The Destructors

 First published in two parts in Picture Post on July 24 & 31, 1954.

 The Destructors disturbed its readers yet it remains one of Greene’s most anthologized short stories.

 The story contains many of Greene’s hallmarks, most importantly it explores the capacity for good and evil in situations where a choice must be made.

 The boys in “The Destructors” are still young enough to be innocent yet they make a cruel and selfish choices.

The Plot

 “The Destructors” is about a group of teenage boys who call themselves the Wormsley Common Gang, after the area where they live.

 The meet everyday in a parking lot that was bombed out during WWII. Almost everything in this area is destroyed although one house stands with minimal damage.  One day, the gang’s leader, Blackie, suggests that they spend the day sneaking free bus rides, but T. has other ideas. He suggests destroying Old Misery’s house from the inside out.

The Characters

The Gang

Blackie

 Before T. becomes the leader of the gang, Blackie is its head. He is described as a just leader, who is not jealous, and wants to keep the group in tact.

 He also distrusts anything having to do with the upper class.

 As the gang’s leader, Blackie suggests such activities as seeing how many free bus rides they can sneak and breaking into Old Misery’s house without stealing anything.

Blackie Cont’d

 When the gang sides with T. instead of Blackie, he initially feels betrayed and privately sulks. He then decides that if the gang is going to succeed in the feat of destroying the house, he wants to be a part of it for the fame.

 Once he rejoins the group he is fully committed to T’s leadership and to contributing to the destruction of the house. In fact, when the gang’s confidence in T’s leadership falters, Blackie pulls the group back together. Thus, demonstrating that the group as a whole is more important to him than the personal glory of being the leader.

Joe

 Joe is the member of the Wormsley Common gang and is simply described as a “fat boy” and is the first to decide to vote in favour of T’s plan to destroy the house.

Mike

 Mike is the only one who is surprised when T. becomes leader.  Mike has always been easily surprised and is gullible: he believed someone who told him that if he did not keep his mouth shut, he would get a frog in it.

Summers

 Summers is the only member of the gang who is called by his last name.  He is a thin boy who is a follower.  When, on the second day he complains that the destruction of the house is too much like work, he is easily talked into staying and helping.

T.

 Trevor, who goes by T. is the new leader of the Wormsley Common Gang.

 He is fifteen years old and has gray eyes. He is a member of the gang all summer before taking leadership in August, when he suggests a dramatic change in the gang’s activities.

 His father, an architect, has recently lost his social ranking, and his mother has an air of snobbery about her.

T.

 Initially, T. Says very little when the gang meets, but as he positions himself to take leadership he talks more.

 He intrigues the gang with his plan to pull down Mr. Thomas’ house a feat unparallel in the gang’s history.

Mr. Thomas

 Mr. Thomas, who is called “Old Misery’ by the boys, lives in one of the last standing houses in the neighborhood. He represents the old traditions and history that is so easily destroyed without thought or feeling.  He was once a builder, but now lives alone, emerging once every week to buy groceries.

 While he expects his property to be respected by the boys, he also refuses to allow the boys on his land to use his outhouse.

Mr. Thomas

 Mr. Thomas is naïve about the ways of the boys and he never expects that they will regard his offer of chocolates with suspicion, and he certainly never imagines that when he agrees to show T. around his house that he will betray him.

 Mr. Thomas believes that the old ways, in which youth respected their elders, are still alive. By the end he realizes he was terribly misguided.

The Driver

 At the end of the story an unsuspecting driver finally brings down the house. The driver’s truck is tied to the gutted house so that when he pulls out of the parking lot, the entire house crumbles.

 At first the driver is astonished, but once he realizes what has happened, he responds with fits of laughter.

 Even when Mr. Thomas faces him and asks him how he can laugh, the driver is unable to control himself,

Themes

Innocence

 The boys in “The Destructors” are in their teens, which is the age when childish innocence is gradually left behind in favour of worldliness and sophistication. For the boys in the story, their innocence is already gone, replaced by cynicism, selfishness, and rebelliousness.

 When Mr. Thomas arrives home early, T. is surprised because the old man had told him he would be gone longer. “He protested with the fury of the child he had never been.”  Not only have these boys grown up during the war, they live in an environment that serves as a constant reminder of that war and its tragedy.

Innocence Destroyers

 The boys meet in a parking lot of a bombed out area and seem unaffected by its carnage because it is such a normal part of their life.  In reality, the war years have claimed their youthful innocence leaving them disillusioned and determined to create their own world order, but all they really know is destruction.

Surrender

   Part of innocence is surrender to the imagination. In “The Destructors,” imagination takes an ugly turn. T. uses his imagination to devise a plan to destroy Old Misery’s home  “worked with the seriousness of creators – and destruction after all it is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as if it had now become.” The imagination used to plot the demise of the house is the opposite of the imagination used to create it. In innocence, a person’s imagination is applied to think of a better world, but the boys have lost their innocence and they can only imagine a horrible alternative.

Power

 “The Destructors” is the study of shifting power. Blackie initially holds the power of leadership in the gang, and is basically a good leader. Although he encourages mischief, it is the kind that doesn't harm others. In his hands, power has the ability to lead others.

 T. takes over the leadership and gets the members to participate in a cruel plan to destroy an innocent man’s home, a home that is a treasured piece of England’s past.

