Traveling on the Edge: Journeys in the Footsteps of Graham Greene

Chapter Two - Sierra Leone The magic of the place never failed him: here he kept his foothold on the edge of a very strange continent. The Heart of the Matter When you check in to the brutalist concrete monolith that is the Cape Sierra Hotel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the first thing they do is ask you for a $2000 deposit. Cash only. The beautiful receptionist smiles winningly as you count out the notes. 'I'm sorry, but we have to do it,' she says. 'It's in case you die before you check out.' When I went to Sierra Leone it was the most dangerous country on earth. Civil war had been raging there for eight years. More than 50,000 people had died in the fighting. More than half the population of four million had been displaced. Tens of thousands of people had had their arms, legs, lips or ears chopped off by the rebels' machetes. Rape was common. Cannibalism had been documented. The fighting was growing fiercer by the day, with the prize of Freetown, the capital, just outside the rebels' grip. More than anywhere in Greeneland, Sierra Leone had changed since Graham Greene's four visits there. His first was in 1935, en route to neighbouring Liberia to collect material for his travel bookJourney Without Maps. His romantic hope was to catch a glimpse of primitive Man, of humanity at its purest, as it must have been before it was contaminated by civilization. He was not disappointed. 'Africa', he wrote, was the 'shape of the human heart'. In 1942, Greene returned to Freetown as a spy for the Special Intelligence Services. As cover, he worked at the local police station. The city was of vital strategic importance to the Allies. The Vichy French held French Guinea next door and German agents were trying to smuggle industrial diamonds out of central Africa. Greene was not a successful secret agent. When MI6 delivered him a large safe, he locked his code books in it but then could not reopen it. Eventually it had to be destroyed to rescue the vital codes. On another occasion, he was enthused by the idea of starting a 'roaming' brothel, whose girls would debrief Vichy French officers. London gave the idea serious consideration, but in the end dismissed it as too expensive. Life in Freetown had its ups and downs, but during his year there Greene grew to love the place. Like Scobie, the protagonist of The Heart of the Matter, he was given a house on the mudflats below the colonists' enclave of Hill Station. It was overrun with cockroaches and rats. Once his cook went mad and chased the houseboy with a hatchet. On another occasion, Greene slipped and fell six feet into an open drain. He emerged covered in excrement. Yet war hardly touched Freetown. There were blackouts, but no bombs dropped there. Wounded people from torpedoed ships were ferried ashore but the actual attacks took place hundreds of miles away. 'There's an awful lot of time around in a country like this,' Scobie says, and Greene had plenty of it in which to ponder his disastrous personal life. He no longer loved his wife, Vivien, yet he was also tiring of his mistress, Dorothy Glover. Both made him feel trapped and guilty. He toyed with the idea of suicide. Ultimately, however, Freetown was one of the few places where Greene's dark side disappeared. The sights, the smells and the shambles of the city relaxed and amused him. He returned in 1949, wretched about his affair with his beautiful, married mistress, Catherine Walston, but as soon as his aeroplane landed in Freetown, he felt a weight lift away. 'I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you,' he wrote to Catherine. 'You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so one all the time is loving something different & yet the same. I want to spill myself out into youSmith, Julia Llewellyn is the author of 'Traveling on the Edge: Journeys in the Footsteps of Graham Greene' with ISBN 9780312282929 and ISBN 0312282923.