Graham Greene showed the destruction of war clearly in the short story, “The Destructors. ” While the bomb craters and destroyed buildings were made evident, the damage done to the psyches of the children were a little harder to see. Even though these children were too young to experience much of the war, and definitely never saw the front lines of combat, they still wore scars that maimed them forever. Childhood was a very formative time in their lives of a person. It shaped who they would become and what they did.
This story was set in the years following the end of World War II, and the teenagers of England had grown up in a country that experienced heavy bombings from German aircraft. Children born around this time had never known the peace and security that a child deserves. The children in this story had their innocence stolen from them well before it should have been. The delinquency of children in post war England began before the completion of the war. Due to increased bombings by the German military, a plan was devised to relocate the children and their teachers from the cities to the countryside.
At this point, all of the schools were closed down in the urban areas. Only fifty percent of the planned children were relocated, however. This left the other fifty percent, around one million children, in the cities with no schools left to instruct them. This resulted in a large number of bored children that had been taken out of their comfortable environments and placed in tight quarters in the subway stations. As is still the case, boredom in the children led to trouble. The children would often form gangs and act out against those that they saw as authority figures.
With most of the fathers away fighting the war, the families were missing the traditional authoritative figure and disciplinarian. This further led to the delinquency of the children. According to the website Spartacus-educational. com, young people were blamed for many crimes: “Young people were blamed for the high rate of crimes in crowded tube shelters. As soon as the chosen victim had gone to sleep the thief would quietly carry off their bags. Teenage pickpockets were also kept busy in public air raid shelters. Others concentrated on burgling the houses of those who had gone to public shelters”(Simkin).
The boys from the Wormsley Commons Gang continued to lose their innocence through the introduction of the character Trevor. The evolution of small petty crimes into something as large as destroying a house shows the escalation of their delinquency. The small misdemeanors that the gang was used to committing were shown in the by saying: “At Blackie’s suggestion the gang was to disperse in pairs, take buses at random and see how many free rides could be snatched from unwary conductors (the operation was to be carried out in pairs to avoid cheating)” (Greene 107).
A minor infraction, such as free rides on the bus, is a long step from completely destroying a man’s home. A bus fare is minute compared to the large sum of money that is required to rebuild a house. The war had also caused animosity to things of beauty. The boys were surrounded by an ugliness that can only be brought on by war. There were bomb craters all around the area that they called their own. When Trevor was shown around Old Misery’s house, he called it beautiful and described the wonderful things that he saw. He told about 200-year-old paneling and an equally old staircase.
Blackie was concerned by Trevor’s use of the word beautiful, however. He stated this in the passage: “It was the word beautiful that worried him-that belonged to a class world that you could still see parodied at the Wormsley Common Empire by a man wearing a top hat and a monocle, with a hee-haw accent” (Greene 108). All the boys had known was destruction and this ugliness was a constant in their lives. People have a tendency to be drawn into their surroundings. So beauty was a thing that they neither knew about, nor cared about. They had begun to hate it, so they decided to destroy it.
The story presents an idea that in order for new to be created, the old has to be destroyed. With so many of the buildings destroyed in the bombing raids, this was a logical thought. By destroying Mr. Thomas’s house, it will build the gang’s reputation with the other gangs of the city, both young and old alike. The gang was only intent on destruction. The idea of stealing was not even allowed to enter into the conversation in Trevor mind. In fact, when they came up Mr. Thomas’ money, they burned it instead of taking it. In the publication “The Destructors.
Masterplots II: Short Story Series, the idea is presented that this is an analogy for the institutions of the time. It states: “Trevor” and his followers represent the extremes of nihilism, the philosophical doctrine that existing institutions- social, political, and economic- must be completely destroyed in order to make room for the new” (Keenan). Trevor had also lost his family’s identity due to the war. The author introduced Trevor’s hardship with the statement: “The fact that his father, a former architect and present clerk, had ‘come down in the world’ and that his mother considered herself better than the neighbors” (Greene 105).
At the time, this was a large drop in status. While this loss of status is an impact to an adult, it can be even more so for a teen. Status means much more to the young than it should. We all care about our status in life, but as adults, we can usually see past it. His given name was Trevor, but this was actually an upper-class name, so it brought up laughter from the other guys in the gang. So they did not call him by this name, but just shortened it to the letter T. War can cause many people to lose their social status in life and fortunes can be found or lost, depending on each person’s luck.
One theory on the rise of juvenile delinquency that could have been at the root of Trevor’s criminal behavior was the economic issues in the country. In the book “The Criminal Area: A Study In Social Ecology”, Professor Terrence Morris states that crime and juvenile delinquency was thought to be a side effect of poverty. The prosperous times of post war England did not ease the criminal activity, however. The books states: “Many magistrates and not a few social workers blamed the welfare state as having sapped the foundations of personal responsibility” (Morris).
Poverty had driven the youth into a criminal state, and when times became better, this delinquency had become a part of who they were. The rise in prosperity did not alter this. To them, it was easier to be a criminal than to become responsible. The welfare state that had been set up to help people in the hard times after the war had become a way of life. The public mentality was there was no reason to work when a hand was so easily available. War has been around us since the dawn of time and people have fought over many different things.
This particular war had deeply affected many lives in this story. The author points out the bomb craters and the bombed out houses. These are the scars that can be seen easily and will eventually be repaired or abandoned and given back to nature. The wounds that a soldier takes on the front lines of a war can be visibly seen, also. The loss of innocence of a child, however, is something that people do not grasp. The boys in this story had become individuals that had no respect for others or the beauty that they saw.
They only saw the world of death and destruction into which they had been born. The story ended with the house falling in, and the boys long gone. It does not say if they felt remorse for what they did or not. The boys did destroy the house. They were not all bad, nor were they cruel. They gave Mr. Thomas a blanket when they locked him in the loo in order to keep him comfortable. Though their innocence was long gone, their sense of humanity was not. There is hope for the damaged children of war. Even though lost innocence can never be regained, a loss of humanity can be.
