One hundred years ago, Graham Greene was an Oxford history undergraduate whose standard student activities were complemented, and often complicated, by a dizzying range of extracurricular pursuits. When not attending tutorials, writing essays or getting drunk, Greene was dabbling in acting, flirting with espionage, taking part in debates, editing a literary magazine, planning a programme for the BBC, falling headlong in love, and chancing his luck and risking his life by playing Russian roulette.

In addition, Greene was striving to become a writer. A volume of verse entitled Babbling April had already been accepted for publication – although it would die a death when it appeared in print in May 1925 (becoming, in Greene’s words, nothing more than ‘an expensive curiosity for collectors’). Whether keen to find his forte or to show off his creative ambidextrousness, Greene had also written his first novel. In early 1925, at the behest of his literary agent A.D. Peters, he was hard at work revising it.

Initially titled ‘Anthony Sant’ and later called ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’, the book had taken shape through clear stretches and bumpy spells. For, as with those more successful books that followed, Greene had problems with the middle section. As he told his mother: ‘The first 20,000 words were easy enough, and the last 20,000 will be. It’s the bit in between I don’t like.’ In August 1925 he assessed it differently. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that the first two thirds is good(!) but the last bit very bad.’

Unfortunately, publishers thought all of it was bad and rejected the work. Today it languishes, unloved and unpublished, in an archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Yet we have an idea of what it was roughly about, both from Greene’s biographers and from the man himself. ‘The subject, like so many first novels, was childhood and unhappiness,’ Greene revealed in his autobiography Ways of Escape. ‘By a mistaken application of the Mendelian theory I told the story of a black child born of white parents.’ His eponymous protagonist’s early life was blighted by loneliness at home and racial prejudice at school. Prompted by Peters to end on a positive note, Greene undertook a drastic rewrite: ‘I made the young man find a kind of content by joining a ship at Cardiff as a Negro deckhand, so escaping from the middle class and his sense of being an outsider.’

Write what you know, goes the dictum. With ‘Anthony Sant’, Greene did just that. He plundered his past and evoked his many growing pains. He also explored themes that he would exploit again and again: schoolyard trauma, lost innocence, divided loyalties, secrecy, betrayal, persecution and escape. Although in this novel and others, the hero can escape from everything but the trials of his childhood.

Greene’s immediate start in life was relatively smooth. As a young boy in a middle-class family in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, he enjoyed care, comfort and affection. However, this deeply sensitive child was plagued by phobias (birds, bats, moths) and a fear of drowning and the dark. At the age of six he was also terrified of a witch who, he believed, lurked in a linen cupboard on the nursery landing. He suffered in silence and in secret, refusing to share his fears, real or imagined, with anyone.

Greene was confronted with blood and death at an early age, as evidenced through a string of macabre recollections. His first memory was sharing his pram with his sister’s dead pug. When the dog was run over, his nurse thought the only way to transport the corpse home was by lumping it in with the baby in her care. At the age of four, Greene had his adenoids and tonsils removed at home. The operation left him with an unwanted image of a chamber pot full of blood, and from that point on he was rendered queasy from the sight of blood. Then, two years later, again while out with his nurse, Greene witnessed a man run into one of the town’s almshouses and slit his throat with a knife. Such incidents may or may not have shaped Greene the boy, but they certainly inspired Greene the writer.

‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in,’ Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory. Any childhood illusions that Greene still harboured were swept away when he was 13 and embarking on a dramatic new stage in his young life. From that age, at the boarding school where his father was headmaster, Greene was mercilessly bullied. The main culprit was a boy called Lionel Carter. His sidekick, Augustus Wheeler, was Greene’s former friend turned traitor. For several years, both boys waged a campaign of cruelty comprising verbal abuse and routine jabs with pairs of dividers. ‘The sneering nicknames were inserted like splinters under the nails,’ Greene wrote in his memoir A Sort of Life. In his Mexican travel account, The Lawless Roads, he looks back on the ‘kind of lawlessness’ that operated within his school and singles out Carter – here named Collifax, presumably to avoid a charge of libel – as possessing ‘the genuine quality of evil’.

At low ebbs, Greene played truant and cut himself with a penknife. When depression took hold, he resorted to more desperate methods and made several suicide attempts. His ways of escape included drinking hay-fever drops, eating deadly nightshade and swallowing 20 aspirins before swimming in the empty school pool (‘I can still remember the curious sensation of swimming through cotton wool,’ he wrote). After suffering a breakdown, he ran away from ‘that hated brick barracks’. This led to him being sent off to London for six months of treatment with a psychoanalyst.

