Graham Greene: The Man for a White Elephant Stall

The Ministry of Fear  by Graham Greene

published 1943

[excerpt] The third stall was the traditional one — the white elephant—though black might have described it better since many Anglo-Indian families had surrendered their collections of ebony elephants There were also brass ashtrays, embroidered match-cases which had not held matches now for a very long time, books too shabby for the bookstall, two post-card albums, a complete set of Dickens cigarette-cards, an electro-plated eggboiler, a long pink cigarette-holder, several embossed boxes for pins from Benares, a signed post-card of Mrs Winston Churchill, and a plateful of mixed foreign copper coins. 

buying a raffle ticket 

 

comments: Who would have thought that our next white elephant stall would come from Graham Greene?

It must be more than 40 years since I first read this, and I remembered little about it. I was inspired to read it again by the news from blogfriend Roger Allen that it begins at a charity fete in wartime London. This fitted in with the current interest in jumble sales, which also morph into white elephant or bric a brac stalls at more general events.

The Intricate World of Literary Jumble Sales

It starts with a most unlikely and imaginative scene – here are the opening lines:

There was something about a fete which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly, bound him a helpless victim to the distant blare of a band and the knock-knock of wooden balls against coconuts. Of course this year there were no coconuts because there was a war on…

We are in Bloomsbury and the fete is being held in the garden of one of the squares (the railings are still there, he notices) and is in aid of Comforts for Mothers of the Free Nations.

[The pictures above are almost exactly that – see details below]

This is a fast-moving book – it’s a thriller and one of what Greene described as his ‘entertainments’ rather than serious novels (a matter to be discussed separately) – but still the author gives a leisurely description of the fete, comparing it with Rowe’s childhood memories of such events.

When he was a child he would follow his mother round the stalls—the baby clothes, the pink woollies, the art pottery, and always last and best the white elephants. It was always as if there might be discovered on the white elephant stall some magic ring which would give three wishes or the heart’s desire, but the odd thing was that when he went home that night with only a second-hand copy of The Little Duke, by Charlotte M Yonge… he felt no disappointment. He carried with him the sound of brass, the sense of glory, of a future that would be braver than to-day.

And then, at the 1940s fete:

Arthur Rowe turned over the books and found with an ache of the heart a dingy copy of The Little Duke. He paid sixpence for It and walked on.

He takes part in a Guess the Weight of the Cake Contest, and then is drawn to the fortune teller.

It was very dark inside the tent, and he could hardly distinguish Mrs Bellairs, a bulky figure shrouded in what looked like cast-off widow’s weeds — or perhaps it was some kind of peasant’s costume.

She tells him to guess the cake-weight again, gives him a figure, and he obeys, and wins the cake.

It is obvious straightaway that this is a mistake – someone else should have been given the winning info. But Rowe holds his dignity and his cake. He takes it back to his miserable lodgings, and sure enough someone turns up to try to wrest it from him, and also to poison/kill him, only to be interrupted by a bomb falling on the house.

And we are only on page 25.

By thriller standards this is great. By Clothes in Books standards too: white elephant, Charlotte M Yonge, fortune teller, and cake form a winning line in the CiB Books Blog Bingo, and there is still another favourite feature – a séance – to come.

the seance

So – Rowe hires a private detective, Rennit, to try to find out what is going on. I think my favourite thing about the book might be this: [the agency] ‘employed only the most experienced agents — and the one agent he had been permitted to see before he left the office was certainly experienced. Rennit introduced him as A 2, but before long he was absent-mindedly addressing him as Jones’.

Rowe – whom we now know, btw, to be a convicted wife murderer – goes to visit the Free Mothers charity and meets Austrian refugees Anna and Willi Hilfe, who are brother and sister.

There’s a murder and a bomb explosion, and a fit of amnesia.

Anna is helpful and brave, and clearly likes Rowe, and so obviously his reaction to her reads as though it was invented for one of those old New Statesman competitions to sound as much like Greene as possible (the contests Greene's alleged to have entered and only come second). Melancholy? Thighs? Prettiest? Oh well, the author is what he is:

She was wearing a pair of shabby blue trousers ready for the night’s raid and a wine-coloured jersey He thought with melancholy that her thighs were the prettiest he had ever seen

 

The book has an epigraph:

“Have they brought home the haunch?” —Charlotte M. Yonge The Little Duke

- from that book Rowe buys at the fete. All the chapter headings are from this book: a historical novel for children. You would guess that the author did exactly that in childhood, bought a copy at a fete.

And eventually Greene makes it crystal clear why he is using this book: there is childhood innocence and principles, the longing for bravery and honour, and then the contrast with the cynicism of the contemporary world. Rowe says:

“There was a book called the Book of Golden Deeds by a woman called Yonge, The Little Duke…" He said, “If you were suddenly taken from that world into this job you are doing now you’d feel bewildered...all this talk of a man called Hitler, your files of wretched faces, the cruelty and meaninglessness. It’s as if one had been sent on a journey with the wrong map.”

The ending is ambiguous, the true Greene touch, but hopeful. I think.

WAR FAIR: HOLIDAYS AT HOME AT A FETE IN RUSSELL SQUARE, LONDON, 1943 | Imperial War Museums

WAR FAIR: HOLIDAYS AT HOME AT A FETE IN RUSSELL SQUARE, LONDON, 1943 | Imperial War Museums

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