 In T’s hands power is the ability to destroy.

Power

 T’s brand of leadership is different; when Blackie arrives on the first morning of the destruction “[h]e had at once the impression of organization, very different from the old happy go lucky ways under his leadership.”  When Summers arrives on the second morning, voicing his preference to do something else, T. will not hear of it. T. knows he is more powerful than Summers, so he reminds him that the job is not done and that Summers himself voted in favor of the project. He uses his power to pressure the boy into staying and finishing the destruction.

The Balance of Power

 In this changing social structure the balance of power is shifting. The boys forcibly take power in the community. They have the ability to make changes in people's lives and to intimidate others.

 Mr. Thomas, on the other hand, thinks he has power that he no longer possesses. He believes that he has authority based on social order of the past, as an elder in the community, and will be respected and obeyed.

 The shift in power signals the changing social order, but does not give us a very promising outlook.

Paradox

 Greene demonstrates the instability of postwar England in his presentation of the opposing faces in The Destructors. The tension created by these forces reflects a society that has survived trauma, but is deeply scarred and changed by it.

 Social dynamics are undergoing change, and the youth no longer feel connected to the past, as previous generations did.

T.’s attitude toward Mr. Thomas

 T sets out to destroy Mr. Thomas’s house, treating him disrespectfully, and regarding him with suspicion. At the same time however, T. does not hate him. His intention to destroy Old Misery’s house is not personal but rooted in his desire to get rid of the last vestige of traditional beauty in the war-torn landscape.

 Although his destructive behavior is not personal, its consequences are deeply personal

71 Pounds

 When T. takes Mr. Thomas’s seventy one found notes, not for personal gain, but only to burn them. T. takes items that are inherently valuable, yet he has no interest in making use of their value.

The House

 Mr. Thomas’s house is beautiful, T. knows and understands its beauty, yet his feelings about beauty (especially as they relate to social classes) make it easy for him to destroy it anyway.  T. sees that house as an emblem of the upper class and therefore needs to be destroyed.

The Driver

 The driver ultimately brings the house down and is responsible for its final destruction. The reader expects the man to respond with fear or guilt, but he responds with laughter.

 He had no part in the planning of the destruction, but like the boys he has no feeling for Old Misery’s pain. He lacks sympathy or compassion, a representation of England itself according to Greene.

Allegory

 Beneath the surface of “The Destructors” are allegorical elements that allow Greene to comment on postwar England.

 The various characters are representations of the older generation and the traditions of the past, as well as the younger generations and its rejection of the empty promises and values of the past.

 Mr. Thomas stands for the old ways and the past belief of authority. He expects to be able to tell the boys what to do and they will follow.

Old Misery

 Mr. Thomas’s house, the work of a respected English architect, demonstrates the longstanding class struggle between the upper and lower classes.  The lower class, represented by the gang, is not satisfied to watch the upper class enjoy valuable property; instead, they succeed in destroying it and somehow achieve a closer balance between the haves and the have nots.

The Allegory of Power

 T. becomes a dictator within the group showing the corrupt and abusive nature of power. He gives orders, makes self-determined decisions and of course in Postwar England these would be disturbing images of a new generation of power hungry youngsters emerging from their war experience.

 Greene has often comments that the price paid for war, the commodity that we lost, was innocence and our youth are the currency we sacrificed.

History

 TEDDY BOYS  During the 1950’s in England, the reality of organized groups of teenagers set on being disruptive and disgraceful caused public concern.

 Known as Teddy Boys, these groups banded together in the name of delinquency and destruction. They were the products of Postwar society and were the building blocks of the gangs we have today.

Teddy Boys as a Paradox

 The Teddy Boys got their name from their choice of attire. Although they were working class, they chose to wear Edwardian style suits, which were traditionally worn by the upper class. The suit, was commonly known as a teddy suits.

Greene on his Gang

 Most of the boys were followers except for Blackie. They are either incapable of making their own moral choices or they are unwilling to do so. Blackie then is the most promising character in terms of redemption, unfortunately his driving ambition takes over and he is swallowed into T’s destruction.

 Greene comments that Blackie is similar to England, and perhaps there is no hope for its redemption either.

England as a House of Destruction

 Although England emerged from WWII on the side of victory, the domestic costs were great: political, economical, and social instability caused the country to destroy itself from the inside out.

 In England there was a fundamental clash between the old generation and the new generation. This new generation became cruel, violent, and destructive, while the old generation as naïve, weak and powerless.

 Who then will lead the way as England recovers from the war? Greene offers no answer, the future of England looks bleak.

Color Imagery

 The boys are surrounded by a society that has no vibrancy, no hope and Greene makes sure that the boys are surrounded by a world of shadow through his use of gray and black hues and an absence of bright colors.

 These drab drab descriptions fit with the boys indifference to culture, beauty, and sentiment.

 The barren landscape symbolizes the erosion of values “[t]he tired evergreens kept off a stormy sun: another wet Bank Holiday was being prepared over the Atlantic, beginning in swirls of dust under the trees.”

Pathetic Fallacy

 Limp trees  Tired and story  A thin yellow Boy, Blackie, gray eyes  It is the boys that assume the color while the landscape remains barren and colorless  They seek to remove emotion from society