The therapy clearly only worked up to a point. It didn’t cancel out the black moods and dark thoughts that dogged Greene throughout his life, nor did it prevent him becoming recklessly trigger-happy with a loaded gun to ameliorate his misery and assuage his boredom. The latter would always prove particularly debilitating. In his memoir, Greene confessed that there was a link between his youthful games of Russian roulette and his visits as a writer to global hotspots and conflict zones. For him, in the likes of Kenya, Malaya and Vietnam, ‘the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver from the corner-cupboard in the life-long war against boredom’.

Greene’s biographers have rightly devoted much attention to his childhood and adolescence. They have also painstakingly combed those early years and trawled his work to cross-reference where and how fact became fiction and life informed art. Childhood is the writer’s bank balance, Greene said, and he had more than enough funds to draw on. In the story ‘The Basement Room’, he takes the green baize door that led from his father’s study at home to school and turns it into a portal to a daunting, unknown world. In another, more devastating tale, ‘The End of the Party’, he reimagines his younger self by depicting a fragile little boy frightened to death of the dark while playing hide-and-seek. ‘Darkness came down like the wings of a bat and settled on the landing,’ Greene writes. ‘Others began to put out the lights at the edge of the hall, till the children were all gathered in the central radiance of the chandelier, while the bats squatted round on hooded wings and waited for that, too, to be extinguished.’

In several notable novels, Greene flashes back and taps into the relentless torture and humiliation he suffered at school. In England Made Me, the feckless hero Anthony Farrant remembers the grim boarding school he eventually ran away from, and the only lesson he ever learned there – ‘the lesson taught by the thirteen weeks of overcrowding, tedium and fear’ – namely that ‘happiness was an incidental enjoyment’. In the same novel, we learn that Minty, an old Harrovian turned seedy journalist, shares a school experience similar to that of his creator: ‘It was only that Minty had more self-control. The twisting of his arm had taught him it, the steel nibs dug into his calf.’ In Brighton Rock, there is a moment when the young gangster Pinkie is set upon by a rival mob: ‘Pain happened to him, and he was filled with horror and astonishment as if one of the bullied brats at school had stabbed first with the dividers.’ Then at the end of the book, Pinkie is presented at his most vulnerable: ‘badgered, confused, betrayed: fake years slipped away – he was whisked back towards the unhappy playground’.

Greene’s most forensic biographer, Norman Sherry, even scoured the manuscript of ‘Anthony Sant’ and found a detailed fictionalised account of Greene’s ordeal at Berkhamsted School. At the centre of it is an unholy trinity: three characters based on a beleaguered Greene, his chief tormentor, Carter, and the perfidious Wheeler. There is a scene in which the Carter character, Webber, attacks Anthony in the classroom with dividers. Later, Webber steals Anthony’s diary and mocks its contents. ‘I’ll read you some. It’s priceless,’ he tells his cohorts. ‘“Beastly unhappy tonight. Webber and everyone teasing me as usual.” Diddums then.’ Webber continues to bully him by employing ‘two methods of torture, the physical and the mental’. The latter has a more damaging effect. A friendly teacher feels Anthony’s pain. ‘They don’t fight fair’, he says, ‘they send out their little insidious worms, brain worms, which creep into your mind so swiftly that you don’t notice them but all the time they are gnawing away at the foundations.’

Greene’s most recent biographer, Richard Greene (no relation), tells how in the late 1950s the author began a novel set in a version of Berkhamsted School. Entitled ‘Lucius’, the book was to tell the story of a schoolmaster who conducts an affair with the matron and protects a bullied boy – only for the boy to blackmail him and drive him to suicide. Greene eventually had second thoughts about the project. ‘I had started a novel about a school,’ he recalled, ‘I revisited the scene and found no change. I abandoned the novel – I couldn’t bear mentally living again for several years in these surroundings.’ Instead, Greene went to a less traumatic location, a Congolese leper colony, where he found inspiration for A Burnt-Out Case.

Thanks to biographical research and literary sleuthwork, we know a lot about Greene’s early life and its profound effect on him, both psychologically and creatively. Much less has been written about Greene’s actual treatment of children in his fiction. There aren’t many of them: he created largely adult worlds inhabited by honorary consuls, travelling aunts, confidential agents, third men, whisky priests, fallen idols, foreign correspondents and doomed lovers. But children pop up here and there, or else are referred to, and while they don’t ever steal scenes or drive narratives, they still serve a purpose. For the most part, Greene utilised children to provide welcome contrasts to his main characters and to illuminate facets of their personalities.

It is worth pointing out here that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Greene didn’t like children much. He had two of his own but he and his wife Vivien hadn’t planned on having them. (Greene’s cousin went further by stating that ‘when their eldest one was expected, they were very distressed about it, and even thought of having it adopted.’) If his father was distant emotionally, then Greene turned out to be distant physically, constantly away from his family either due to work overseas – MI6 postings, journalistic assignments, field trips for novels – or extramarital affairs on home turf. In any case, domestic life held little allure.

