Maiden Lane by night Photo: Nicolas Tredell The itinerary of the novel extends beyond Clapham to include Rules Restaurant and the Roman Catholic Church of Corpus Christi, both in Maiden Lane, which joins Bedford Street to Southampton Row between the Strand and Covent Garden Vigo Street, which runs between Regent Street and the junction of Burlington Gardens and Savile Row, where Bendrix consults a private detective agency and Eastbourne Terrace by Paddington Station, where, at that time, small hotels with grand names offered rooms for hire by the hour as well as the night where couples might assuage their carnal desires. The house now bears a blue plaque commemorating his residence there. Greene himself lived at 14 Clapham Common North Side from 1935 until bomb damage made him leave in 1940. In the Clapham area, the novel also takes in the Pontefract Arms, based on the actual and still open Windmill (now a Youngs pub) and St Mary’s Catholic Church in Clapham Park Road. The novel unfolds largely in the capital just before, during and just after the war and its metropolitan topography moves mainly between the north side of Clapham Common, where Henry Miles, a senior civil servant, lives with his wife Sarah in a ‘desireless’ marriage, and the south side (socially, at that time, ‘the wrong side’) of the Common where Sarah’s sometime lover Maurice Bendrix, an unmarried novelist, lodges. Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943) had vividly evoked London during the Blitz The End of the Affair mentions the Blitz occasionally but its powerful account of aerial attack focuses on a later phase of World War Two. The pivotal moment of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair (1951) occurs in June 1944 when a new form of weapon strikes home: the V-1, the flying bomb that needed no plane or pilot.

Graham greene's the end of the affair