I first came across Peter Greave in a battered Penguin paperback copy of his 1977 memoir, The Seventh Gate, that I’d found at the Montana Valley Book Store, a marvelous storehouse of books in the little town of Alberton, Montana. The Seventh Gate has the grim fascination of a car crash. Born in Bombay in 1910, Greave spent his first years in the comfort of a villa surrounded by a lush garden and cared for by Indian servants. That haven was soon destroyed, however, by his father’s predilections. It wasn’t just that his father (who is unnamed in the book) was a swindler, he was also a chronic exhibitionist. He would ask his wife to play something on the piano to keep her occupied while he strolled out to their porch and exposed himself.
Greave’s childhood was punctuated by abrupt moves as his father fled the police and creditors or pursued ever-riskier ventures. In late 1918, the family sailed from India to New York City on a ship called The City of Lahore to make a fresh start. The voyage was not smooth: the ship was quarantined at Cape Town when influenza broke out among the crew; then the Hindu and Chinese seamen began fighting and one man was thrown overboard. Twice German submarines tried to torpedo her. Then, hours after the family disembarked in New York, the ship caught fire and sank at pierside.
Greave’s father tried to set up an import/export business. It failed. Then he took off for South Africa hoping to sell Afrikaners a new American automobile called the Dixie Flyer. Greave’s mother and the three children were left freezing in a tenement flat in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the car had a tendency to stop running, usually far from a garage. The father returned and took the family back to India again. This time he started a sporting newspaper; it too proved a failure. Then he set up a lottery scheme that proved another scam. He was convicted of fraud and sent to jail.
Greave’s mother fell ill of cancer. As he writes in The Seventh Gate, the family fell apart “like an old trunk eaten by white ants” — his sister sent to a convent in Calcutta, Greave and his brother to a derelict school in Darjeeling. Desperate for a home, Greave ran away from the school in the spring of 1923. Alone and almost penniless, he traveled eight hundred miles — walking, train-hopping, stowing away on a boat — to a remote town in East Bengal. There he persuaded a kindly woman he barely knew to take him in.
By the time Greave was a young man, he’d become accustomed to life on the fringes of Anglo-Indian society. With his sketchy education and lack of connections, he took whatever work he could get. He sold gramophones; he sold refrigerators; he sold coloured enlargements of family photos for a firm that rarely delivered them. He spent most of his time reading, going to movies and getting drunk: “I lived like a nomad, moving from one city to another, existing in seedy hotels or in shoddy rooms.” His father reappeared. The two often shared the same rooms and pooled their meagre resources. Then one day in 1938 while shaving, Greave noticed a reddish bump on his forehead. Others appeared on his legs and buttocks. A doctor diagnosed food poisoning: “You’ve been eating some muck from the bazaar.” New symptoms joined the skin lesions — numbness in his right hand, pain and cloudiness in his eyes.
Finally, he went to an Indian hospital in Calcutta, where he was diagnosed with leprosy in August 1939. Hearing this news, Greave “realised instinctively that I had crossed a frontier from which I could never return.” He spent the next seven years in squalid Calcutta flats, living off handouts, an occasional cheque from his father and the kindness of a few Indian friends. With India being torn apart in the conflicts over Partition, his existence grew more and more tenuous until he received a letter from a doctor with the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association. The doctor offered him free treatment at St Giles, England’s last operating leprosy clinic, outside Chelmsford. Greave managed to obtain a berth on the Franconia, a ship carrying British Army troops and their families away from the embattled former colony. The Seventh Gate ends in August 1947 as Greave stands on the deck, his last view of India slipping over the horizon.
The story that followed was told in Greave’s first book, The Second Miracle, published in 1955. His first miracle was making it to St Giles, where through slow and painful drug therapy, his leprosy was cured. The second miracle referred to in the title was his spiritual recovery. Greave wrote in the brutally honest tradition of Rousseau and Stendhal that considered hypocrisy as the greatest of all sins. While he hid away from the world in his room in Calcutta, Greave had come to see his disease as a mark of “the guilt of a thousand generations of twisted minds, and of bodies thirsting for decay.”