With Greene’s views in mind, not to mention the experiences that had helped form them, it is equally unsurprising to find that children are frequently portrayed in a negative light in his fiction. In Our Man in Havana, the hero’s 16-year-old daughter Milly is a conniving, materialistic young woman (‘Girls grow up quickly in the tropics,’ is one character’s sinister observation). Supposedly a devout Catholic, just three years earlier she set fire to a small boy. In Brighton Rock, 17-year-old Pinkie – referred to throughout by Greene as ‘the Boy’ and by strangers as a child – is a razor-wielding killer. And in The Comedians, five-year-old Angel, ‘the unbearable child’ of the protagonist Brown’s secret squeeze, Martha, is dumpy and needy and stymies their shared future together. As Greene puts it: ‘the child blocked her escape’.

Many of Greene’s children have been wrenched out of childhood by father figures and forced to adapt to new environments. In The End of the Affair, Parkis, the private detective, has trained his 12-year-old son, a born ‘lingerer’, to accompany him to monitor all manner of adult follies and vices. In ‘The Basement Room’, young Philip realises he is out of his depth with his best friend Baines the butler and ‘caught up in other people’s darkness’. Baines’ behaviour doesn’t help: ‘For if a grown-up could behave so childishly, you were liable too to find yourself in their world. It was enough that it came at you in dreams: the witch at the corner, the man with a knife.’

At other times, Greene’s children find grown-up worlds thrilling. In The Captain and the Enemy, Victor, on his 12th birthday, is rescued from his loathed boarding school and shown an exciting alternative by the eponymous captain. ‘He was an adventurer, he belonged to that world of Valparaiso which I had dreamt about as a child, and like most boys I responded, I suppose, to the attraction of mystery, uncertainty, the absence of monotony, the worst feature of family life.’

It is interesting that only in this book, his last novel, published just three years before his death, did Greene feel he could write about school at length. Victor looks back on himself as an ‘outcast’ there: ‘I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next.’ Perhaps Greene could finally confront those enemies on the page. Either that or he was able to stop running.

Greene’s work is peppered with cynical views of childhood. Take Wormold’s jaundiced belief in Our Man in Havana that ‘Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.’ In Brighton Rock, Pinkie doesn’t even believe in childhood innocence: ‘you had to go back a long way further before you got innocence; innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats; perhaps not even that; innocence was the ugly cry of birth’.

Occasionally, Greene’s views can become overly bleak. We think of Scobie in The Heart of the Matter comforting a six-year-old girl who is breathing her last while telling himself that this is what parents endure all the time: ‘They see their children dying slowly every hour they live.’ Or the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory looking at his illegitimate daughter, Brigitta, and noticing that ‘the world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit’.

This is the writer who, in Richard Greene’s words, ‘tried to stamp out sentimentality in his fiction as if at war with something in himself’. But Greene could stamp too hard. Or to switch metaphors, that splinter of ice that he said is found in the heart of writers could make him too cold-blooded for his own good. His fiction is at its strongest when he tempers the gloom and doesn’t allow his jaded mindset to poison the proceedings. Or when he doesn’t employ an adult looking at a child to trigger thoughts of death and decay, but rather to reveal something insightful about the beholder. At one point in The Human Factor, Castle explains his affection for his wife’s son: ‘I love Sam because he’s yours. Because he’s not mine. Because I don’t have to see anything of myself there when I look at him.’ Greene even strikes an optimistic note in The Quiet American with Fowler’s observation that our childhoods neither make us nor break us. ‘Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.’

It was in Greene’s fever dream of a novel from 1943, The Ministry of Fear, that he achieved if not a perfect depiction of childhood – surely an impossible task as there are so many different permutations – then at least a series of skilful meditations on it. Along with patches of overdone negativity (‘like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering, loss and despair, and called it happiness’) and a scattering of effective and evocative Proustian trips down memory lane, Greene delivered captivating passages like this one which contrast key stages in our lives:

In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality – heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood – for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated  and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories – of the V.C. in the police-court dock, of the faked income tax return, the sins in corners, and the hollow voice of the man we despised talking to us of courage and purity.

That first novel that Greene was writing a century ago might have failed, and might represent a false start to his writing career. However, the childhood he channelled for ‘Anthony Sant’ would go on to prove fruitful. It hardened him as a writer and made him unafraid to dole out tough truths. It helped engender his dispassionate writing style. And it rendered him, like the protagonist of his story ‘Chagrin in Three Parts’, ‘a cold literary observer of human anguish.’ As readers, we should be grateful that his childhood was so difficult. It makes his biography fascinating and his fiction compelling. As Sancho says of his youth in Monsignor Quixote, ‘everything was so complicated and contradictory – and interesting’.