TO MARION GREENE

After three months in Lagos, Graham took up his post in Freetown, where he remained until February 1943. In a drab bungalow where rats swung on his bedroom curtains and one servant chased another with an axe, he quickly wrote The Ministry of Fear, his most successful thriller. His experiences there led also to the writing of The Heart of the Matter (1948). In this letter, he complains about difficulties and inconveniences of his posting, yet his attitude towards this place was surprisingly passionate. He believed that what was essential about life was most likely to be apprehended on the move or in conditions of privation and danger. He wrote of 1942 : ‘“Those days” – I am glad to have had them; my love of Africa deepened there, in particular for what is called, the whole world over, the Coast, this world of tin roofs, of vultures clanging down, of laterite paths turning rose in the evening light’.¹

I left Lagos last Saturday (today’s Thursday) and flew to Accra. What I saw of it I didn’t like – except the superbly beautiful old Danish fort in which the Governor lives – like a stage set of Elsinore in dazzling white with the surf beating below on two sides. I stayed in an American transit camp for the night: a wind blowing up the red dust all the time, bad food and morose or drunk tough Americans belonging to the airline. Then on the Sunday I flew on here coming down in Liberia at a new aerodrome the Americans have made, for lunch – an overcooked steak literally a foot long. The planes are uncomfortable – freight planes in which the passengers sit upright facing each other the whole length on little metal seats like lavatory seats. The heat until you get well up is appalling and then of course the metal turns cold.

I arrived in Freetown with no accommodation in the evening but the Governor²– a very kind and intelligent man – put me up a couple of nights until I’d got a couple of boys and a cook, and then I moved into my dingy little Creole villa about two miles out of town in the flats. It’s terribly difficult to get anywhere to live alone in these days, so one can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. All the same I wish I was not just across the road from a transport camp in process of erection with two steam shovels going all day. And there’s no water although there are taps. Freetown has 147 inches a year, but distribution is so bad that there won’t be any water in my part till the rains six weeks hence. Drinking water I have to fetch in empty bottles from Freetown and then of course boil it, and bath water is fetched from a water hole. One tries not to think of germs and what the blacks do there and one pours in sanitas … I’m hoping that the police are getting me an oil-drum of water out in a few days. Sanitation of course is nonexistent.³I shouldn’t mind this a bit if I was in the bush, but it’s depressing trying to keep clean to entertain and be entertained. This sounds a depressed letter, but I’m not really depressed. Just a bit badgered with housekeeping worries: it’s a little difficult at present to find time to work.

[…]

I’m afraid letters from me will be rather few and far between. I have no assistant or secretary, and God knows how I shall get through the work. I’m turning my minute dining room here into an office as soon as I can get any desk or other furniture but practically everything is unobtainable here. For instance even ink can’t be bought for love or money, no soda water – a trial in a country where you have to boil and filter every drop – if you can get a drop. Even in the town taps stop running about 11 in the morning. People keep the two inches of their morning bath to serve again at night – this isn’t so good when you’ve sweated all day, but when the rains come it will be better.

Well this has been a moan. I hadn’t meant it to be. In many ways we are better off than at home. Tomorrow’s Good Friday … Good Friday four years ago I went to a secret illegal Mass in Chiapas. I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.

My love to all of you,
Graham

I’ve sent on the letter to Lagos and asked them to forward by air mail. It should get to Elisabeth in about a week to ten days. If a bag is going it will get there earlier. I suddenly realized that I hadn’t told you that it would probably have to go through the Egyptian censorship⁴so I took the necessary liberty of reading it first. Now that I’ve told you I shan’t have to again. Sorry. C’est la guerre! I’m so glad you’ve got airgraph letters now.

Much love.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 676