The Second Miracle takes the reader not only through the physical ordeal of Greave’s treatment for leprosy but also his realisation that he — not his doctors and not God — was responsible for what he made of his situation. In the end, he went from slinking through his days “sunk in lethargy” to an attitude of joyful penitence — of saying in his prayers, “Thank you — give me more.” This attitude would be crucial to Greave’s acceptance that, despite being cured, his leprosy had left him with such severe damage to his eyes, nerves and muscles that he would remain at St Giles, dependent on its care, for the rest of his life. It fills the two otherwise grim books with vitality, wonder and hope.
Years after I posted pieces about The Seventh Gate and The Second Miracle, I was contacted by Josephine, a woman living in Herefordshire. Josephine had been given Peter Greave’s journals by a friend. Greave had left them to the secretary at St Giles and through various hands they made their way to her. Having been born and raised in India, both Josephine and her husband had a keen interest in materials related to Anglo-Indian society. She also informed me that Peter Greave’s real name was Gerald Carberry, though she had no idea why he’d chosen the pseudonym.
In June 2019, I arranged to visit Josephine and look through the journals. When I arrived, she showed me into her dining room. There on the table sat an old fruit crate filled with what looked like two dozen or more well-used school notebooks. Josephine had marked the dates covered by each — the earliest starting in January 1937, the last in late 1969.
Not knowing what I would find, I hadn’t planned how to use the few hours I had. At first, I skipped through entries almost randomly, photographing pages with my phone. In the earliest entry — 11 January 1937 — he was miserable. “Nothing to read, nothing to do, and no money. And a god-damned toothache.” He was rooming with his father — “H,” for Herbert Carberry — who is also broke but working on some suspicious deal: “I’m sick of his strong silent man act.” And he was frustrated with a woman he referred to as “C”: “It’s like her to start her stuff when I’m in a worse corner than usual.” I jumped forward to the 1950s, where he reported his progress in writing The Second Miracle, worried about publishers and critics, exulted when BBC Radio invited him to appear. In the journals from the 1960s, the handwriting grows larger, looser and more difficult to decipher. Fears about losing his sight came to dominate the entries.
I soon began to focus on references to “V.” The initial first appears in the entry of 5 June 1948, the first since his arrival in England nine months earlier. V appeared to a nurse at St Giles. “V was anxious this morning, and behaved with less than her usual sense,” Gerald wrote.
By August, she had left the clinic and he went to see her in London. They saw Oklahoma at the Drury Lane Theatre, sat together in a bar full of visitors to the Olympics and, near midnight, went to V’s room. They “experimented with passion,” but he confessed, “I felt little real desire.” “She sensed it almost immediately and was, I fear, hurt and disappointed.” And yet she begged him, “Can’t we be married?” He quickly gave in. On 9 September 1948, he wrote, “I’ve done it! What the blazes it will lead to I don’t know.” Just a few lines later, he wondered if the marriage can be annulled but feared the resulting publicity “would immediately finish me.” He hadn’t told anyone at St Giles aside from “M,” a fellow patient and confidant.
Armed with the date of the marriage, Josephine and I searched on a genealogical website and confirmed that Gerald Carberry and Violet Wood married in London in September 1948. This fact — indeed Violet’s very existence — was never mentioned in The Second Miracle. It seemed from the diary that Gerald and Violet rarely lived together — there are notes about sharing holiday cottages, but also entries where he fretted about not receiving letters from her.
Then, in an entry dated 26 September 1964, he wrote, “10 months since Vi died.” In the following pages he wrote multiple versions of the days leading up to her death: “And so, when I returned to your room it was all over …”; “It must have been around eleven on the night of 25 October 1963 that I learnt she was going to die”; “She died on the morning of the 5th of December.” It was as if he hoped to appease grief by achieving the most precise record of her death. Yet the sense of loss remained. In one of the last notebooks, from December 1966, one line appears on the inside cover: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.”
