When Graham Greene was a teenager growing up in Berkhamsted he fell for the governess of his younger siblings. It was an “obsessive passion” and he would take her “to what were called ‘hops’ at the King’s Arms” (as he describes in A Sort of Life).

They were not meant to be together so “to keep up appearances I would have to dance occasionally with some boring wife of a master at school”.

On my recent stay at the King’s Arms, a stroll from Berkhamsted School, where Greene’s father was headmaster, it was hard to imagine the novelist dancing in the gloomy bar “exchanging half kisses”.

Sitting on a shabby sofa I took in the early evening scenes as lads played a fruit machine and a round of “Berkhamsted’s Got Talent” took place to whoops of “Go on girl!” Barmaids smoked in a courtyard with artificial grass. The only indication of a Greene connection was The Heart of the Matter on a dusty shelf.

Yet each October, to coincide with the writer’s birth date, this is where fans stay during the annual Graham Greene International Festival. “We always get them coming — including his daughter,” the landlord said. “It’s good business.” It’s also a great place to get an understanding of how the town helped to shape the writer’s imagination.

After checking in to a slightly tatty room with a sleigh bed and exposed beams, I walked along the High Street, passing the W H Smith from which Greene stole magazines, to the grand Victorian school where he lived, devouring books in the library — “thousands of books only waiting to be explored”.

Beyond is a canal where there were, in Greene’s day, “slow-moving painted barges and remote gypsy children” and the woods in which he says he tried Russian roulette. Reading A Sort of Life in the bar of the King’s Arms, I felt I was seeing Berkhamsted through Greene’s eyes . . . a sort of pilgrimage for lovers of his writing.

The King’s Arms (01442 866595, www.kingsarmshotel.com), 147 High Street, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire HP4 3HL.

Mystery Guest paid £75 for a double.

Room 4.5 out of 10

Food 6 (OK bacon bap for breakfast)

Service 7

Value 6

Score 5.88

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