A Sort of Life by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409020189
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

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For English my father took charge of some of the classes, ‘Dicker’ Dale of others. Dicker’s were the more unexpected. He would read aloud to us, a class of half a dozen only, works which were not on the syllabus, introducing us in his lazy drawl – ‘it’s all experience’ – to Beddoes and Death’s Jest-Book. But perhaps my father’s lessons drove deeper roots. He was an unconventional teacher. His three subjects were English, History and the Latin classics, and they often overlapped, so that a lesson on Robert Browning might well turn into a discussion of Trevelyan’s history of Garibaldi’s campaigns. The amusement and respect which he inspired in the VIth form (far, far distant now were the jeers of Carter and his immature gang who didn’t know a thing about the Freudian interpretation of dreams) have been described by Claud Cockburn. ‘Nobody but a fool could fail to enjoy a history lesson with Charles Greene. “Speaking”, he would say, “of Rome, let me draw your attention to yesterday’s events in Paris. Let me draw your attention for a moment, if I may, to the probable – nay, assured – consequences of the machinations of Mr Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau. Let us gaze for a moment into the abyss which now opens before the feet of liberal Europe. Let us not for a moment hesitate to recognize the consequences of the evil acts of these misguided men. And with this in mind, let us return to a thoughtful consideration of the situation which faced Cicero (a shady character) and his associates at the moment of the Catiline conspiracy.”’

A letter written to me by Peter Quennell after I had reached Oxford describes my father’s manner as he lay, almost on his back, in his deep chair at the end of the table in the library, his mortar-board at a perilous angle (he was never during school hours without gown and mortar-board and it was a shock sometimes to encounter him in his uniform on the home side of the green baize door: it was like a breach of neutrality). I had gone to Oxford a term or two in advance of Quennell carrying with me his introduction to a girl much older than either of us who lived at Boar’s Hill. Greatly daring, Claud Cockburn and I invited her to lunch and I sent Quennell what must have been a rather boastful telegram (not that there was anything at all to boast about, for in a letter to my mother I wrote, ‘She was very charming, but on the wrong side of twenty’). This was his reply, arranged somewhat in the vers libre manner of his Masque of The Three Beasts which was about to be published by the Golden Cockerel Press. (The poem had already appeared in Public School Verse, and it was said that in the school baths he had been sometimes pursued by his own particular Carters who mockingly recited what seemed to them his loony lines.

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