Visiting Liberia to meet some of the people involved in the charity Mary’s Meals, the writer realised she was travelling a similar path to Greene – and that 80 years after his visit, the country remains mired in many of the problems he described

It’s 10 p.m. and I am in a deserted bar in downtown Monrovia, enjoying my first bottle of the local brew, Club Beer (should you ever find yourself in this corner of west Africa, I thoroughly recommend it). The bar is on the top floor of my hotel, all neon lights and 1970s Formica tables, and an exhausted fan is doing its whirring best to dent the 33C heat. I had tried to venture out, but the hall porter insisted it wouldn’t be wise: “Not after dark, madam. Not on your own. Not in Monrovia.”

Before travelling, I had been warned about being alone, especially after dark, and about the importance of staying with my colleagues at all times. But somehow – and really, if this sort of thing bothers you, you shouldn’t be visiting Liberia in the first place – our well-laid plans have inextricably gone awry, and 14 hours out of London I’m entirely alone, at night, in this hot, strange, empty bar. I feel like a character in a Graham Greene novel: and then I think, hang on a minute. Didn’t Greene visit Liberia in the 1930s and write a book about it? Which is odd, because our paths have crossed before: I’ve lived for a long time in the corner of London where he lived, Clapham, and his book on Mexico, The Lawless Roads, gave me hugely useful background for my biography of the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (Greene visited Mexico in 1938, four years before Leonora moved to live there).