Graham Greene wrote a handful of stories for children’s picture books. Nicholas Tucker finds them full of themes familiar from his adult work. Last month saw the reissue of two of the four books written by Graham Greene for children: The Little Horse Bus and The Little Steamroller .

Illustrated originally by Dorothy Glover, Greene’s mistress over many years but here using her stage name Craigie, they were the fruits of hours spent together as ARP wardens on the look-out for flying bombs during the last war. In periods of inactivity the couple amused themselves composing these stories, looking back to a time of rural tranquillity with no suspicion of a German bomber anywhere in sight.

After the war they were published over the next seven years, beginning with The Little Train in 1946. This first appeared under Dorothy Craigie’s name alone, but the other books acknowledged Greene as author partly to attract higher sales for the publisher, Eyre and Spottiswoode, for whom he now worked as a director. Greene eventually separated from Glover, but resisted suggestions that the stories be illustrated by a better-known artist.

But three years after her death in 1971 the books did re-emerge illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, and this is the edition that re-appears now. Although this artist introduced better characterisation and more general atmosphere, there is much to be said for Glover’s original work. Bright, primary colours and a generous use of white space made for jolly and occasionally inventive picture books. It is sad that nothing of her work still exists in print today, although few would shed tears for two of her books published in 1960: Nicky and Nigger and the Pirate and Nicky and Nigger Join the Circus.

Is there anything for Greene-watchers to learn from the texts of his picture books? It is not an idle question; Greene himself twice wrote perceptively about Beatrix Potter’s little stories, detecting within them evidence for the existence of an emotional crisis once suffered by the author but then still a secret from others. Greene’s own obsession with the theme of betrayal and the dangers of innocence was also too strong to be kept out indefinitely from any of his fiction, even in stories addressing small readers and written primarily for relaxation.

And sure enough, in The Little Train an unwise branch-line engine - restless as his adult creator - risks everything by impetuously steaming away to the world of adventure beyond the Great Gloom Mountains. This is a bad mistake. In the hideous town of Grimborough, “cruel shouting men” and the general cacophony of unbridled industrialism cause deadly fear in the little train who “thought he had found his way to a terrible cave of demons.” Lost and at the point of expiring through lack of fuel he is rescued by kindly Great Jock of Edinburgh, the famous Scotch Express, who pushes him back to his country home. Drying his tears, the little engine now realises that it is a very tough world out there indeed.

In the next three books Greene also only just contrives to put everything to rights by the last page. In The Little Fire Engine the corrupt mayor of Much Snoreing anticipates Greene’s later real-life enemy in Nice, mayor Jacques Medecin, by thinking up “a really dirty plan.” This involves sacking the faithful fireman Sam Trolley for having refused to salute him on a visit to Little Snoreing. Sam is reduced to penury and is also cruelly taunted by the firemen who replaced him. Fortuitously putting out a fire when the new men are all drunk, the little fire engine ends up with a “grand new fire station to live happily ever after.” But it is a close run thing, and although Sam gets a medal he also learns a harsh lesson about life’s uncertainties.

The Little Horse Bus is another tale of innocence betrayed. Mr Potter, the kindly local grocer, has his business taken away by “a horrible shop with a horrible name”: the Hygienic Emporium, owned by the ruthless and distant capitalist, Sir William Popkins. When formerly loyal customers desert him My Potter goes hungry to bed thinking “It’s the end.” His last companion, the little horse bus itself, also “nearly loses his self-respect, and when a bus loses his self-respect it is time to be broken up and turned into wooden boxes.” Possible vehicle suicide is averted, but at some cost. The horse that draws Sir William’s smart new delivery cab is kidnapped and given a savage beating by thieves who then shut her up in dark dreary Hangman’s Wharf to starve to death. She is finally rescued by Mr Potter’s emaciated horse Brandy, and all former fortunes are restored. But for how long? Even in 1952 the writing was on the wall for small grocers and most particularly for delivery vans still drawn by horses.

The Little Steamroller, the last story to appear, involves two smugglers plotting together in familiar Greeneland “a thousand miles away in the sun and heat of Africa.” In London meanwhile, snow lies thick on the ground during an exceptionally cold Christmas. Characters move around joylessly, huddled up against frost and ice. In this atmosphere of bleak post-war austerity it comes as no surprise when the wicked smuggler Mr King finds his air-flight is delayed. On his arrival, he outwits Customs control but is then not very convincingly “charged” by the little steamroller, later awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for courage and resource. The author himself also went on to win a medal: the Boys’ Clubs of America Junior Book Award 1955.

Greene also provided a foreword to Bodley Head’s re-issue in 1960 of Marjorie Bowen’s romantic children’s historical novel, The Viper of Milan. Written in 1906 when the author was only 15, this was always a supremely important book for Greene, frequently mentioned as the key to making him decide to be a writer. Explaining the way this novel made bearable “the terrible living world of the stone stairs and the never quiet dormitory” of Greene’s hated boarding school, he writes: “It was no good in that real world to dream that one would ever be a Sir Henry Curtis of King Solomon’s Mines, but della Scala who at last turned from an honesty that never paid and betrayed his friends and died dishonoured and a failure even at treachery - it was easier for a child to escape behind his mask. As for Visconti, with his beauty, his patience and his genius for evil, I have watched him pass by many a time in his black Sunday suit smelling of mothballs. His name was Carter. He exercised terror from a distance like a snow cloud over the young fields. Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey. I read all that in The Viper of Milan and I looked round and I saw that it was so.”

But in the determinedly up-beat world of mid-20th century children’s books, dominated by professional optimists like Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton, there was no room for such darker visions of mankind. When Greene did write about the subject of childhood, about which he was always obsessed, it had to be for an adult audience.

In Brighton Rock the young psychopath Pinkie is just 17, and often referred to simply as the Boy. His duped girl-friend Rose is only 16; when together they are still addressed as children. Pinkie’s empty boasting and ignorant fearfulness about sex is typical of adolescence, as is his taste in food - chocolate and sausage rolls. His murderous personality seems to derive from a time when “Hell lay about him in his infancy”. As Greene puts it elsewhere in the novel, it is necessary to go back a very long way to discover anything like true innocence in the human soul, and even then the spectacle is hardly a reassuring one. “Innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats; perhaps not ever that: innocence was the ugly cry of birth.”

So Greene the master story-teller, with his own life-long love for the boyhood heroes created by Rider Haggard, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope and many others, never felt able to write such stories for modern children. A novel he contemplated in 1959 within a school setting was discontinued because he could not bear mentally living again in those surroundings. He died in 1991, but long before then the children’s literary climate had begun to change in his own direction. Robert Cormier, among many others, has written about childhood and school as savagely as anyone looking back in loathing could wish - and received a large, appreciative post-bag from child readers, drawn towards the dark pictures he paints. If a younger Greene were alive and writing now, the pessimism that once seemed to disqualify him as an author for any other than the smallest reader could possibly prove instead to be one of his most potent appeals.

Nicholas Tucker is a lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Sussex.