It is with a sense of true sadness that the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust announces the recent passing of two very loyal and valuable supporters – Brian Shepherd and Dermot Gilvary.
Those who regularly attend the yearly international festival will know that the event always starts with a Town or a Country walk which was led by Brian Shepherd (pictured above left). We’d join Brian and his team and tramp the Common up behind Berkhamsted in the footsteps of the writer who spent many hours exploring those acres. We’d listen to well-chosen extracts from Greene’s writings and instantly this lent an immediacy – a sense of place, so integral to this writer’s work. The perfect, festival curtain-raiser. The Town walk was equally fascinating. Berkhamsted was deeply ingrained in Greene’s make-up (‘If I had known it,’ he recalled, ‘the whole future must have lain all the time along those Berkhamsted streets’) and Brian’s intimate knowledge of Berkhamsted led us to some familiar and unfamiliar places which often cropped up unexpectedly in the novels and short stories.
Dermot Gilvary (pictured above right) was the sort of person who you met up with after a year apart and could pick up a conversation with as though you had just stepped out of the room for five minutes. In addition to directing some excellent festivals in his quiet, self-effacing and patient manner, Dermot had an authoritative and perceptive understanding of his subject matter. His Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene: Journeys with Saints and Sinners, published by Bloomsbury in 2011, is possibly the finest collection of contemporary essays on Greene’s writings – Cedric Watts on The Power and the Glory, Judith Adamson’s seminal work on Aunt Augusta, Michael Billington on those Greene plays, Mike Hill unpicking Greene and Hitchcock and much, much more.
The quotation, ‘The field is full of shades’, refers to The Field is Full of Shades: Historical Portraits of Men Who Helped to Make the National Game, a 1946 edited collection by G. D. Martineauis about cricket. As a fanatic for the game, Dermot would have liked that.