Introduction

It is a cold January morning in 1935. The steamboat, SS David Livingstone, slips out of Liverpool docks under a low grey sky on its standard cargo service to the west coast of Africa. Amongst the seven passengers listed in the manifest are two Greenes: H. G. Greene of 9 Woodstock Close, Oxford, is the writer, Graham Greene, with five novels and a reputation already under his belt at the age of thirty-one; the other, with a London address, is Graham's first cousin, twenty-seven-year-old Barbara. Or maybe we should start in October 1934 at a Greene family wedding reception, when after a few glasses of champagne, Barbara impulsively agreed to go with Graham to Liberia, 'wherever it was'. She looked it up in The British Encyclopaedia. The only maps Graham Greene could find showed a few dotted lines for the 'probable course of rivers', and areas marked 'jungle', 'wild animals' and 'cannibals'. Their other source of information, a British Government Blue Book, listed the endemic diseases: yellow fever, plague, elephantiasis, leprosy, yaws, malaria, hookworm, schistosomiasis, dysentery, smallpox; and swarming populations of rats.

Liberia was the first modern African republic. In the 1820s territory had been bought (sometimes at gunpoint) from the local rulers on what was known as the Grain Coast of Africa (after a pepper spice traded in the area) with American money so that freed slaves and the illegitimate children of slave owners could go back to Africa. This was a sort of conscience-salve and a way of disappearing a problem in one, for many were freed on condition they emigrate. From 1822-1861, 15,000 African Americans and 3,100 African Caribbeans were shipped in to form the new country, settling along the coast. In 1847 they attained independence but the ideal of freedom behind the name Liberia (for 'Land of the Free') would not resonate with the indigenous peoples of the interior. The Black minority settler elite who survived (disease meant many didn't) monopolised the positions of power, imposed punitive tax collections, and clashed violently with the local tribes. In 1923 came reports of shipments of forced labour from Liberia to the Spanish colony of Fernando Po. In 1926, the American rubber company, Firestone, leased a million acres for latex production, and interesting to this story is that a New York Times article on Firestone's investment noted 'Carrying forty or fifty pounds all day long on his head is said to be nothing to a native Liberian.' Allegations of modern slavery began to filter out.

The story goes that Graham Greene wanted an African experience to probe into his own Heart of Darkness and he didn't want to take a well-worn road. Indeed, Liberia in 1935 was around 43,000 square miles of forest with neither roads nor navigable rivers. For the resulting book of his journey through the hinterland, he had received an advance of £350 from his publishers, William Heinemann. In secret, he had also been recruited by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society, which wanted someone to investigate the allegations of slavery. That Barbara accompanied him on what would turn out to be a 350-mile trek through unmapped land was, he allowed, because everyone else had refused. The truth was he couldn't have found a better travelling companion.

Barbara sensed her 'conventional little mind' irritated him, 'But we never quarrelled, not once.' Not once do they walk side by side, however, and it isn't long before the only subject they can discuss, by tacit agreement, is food. What he missed she gives us, in line after line of her bright, and so often witty, observations. 'I got out my diary and wrote down what I thought of him. His brain frightened me. It was sharp and clear and cruel. I admired him for being unsentimental, but "always remember to rely on yourself", I noted. "If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you."' However, Graham Greene's book of the expedition, Journey Without Maps, does not in fact note her reactions. Barbara is mentioned just once by name, and then moved to the shadows as an infrequent vague presence ('my cousin') without voice. Also unnoticed by Graham was that his steadfast cousin was meticulously jotting down every interesting detail in her diary. 'I was learning far more than he realised,' she writes.

Let us hover over the Liberian jungle and time-travel back to January 1935. The unending green is veined with a narrow red clay path, a day's walk to the next remote village. We will not see two white perspiring figures in pith helmets bent beneath their canvas knapsacks, with two or three local guides as I'd imagined. Oh no. To facilitate the Greenes' journey is a straggling train of thirty-two human souls, along with one monkey, one goat and five chickens. I see the entourage as a living metonym for the Great Chain of Being, that hierarchal order of life (and servitude) down through ranks that held, since Aristotle, such pervasive influence on Western thought. The procurement of labour, after all, is the dark sorrow of Africa, and the basic systems grimly endured. For three shillings a week and one meal daily, the barefooted carriers (including the hammock-bearers hired to carry Graham or Barbara when required) will bear fifty pounds of luggage all day long on their heads, in the heat, from village to village, chewing kola nuts for the caffeine to sustain them. Modern jaws will drop at the inventory: a wooden table, two chairs, two beds, bedding, mosquito nets, a tent (in case they don't find a village before nightfall, and remember nothing is lightweight in 1935), a tin bath, a water filter, all the paraphernalia for cooking and eating, and tins and tins of food: bully beef, sausages, turnips (why?), golden syrup; a case of whisky (or two), a gun, a money box, and two leather Revelation suitcases. The irony, considering Graham's covert mission, swings in the breeze with the hammocks.

The journey teems with paradox. The imperialist trope predisposes the Greenes to view their attendants as children, yet Barbara also sees herself as a child, and 'the baby of a large family'. And they are overawed by the dignity of their hired retainers, particularly by Graham's manservant, Amadu. 'Would we ever be able to live up to them?' Barbara asks. 'Because of Amadu we could not swear if we were angry, I could not cry if I was hurt, we invariably displayed the greatest courtesy towards one another.'

As Graham races ahead, impatient for his 'smash and grab raid into the primitive' (his description) to be over, Barbara wants to linger inland as long as possible. She is in her element when her party gets lost, and crestfallen when reunited too soon and once again being 'too much looked after'. The lark of going to Liberia had taken a far more profound turn than she had ever anticipated. While Graham's metaphorical stethoscope is pressed to his soul, Barbara is far more interested in the people they are with and those they encounter. Her easy intimacy engages everyone. There is nothing precious or pompous about Barbara. The girls in the villages pour into her hut. 'Although we could exchange no word, we laughed together . I felt I was among people I liked.' Where Graham is tense and fidgety, Barbara is conscious of being perfectly happy. 'I began quite suddenly to feel the overwhelming magic of Africa.' She peers out of her window into the night. 'I was part of it somehow . It meant something deeper and more valuable to me now.'

Nothing sets the scene better than the Greenes' choice of reading matter. Barbara takes Saki and Somerset Maugham; Graham chooses The Anatomy of Melancholy, all 900 pages published in 1621 with the full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. Seriously. And as Graham weakens from heat, impatience, and Symptomes of a mysterious fever that manifest in eternal hunger (a tapeworm?), Barbara flourishes, becoming fitter and stronger, feeling better than ever. Here is a young woman who, as she admits, has been spoilt all her life: a flat in London, a maid, her bath run for her, her evening clothes spread out on her bed. A bright young upper-middle-class thing in a pre-war world, subbed by a father who made his fortune from the coffee trade in Brazil. Yet she turns out to be remarkable. She is bitten all over, her clothes are infested with bugs, her feet bleed and parasitic 'jiggers' worm their way beneath her toenails. The village huts where they sleep shake with rats, yet after a few days she does not mind. She leaves her hairbrush out one night, by the next morning all the bristles have been eaten by rats, so for the next two months she does not brush her hair again. 'It got stiff with dust and stood out round my head like a halo.' The soles of her shoes wear out so she tries packing them with cardboard (it doesn't work). She couldn't give a hoot. Barbara is vibrant yet self-effacing, modest yet master of the deadpan line. And she never, ever complains....