John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  As so often with Ronnie, this was fantasy masquerading as fact. Having learned that the Kulm was deep in debt, he had sought a private conversation with the general manager, a grandson of Johannes Badrutt, the hotel’s founder. Ronnie had confided that he represented a consortium of investors who were considering the possibility of making an offer (perhaps not an unwelcome one) to buy the Kulm. He had brought his family here, he explained, to test whether it came up to the consortium’s exacting standards; and was happy to inform Herr Badrutt that he would be making a favourable report to his colleagues when he returned to England. Presenting a newly printed business card, Ronnie asked him to be so kind as to forward the bill (should he wish to present one) to this address, where it would of course receive his prompt attention. The gratified general manager expressed his satisfaction that Herr Cornwell and his family had enjoyed his stay with them. In the circumstances he was happy to waive all charges.

  Life was no longer marvellous for Olive. She had been mortified to be summoned before the bankruptcy court for cross-examination. In the past she had never questioned it when Ronnie had asked her to sign papers – ‘Just witness this, will you, Wiggly?’ He would ask her to cash cheques, which bounced. By now he had run through almost all her money: she had only the few pounds in her handbag remaining. The bankruptcy court had asked her to explain the large sums in her account – an account of which she apparently knew nothing. ‘One just couldn’t live like it,’ she told her sons later. Moreover she found it hard to cope with her husband’s philandering. He was now having an affair with her best friend, Mabel George; twice Mabel had become pregnant, and both times she had terminated the pregnancy. On at least one occasion he persuaded Olive to share a bed with the pair of them. Ronnie would often stay out late and come back reeking of drink. Olive still adored him, ‘but he was quite incorrigible’.

  A business associate of Ronnie’s, a land agent called John Hill, came to stay with them for a few days. Seeing what was happening, he begged Olive to make a stand. When she refused Ronnie’s next request to cash a cheque, there was ‘one hell of a row’; for the first time in their marriage, Ronnie hit her. Afterwards he tried to make amends with chocolates and flowers, but Olive could take no more: she decided to elope with Hill, leaving her sons behind. One night when Ronnie was out, she hurriedly packed some clothes – in her honeymoon suitcase bought from Harrods, a reminder of better days, covered in luxurious white hide and lined in pink silk – then slipped out of the house, locking the door behind her. The two boys were sleeping upstairs. She lugged the suitcase along the dark streets to Rickmansworth Cricket Club, where Hill collected her in his car. ‘I feel positively unclean,’ she told him.

  * Many years later David raised this subject with his half-sister Charlotte, who had been suffering from depression. ‘Did he touch you up?’ he asked her – before adding, ‘It’s all right, Sis, he did it to me too.’

  * The average annual wage at the time was £200, and one could buy a three-bedroom house for a few hundred pounds.

  * After he joined MI6 he put through a trace for her, to no avail.

  2

  ‘We seek higher things’

  Nobody told the boys that their mother had gone for good. Ronnie indicated that she was ill, implying that she would soon return. After a while he began to hint that she had fallen into immoral ways. (‘Never judge, son. That’s God’s job, not ours.’) It would be years before they realised that she was never coming back. Even then, they found it hard to accept that she had abandoned them. When they were sent away to boarding school Tony and David kept a biscuit tin of coins hidden in the hollow of a tree, saving up for bus fares so that one day, like Peter Pan’s lost boys, they could go and find their mother. David sometimes wondered if she might be dead, especially when Ronnie hinted that her illness was worse than first thought. (‘These medical boys, son, they just won’t give it to a fellow straight.’) When he tried to pursue the point, Ronnie seemed hurt and even insulted to be questioned. (‘Isn’t your old man good enough for you, then, son?’)1

  Oddly, Tony has no memories of his mother at home, though he must have been at least seven when she left. David was only five; he remembered only her scent and clutching a gloved hand. After she had gone he would approach each woman who came to the house, and ask her shyly if she was his mother.

  ‘We were frozen children, & will always remain so,’ David wrote in an impassioned letter to his brother almost a lifetime later. Denied maternal love, his response was to try and make everybody else love him. ‘You chase after it, act it, imitate it, and eventually, if you’re old & lucky, you believe in it,’ he wrote to Tony, ‘but it comes hard, it’s flawed, & we fake it a lot, like religion, in the hope that one day we’ll have it for real.’2 Magnus Pym, the protagonist in A Perfect Spy, the most autobiographical of David’s novels, is another motherless son, whose upbringing is almost identical to his own. He seduces everybody he meets, in a vain search for love. ‘Love was all he cared about,’ Magnus’s old schoolmate Sefton Boyd says of him. ‘Didn’t know where to find it.’3

  David has never been able to forgive his mother for deserting him. Though the wound healed over, he remained raw inside. He would develop a carapace of relaxed ease, but inwardly he was racked with rage and wretchedness. Looking back at his childhood, he has written of the ‘sixteen hugless years’ that followed his mother’s departure. He was left ignorant of women, and mistrustful of them. Women were people who disappeared without explanation, not to be relied upon. ‘He never loved a woman in his life,’ Magnus’s mistress tells his friend Jack Brotherhood. ‘We were enemy, all of us.’4

  The theme of abandonment recurs again and again in his books. It is there in the very first paragraph he wrote, in his first book, Call for the Dead, when Smiley’s wife leaves him for the first time. Another of David’s autobiographical characters, Aldo Cassidy, the central figure in his novel The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, has been abandoned by his mother as a small boy; when asked what effect this had on him, he replies: ‘Well … it made me lonely I suppose … it sort of … robbed me of my childhood.’ Pressed to explain what he means, Cassidy continues: ‘Denied normal growth, I suppose … a sense of fun … I had no female reference, no one to make women human.’

