Graham Greene (9 page)

“Beware of Nicholas Levitski and Pauline Ozeroff who are sitting opposite you. They are agents of Secret Police.”

WILLIAM LE QUEUX

harlie Stowe waited until he heard his mother snore before he got out of bed. Even then he moved with caution and tiptoed to the window. The front of the house was irregular, so that it was possible to see a light burning in his mother's room. But now all the windows were dark. A searchlight passed across the sky, lighting the banks of cloud and probing the dark deep spaces between, seeking enemy airships. The wind blew from
the sea, and Charlie Stowe could hear behind his mother's snores the beating of the waves. A draught through the cracks in the window-frame stirred his nightshirt. Charlie Stowe was frightened.

But the thought of the tobacconist's shop which his father kept down a dozen wooden stairs drew him on. He was twelve years old, and already boys at the County School mocked him because he had never smoked a cigarette. The packets were piled twelve deep below, Gold Flake and Players, De Reszke, Abdulla, Woodbines, and the little shop lay under a thin haze of stale smoke which would completely disguise his crime. That it was a crime to steal some of his father's stock Charlie Stowe had no doubt, but he did not love his father; his father was unreal to him, a wraith, pale, thin, indefinite, who noticed him only spasmodically and left even punishment to his mother. For his mother he felt a passionate demonstrative love; her large boisterous presence and her noisy charity filled the world for him; from her speech he judged her the friend of everyone, from the rector's wife to the “dear Queen,” except the “Huns,” the monsters who lurked in Zeppelins in the clouds. But his father's affection and dislike were as indefinite as his movements. Tonight he had said he would be in Norwich, and yet you never knew. Charlie Stowe had no sense of safety as he crept down the wooden stairs. When they creaked he clenched his fingers on the collar of his nightshirt.

At the bottom of the stairs he came out quite suddenly into the little shop. It was too dark to see his way, and he did not dare touch the switch. For half a minute he sat in despair on the bottom step with his chin cupped in his hands. Then the regular movement of the searchlight was reflected through an upper window and the boy had time to fix in memory the pile of cigarettes, the counter, and the small hole under it. The footsteps of a policeman on the pavement made him grab the first packet to
his hand and dive for the hole. A light shone along the floor and a hand tried the door, then the footsteps passed on, and Charlie cowered in the darkness.

At last he got his courage back by telling himself in his adult way that if he were caught now there was nothing to be done about it, and he might as well have his smoke. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then remembered that he had no matches. For a while he dared not move. Three times the searchlight lit the shop, while he muttered taunts and encouragements. “May as well be hung for a sheep,”

“Cowardy, cowardy custard,” grown-up and childish exhortations oddly mixed.

But as he moved he heard footfalls in the street, the sound of several men walking rapidly. Charlie Stowe was old enough to feel surprise that anybody was about. The footsteps came nearer, stopped; a key was turned in the shop door, a voice said: “Let him in,” and then he heard his father, “If you wouldn't mind being quiet, gentlemen. I don't want to wake up the family.” There was a note unfamiliar to Charlie in the undecided voice. A torch flashed and the electric globe burst into blue light. The boy held his breath; he wondered whether his father would hear his heart beating, and he clutched his nightshirt tightly and prayed, “O God, don't let me be caught.” Through a crack in the counter he could see his father where he stood, one hand held to his high stiff collar, between two men in bowler hats and belted mackintoshes. They were strangers.

“Have a cigarette,” his father said in a voice dry as a biscuit. One of the men shook his head. “It wouldn't do, not when we are on duty. Thank you all the same.” He spoke gently, but without kindness: Charlie Stowe thought his father must be ill.

“Mind if I put a few in my pocket?” Mr Stowe asked, and when the man nodded he lifted a pile of Gold Flakes and Players from a shelf and caressed the packets with the tips of his fingers.

“Well,” he said, “there's nothing to be done about it, and I may as well have my smokes.” For a moment Charlie Stowe feared discovery, his father stared round the shop so thoroughly; he might have been seeing it for the first time. “It's a good little business,” he said, “for those that like it. The wife will sell out, I suppose. Else the neighbours'll be wrecking it. Well, you want to be off. A stitch in time. I'll get my coat.”

“One of us'll come with you, if you don't mind,” said the stranger gently.

“You needn't trouble. It's on the peg here. There, I'm all ready.”

The other man said in an embarrassed way, “Don't you want to speak to your wife?” The thin voice was decided. “Not me. Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. She'll have her chance later, won't she?”

“Yes, yes,” one the strangers said and he became very cheerful and encouraging. “Don't you worry too much. While there's life …” and suddenly his father tried to laugh.