As I later read through the hundreds of pages I’d photographed, it became clear that Violet was not the only secret Gerald Carberry had kept from the readers of Peter Greave’s books. In trying to reconstruct Gerald’s story through further research, I discovered that Carberry was also a pseudonym. Gerald Carberry had been born Gerald Wilkinson and christened at St Teresa’s Church in Kolkata on the 11th of November 1910. His parents were listed as Herbert Reginald Wilkinson and Katherine Margaret Wilkinson, nee Tighe.
His father had been born in Manchester and enlisted in the 1st (Kings) Dragoon Guards at the age of 16 in 1899. After service in the Boer War and Aden, he made his way to India. When he married Katherine Tighe, whose father had been a police commissioner in Bombay, in 1909, Herbert Wilkinson’s profession was listed as “merchant’s assistant.” The job must have involved some travel, because a few months before Gerald’s birth, Herbert was arrested and fined in Adelaide, Australia for indecent exposure.
Sometime after the family’s return to India in 1922, Herbert Wilkinson changed his name, because the Times of India article about his conviction for “cheating and abetment” identifies him as “Herbert Carberry, alias Wilkinson.” The rest of his family went along and Gerald began Gerald Carberry, the name by which he was known outside of his books.
Greave had also taken liberties with some of his characters. In The Seventh Gate Greave wrote of his sexual relationship with a woman he called Sharon. Sharon was clearly the “C” of Gerald’s diary: “C and I spent hours together yesterday;” “With C all afternoon.” He was deeply affected by her: “Another of C’s moods worked off on me;” “Struck cold by something C said.” According to the book, Sharon married, left India in 1946 and was killed in a traffic accident soon after arriving in England.
In the diary, however, C remained alive and part of Gerald’s life into the early 1960s—despite his marriage to Violet. He wrote of meeting her. In 1951, he quoted from one of her letters: “For God’s sake, come to me Gerald; come to me before I lose my sanity.” From some of the clues in the diary, I was able to identify “C” as Catherine Rowland-Jones. Born in Bombay in 1914, she married Owain Rowland-Jones, a ship’s captain, and left India for England not long before Gerald’s own departure. Living in Kensington after coming to England, it would have been easy for her to meet with Gerald, who appears to have come to the city often by train from Chelmsford.
After Vi’s death, yet another woman appears in the diary: Mac. In a long entry from November 1966, he wrote of meeting her at the Liverpool Street station in London, after which they spent a long afternoon in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel. “For the first hour her behaviour was relatively subdued, but as one double vodka after another disappeared her voice and her spirits rose disquietingly.” She plied Gerald with drinks, insisted he kiss her, implored, “Will you marry me?” She may have been another nurse from St Giles, as she speaks of her impending departure for “that big hospital in Barnsley” (Yorkshire). He referred to her apprehensively as “Mac the Knife.”
By this point, however, sight was his biggest concern. From the early 1940s, the effect of leprosy on his sight had been a constant worry. “I just don’t know what to do with these bloody eyes”; “Eyes killing me again”; “I feel blindness hovering over me.” At times, he couldn’t focus or bear bright lights. In the 1960s, there were repeated visits to the Royal Free Hospital for operations. Each time he wondered whether he would wake up from the anesthesia and find himself blind. In the next entry after his meeting with Mac, he writes, “The world becomes increasingly foggy and indistinct. All I see is seen darkly even at noon when the sun shines brightly.”
His ability to see became intertwined with his will to live. “Long ago I made up my mind that when it came to this, I’d say, OK, enough,” he wrote in late November 1966. “But already I may have lost the power to act, to conclude the final chapter.” The last entry in his hand is dated 30 December 1966: “Almost certainly my last entry. No sight left — can’t read, can’t write. At last I’m ready to say — I don’t want to live anymore.”
After this, the remaining pages are blank. The next journal opens in early 1967. The handwriting is new, a precise secretarial copperplate: Gerald’s dictation, taken down by the secretary at St Giles. Occasional passages are written in Pittman shorthand: other secrets to be revealed, perhaps.
This is an expanded version of a piece included in Secrets & Lives: The University of East Anglia MA Non-Fiction Anthology 2020.