As recounted in his 1976 memoir, The Seventh Gate
But by the time he was about to start school, he found himself on a tramp steamer on a slow and trouble-filled voyage to New York City as his father took the family off in search of a fresh start. His father, as Greave later learned, had run through a string of failed business schemes, insulted or stolen from much of proper society in Calcutta, and been bankrupted and politely asked to leave the country. He had also, as Greave only came to understand slowly and obliquely, been on the verge of being jailed as a chronic exhibitionist.
With utterly no connections in America, Greave’s father still manages to persuade another English firm to bankroll him in a venture to sell a now-forgotten car, the Dixie Flyer, in South Africa. His tiny stipend forces Greave’s mother to find ever-worse lodgings in ever-rougher parts of New York City. His days were spent avoiding, battling with, or being chased by gangs of young boys “engaged in continuous warfare.” At one point, she fell ill and the boys were taken into the city’s foster care system, spending weeks in a bleak orphanage stuck in the midst of a grey forest. His mother prayed for her husband to return and rescue them.
Instead, he returned accused of having blown through $600,000 in South Africa, and antagonized the Afrikaaners, and run off to the Congo with a black mistress in search of a lost mine. So he took his family off again, back to India on another cheap passage. Greave and his brother were enrolled in a threadbare boarding school where a schoolmaster straight from Dickens loved to beat morality and Catholic virtues into the boys.
Used to running wild in the streets of New York, Greave found the school intolerable and engineered an escape. Smuggling himself onto trains and ferries, hiding from the police, stealing food and finding unexpected support from an occasional Indian, he made his way from the Punjab to the far reaches of Assam. There, he enjoys some months of refuge, peace, and unsupervised play in the jungle from a friendly American couple he had met on ship.
The rest of Greave’s childhood was spattered with brief family reunions, more troubles due to his father’s grifts and sexual addiction, and a variety of poor excuses for schooling. With such an upbringing, it’s not surprising that his own experiences as a young man involve hopping from one job to another, great bouts of drinking, gambling, and whoring, and barely managing to exist on the fringes of Anglo-Indian society.
Then, sometime in his late twenties, he noticed a spot on his face. It stayed for weeks, growing slowly, and then was joined by similar spots on his legs and buttocks. He finally heads to the public hospital in Calcutta, where an Indian doctor calmly informs him that he is suffering from leprosy.
Over the next seven years, Greave spent much of his time holed up in a tiny, squalid room in a boarding house. One eye was blinded by the disease, the other nearly so. Only the tenderness of his lover, a beautiful but wayward Anglo-Indian girl rejected by both races, and an incredible forbearance and patience on Greave’s part, got him through. Finally, in 1946, a letter came to him out of the blue with an offer to take for him for free in a special clinic back in England. Greave tracked down his father–still concocting schemes in India–and begged enough money to pay for his passage. Scraping through the medical inspection, he got on board and set sail, never to return to India.
This is a pretty grim story. I suspect few reading my synopsis would imagine The Seventh Gate
Yet Greave (who died in 1977) seems to have possessed a spirit made of pure stainless steel. In the most degraded and dehumanizing situations, he managed–at least in reflection–to have been able to latch onto the tiniest bits of sunlight. Yes, he was trapped in some god awful boarding school run by a sadist–but he could always escape for a few moments:
Pacing endlessly across the wet, deserted playing field, I forgot the shoddy classrooms and the soaring, aloof grandeur of the Himalayas, and returned to those happy months when I had been free to wander beside the waters of Bombay harbour. Soaked in dazzling sunlight, the smell of the sea in my nostrils, I saw again the white sails of the dhows as the wind carried them towards Africa, and mingled happily with the cosmopolitan crowds that drifted beside the waterfront.
The cover of the Penguin paperback edition of The Seventh Gate
It’s also a book rich in description, with remarkable scenes, such as the one where Greave stumbles across a pack of vultures in the middle of the night as he escapes from school. I found it a little like David Copperfield
Although Greave was cured of leprosy once safe in the English clinic, the disease permanently weakened him and his blindness eventually became complete. Despite this, he managed to write, starting with his 1955 memoir of his cure, The Second Miracle
A thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Let’s hope John Seaton at Faber Finds adds this to his list.
- Find it at Amazon.com: The Seventh Gate
- Find it at Amazon.co.uk: The Seventh Gate
- Find it at AddAll.com: The Seventh Gate
I would highly recommend reading his first book, The Second Miracle, which I wrote about in this post back in 2013. It tells of his return to England and his treatment and recovery from leprosy and is full of wonderful writing.
I `ve just read this book which I found on the shelves in my house. What a childhood he had. I wondered what happened to his brother and sister. I felt moved to research and find out a little more about Peter Greave.
Although I haven`t been to India I feel I have travelled with him in the book. I feel sorry for his dear mother and the life she was subjected to. I`m glad that I read it although I felt like putting it down a few times.
I just stumbled upon The Seventh Gate and found myself moved to tears. It’s the first book I have read about a British childhood in India that doesn’t wallow in nostalgia but shows a side of colonial life that the establishment chose to ignore and write out of the history books. As an Indian who is endlessly fascinated by that period of our history , I found this a courageous and uplifting book.
Thanks for your comments. It is a remarkable book, one of the best I read in 2009 and one whose scenes I new recall with particular vividness. Greaves clearly put a get deal of care into writing “The Seventh Gate”.
I am a School Librarian at an international school in Spain. We pick up a lot of books from donations from the parents of our students. A tattered old paperback copy of ‘The Seventh Gate’ was among our donations. I read it myself and was absolutely amazed. It is one of the most remarkable true-life stories I have ever read and the extraordinary spirit of the man who wrote it comes out in this book. As I am Indian-born and know many of the places he mentions, including Darjeeling, it was specially moving and enlightening for me to read about what these places were like over eighty years ago, seen from the eyes of a young English boy. Also, what struck me as surprising, was that osmeone of his background could be so neglected and indeed overlooked in public places in Imperial India. It amazed me that this could be possible, because of the status that people of British origin had over there in those days. The book has the ring of truth about it, without a doubt, despite the almost incredible desperation of the story. Quite frankly, if someone wrote a fiction book like this, you might doubt it as a credible plot, proving the old adage about truth and fiction. I am surprised that a film has not already been made of this autobiography, with some powerful actor in the lead role. Stands out from the crowd, really and truly.