When the door had closed Charlie Stowe tiptoed upstairs and got into bed. He wondered why his father had left the house again so late at night and who the strangers were. Surprise and awe kept him for a little while awake. It was as if a familiar photograph had stepped from the frame to reproach him with neglect. He remembered how his father had held tight to his collar and fortified himself with proverbs, and he thought for the first time that, while his mother was boisterous and kindly, his father was very like himself, doing things in the dark which frightened him. It would have pleased him to go down to his father and tell him that he loved him, but he could hear through the window the quick steps going away. He was alone in the house with his mother, and he fell asleep.

GRAHAM GREENE

n 2 September 1940 four German agents embarked at Le Touquet in a fishing boat which was escorted across the Channel by two minesweepers. According to one of the men the fishing boat's crew consisted, improbably, of three Russians and a Latvian; another said it was manned by two Norwegians and one Russian. All had confused memories of the voyage, and it seems possible that they were drunk.

The spies were to hunt in couples. One pair, after transshipping to a dinghy, landed near Hythe in the early hours of 3 September. They had a wireless set and an elementary form of cipher, and their orders were to send back information of military importance; they had been given to understand that an invasion of the Kentish coast was imminent. By 5.30 on the same morning both men, although they separated on landing, had been challenged and made prisoner by sentries of a battalion of the Somersetshire Light Infantry.

This was hardly surprising. The two men were of Dutch nationality. They were completely untrained for their difficult task; their sole qualification for it seems to have lain in the fact that each, having committed some misdemeanour which was known to the Germans, could be blackmailed into undertaking the enterprise. Neither had more than a smattering of English, and one suffered, by virtue of having had a Japanese mother, from the additional hazard of a markedly Oriental appearance; he it was who, when first sighted by an incredulous private of the Somersets in the early dawn, had binoculars and a spare pair of shoes slung round his neck.

The other pair of spies consisted of a German, who spoke excellent
French but no English at all, and a man of abstruse origins who claimed to be a Dutchman and who, alone of the four, had a fluent command of English. They landed at Dungeness under cover of darkness on 3 September, and soon after daybreak were suffering acutely from thirst, a fact which lends colour to the theory that on the previous night the whole party had relied on Dutch courage to an unwise extent. The English-speaker, pardonably ignorant of British licensing laws, tried to buy cider at breakfast-time in a public house at Lydd. The landlady pointed out that this transaction could not legally take place until ten o'clock and suggested that meanwhile he should go and look at the church. When he returned (for she was a sensible woman) he was arrested.

His companion, the only German in the party, was not caught until the following day. He had rigged up an aerial in a tree and had begun to send messages (in French) to his controllers. Copies of three of these messages survived and were used in evidence against him at his trial. They were short and from an operational point of view worthless; the news (for instance) that
“this is exact position yesterday evening six o'clock three messerschmitt fired machine guns in my direction three hundred metres south of water reservoir painted red”
was in no way calculated to facilitate the establishment of a German bridgehead in Kent.

All four spies were tried, under the Treason Act, 1940, in November. One of the blackmailed Dutchmen was acquitted; the other three men were hanged in Pentonville Prison in the following month. Their trials were conducted
in camera,
but short, factual obituary announcements were published after the executions.

Two men and a woman, who on the night of 30 September 1940 were landed by a rubber dinghy on the coast of Banffshire
after being flown thither from Norway in a seaplane, had—and, except by virtue of their courage, deserved—no more luck than the agents deposited in Kent. They were arrested within a few hours of their arrival. During those hours their conduct had been such as to attract the maximum of suspicion. This—since both men spoke English with a strong foreign accent and the documents of all three were clumsily forged—they were in no position to dispel; and the first of them to be searched by the police was found to have in his possession,
inter alia:
a wireless set; a loaded Mauser automatic; an electric torch marked “Made in Bohemia”; a list of bomber and fighter stations in East Anglia; £327 in English notes; and a segment of German sausage. Both men—one a German, the other a Swiss—were in due course hanged.

PETER FLEMING

ANNA SEWARD

•

John André (1751–80), Major in the British Army, was the son of a Genevese merchant settled in London. He received his education at Geneva, and upon his return to England became intimately connected with Miss Seward and her literary
coterie
at Lichfield, where he conceived an attachment for Honora Sneyd, subsequently the second wife of Richard Lovell Edgeworth. His relinquishment of mercantile for military pursuits has been attributed to the disappointment of his passion for this lady, whose marriage, however, did not take place till two years after the date of his commission, 4 March 1771.

He joined the British Army in America, and in 1775 was taken prisoner at St John's. Upon his release he became successively aide-de-camp to General Grey and to Sir Henry Clinton, who entertained so high an opinion of him as to make him Adjutant-General, notwithstanding his youth and the short period of his service. This position unhappily brought him into connection with Benedict Arnold, who was plotting the betrayal of West Point to the British. As Clinton's chief confidant, André was entrusted with the management of the correspondence with Arnold, which was disguised under colour of a mercantile transaction, Arnold signing himself Gustavus, and André adopting the name of John Anderson.