“The Destructors” was published in 1954, less than 10 years after World War II. During this relatively short period, many writers, artists, and intellectuals—Greene included—tried to make sense of this global catastrophe that resulted in the Holocaust and approximately 60 million soldiers and civilians dead. Much of London was destroyed in Germany’s bombing campaign known as the Blitz. Houses were reduced to rubble, and many children became war orphans. While Great Britain was a leader among the Allied powers who won the war, the peace proved to be costly. The transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy involved shortages, deprivation, and unemployment. Moreover, the means used to win the war, such as the use of firebombs in Germany and nuclear bombs in Japan, struck some as barbaric and hypocritical. National purpose dissolved as the unifying war effort devolved into political squabbles in the postwar period. Moreover, the end of World War II led quickly to the Cold War and the fear of nuclear annihilation.

The boys of the Wormsley Common Gang are too young to remember the war. They know only the privation and cynicism of the postwar period and the omnipresent dread provoked by the Cold War.