Unfortunately, you are not allowed to respond to multiple
questions, so I have had to edit your question down to focus on one element. Please
remember to only ask one question in the future.
Setting is
absolutely key to this great and rather shocking short story by Graham Greene. Let us
remember the context: the story is based in London, and set nine years after the end of
World War II. London, much more than other European cities, had been regularly blitzed
or bombed by German planes which destroyed large tracts of buildings, making London
resemble a bomb site. The rebuild took many years to carry out, so for a long time after
the end of the war, the people of London still lived in
rubble.
Many were concerned about the moral destruction of
society rather than the physical destruction however. An entire generation of children
had grown up knowing nothing but war and destruction, and the collapse of hope. This is
the kind of gang that we are presented with in the form of T. and Blackie. Note how the
setting is described in the story:
The gang met every morning in an impromptu
car-park, the site of the last bomb of the first blitz... On one side of the car-park
leaned the first occupied house, number 3, of the shattered Northwood Terrace--literally
leaned, for it had suffered form the blast of the bomb and the side walls were supported
on wooden struts. A smaller bomb and some incendiaries had fallen beyond, so that the
house stuck up like a jagged tooth and carried on the further wall relics of its
neighbour, a dado, the remains of a
fireplace.
Thus we can see
that the place where the gang meets already mirrors the internal "destruction" that has
gone on within the boys in terms of their values and morals. Bomb blasts have demolished
the buildings, and number 3 is poorly supported and isolated. In the same way the boys
engage themselves in acts of vandalism and destruction without a care for concepts such
as "right" or "wrong."
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