companions tramping into the school chapel and afterwards climb the hill to St John’s, and then at night the stone stairs to the dormitory – where at this moment in my memory I have lamentably failed to saw open my knee.
    Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years. The unexpected never happens. Unhappiness is a daily routine. I imagine that a man condemned to a long prison sentence feels much the same. I cannot remember what particular item in the routine of a boarding-school roused this first act of rebellion – loneliness, the struggle of conflicting loyalties, the sense of