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He was born (1904) in the town of Berkhamsted (accent on the Berk), about 26 miles northwest of London. Berkhamsted's chief distinction, then as now, was the unstylish but solid boys' public school which bears the' name of the town. Graham's father, Charles Henry Greene, had left Oxford in the 80s intending to be a lawyer. He came to Berkhamsted to teach for one term, and stayed at the school 38 years, the last 17 as headmaster. All six Greene children were born in Berkhamsted; Graham was the fourth. He hated the town, but not as much as he hated the school, with its harsh stone steps, its plain pine desks, the doorless cupboards with rows of dirty gym shoes, the ugly communal washbasins.
Berkhamsted's prevailing idea, Greene remembers, was that "privacy could only be misused." The boys slept in a large dormitory where hardly a quarter of an hour passed "without someone snoring or talking in his sleep." The lavatories had no locks. Even solitary walks were forbidden. Yet there "one met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil. There was Collifax, who practiced torments with dividers; Mr. Cranden with three grim chins, a dusty gown, a kind of demoniac sensuality; from these heights evil declined toward Parlow, whose desk was filled with minute photographs—advertisements of art photos. Hell lay about them in their infancy."
A less sensitive boy would not have been so affected by Berkhamsted's ugliness. But Greene was a sensitive boy: "One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell, but for a long time it was only hell one could picture with a certain intimacy."
One way of escape was to be inconspicuous. Greene learned to drift off by himself, against the rules, to Berkhamsted's beautiful common, a "wilderness of gorse, old trenches, abandoned butts." (Once he ran away from home and hid out on the common; it was a deeply humiliating anticlimax when his big sister flushed him out after a few hours.) A boy could also escape by reading. Graham was 14 when he read Marjorie Bowen's * The Viper of Milan, a melodramatic yarn about a war between the dukes of Milan and Verona, and "from that moment I began to write."
Wrung Dry. "Imitation after imitation of Miss Bowen's magnificent novel went into exercise books — stories of 16th Century Italy or 12th Century England marked with enormous brutality and a despairing romanticism. It was as if I had been supplied once and for all with a subject." At 14, a story had made Graham feel what most children learn much later, if at all. "Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white, but black and grey . . . I read all that in The Viper of Milan, and I looked round and I saw that it was so."
Before he found his future, at 14, Graham had made serious attempts at suicide. Once he drank some photograph developing fluid and a bottle of hay-fever lotion. Another time he tried eating a bunch of deadly nightshade. He can still remember "the curious sensation of swimming through wool" after swallowing 20 aspirins and jumping into the school swimming pool.