  David has admitted that he finds it difficult to write about women as a consequence. By comparison with the men, the woman in his work are often curiously blank. ‘Whenever I start to write a female character, Olive always seems to get in the way.’

  With John Hill, she settled in East Anglia, where they eventually started another family. Olive was still besotted with Ronnie, however, and after a while she began going up to London to see him. ‘It was always a very happy time,’ she told Tony many years later. They would have lunch, holding hands across the table, while Ronnie expanded on his latest schemes, ever more grandiose; and, as David pictured it, after the coffee and the brandy, Olive ‘yielded to him in some safe house before he scurried off to run the world’.

  She would later claim to have agreed with Ronnie that the boys should board during the term-time and that she should have them on alternate holidays; but if there was such an agreement, she seems to have made little attempt to enforce it. In old age, she recalled that as a boy David had visited her a couple of times, though he is adamant that this never happened. Tony remembers being taken to see her once, when he was about ten years old, and shouting at Hill in fury.

  The boys were sent to board at a nearby preparatory school, St Martin’s in Northwood. The school historian suggests that Ronnie may have met the headmaster at the local golf club.5 Tony was then seven; David only five, by far the youngest child at the school. Even then he was conscious of being an outsider, from the wrong kind of background – a sense of not belonging that would dog him all his life. He remembers little else, beyond ‘the harrowing daily routine of bed-making, clothes-changing, and bell-ringing, and the extraordinary kindness of my brother Tony, who appeared from nowhere to scoop me u
p, brush the grime off me, and set me back on my feet’.6

  The period after Olive’s departure was a confusing time. Soon afterwards they moved from Hazel Cottage to Greengates, a large detached house on the outskirts of Amersham. For a while Mabel George looked after the boys: the first, and David’s favourite, of many substitute ‘mothers’, who came and went at regular intervals. The one constant in the boys’ lives at this time was their grandparents’ home in Parkstone, where they would often spend their holidays.7 In those days children roamed free of adult supervision: the boys would play with cap guns among the pine trees on Constitution Hill, or wander down to the shore at Sandbanks or to the Victorian Boating Lake. David remembers being taken by his doting aunts to the Bournemouth Palace Court Theatre on successive nights, and seeing Emlyn Williams perform in his own play Night Must Fall. He was fascinated by Williams’s portrayal of a psychopathic murderer who conceals his true nature beneath a polite, unassuming, cheerful exterior. ‘I had an enormous appetite for narrative and fantasy, without knowing what was gnawing at me,’ David would tell an interviewer many years later. Looking back on his childhood from the perspective of an adult, he expressed the frustration of growing up in households that were ‘artless, bookless and cultureless’.8 The first books that he can remember reading were Treasure Island and a volume of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

  Before they left Hazel Cottage, Ronnie had thrown a party for the West Indies cricket team, then touring England. This was an unusual gesture: not many black faces were to be seen in Rickmansworth at the time. Ronnie reacted with indignation to any prejudice shown towards his friends.* The Cornwell boys were thrilled to play French cricket in the garden with the West Indies’ star player, the Trinidadian Learie Constantine, dubbed ‘the coloured catapult’ because of his big-hitting batting, hostile fast bowling and athletic fielding. After the tour Constantine settled in England, and Ronnie would co-opt him on to the local cricket team. David remembered a jovial domestic ceremony in which, without the benefit of a clergyman, Constantine was formally inducted as his godfather. In fact this was a false memory, because Constantine’s godson was not David but his brother.9

  The West Indies tour of 1939 was cut short by the outbreak of war. David was staying with his grandparents in Parkstone when Neville Chamberlain broadcast to the nation at eleven o’clock in the morning of 3 September. Germany had invaded Poland two days before, in defiance of Britain’s guarantee of Polish independence. Across the nation people gathered anxiously around their ‘wireless’ radio sets to hear the Prime Minister’s mournful announcement that no reply had been received to the British ultimatum, ‘and that consequently this country is at war with Germany’. The scene remained fixed in David’s memory like a family portrait. ‘Dear Lord, where will the battlefield be?’ asked Bessie. ‘Could be out there on the tennis court,’ his grandfather replied grimly. Thereafter David shunned the tennis court – which was perhaps just as well, because later in the war a bomb fell on it.

  Fear of enemy bombing caused many London schools to relocate to safer locations in the countryside. Pupils at St Martin’s were evacuated from Northwood to Chard in Somerset – but the Cornwells were not among them, because Ronnie had arranged for them to start at another preparatory school: St Andrew’s, near Pangbourne in Berkshire.* As an economy measure Ronnie persuaded St Andrew’s to take them as day-boys, rather than as boarders, and fixed it for them to live with Mabel George’s sister Vi and her husband Frank at Flint Cottage, a lodge at the school gates. This double anomaly would set them apart, in a regime where conformity was all important, reinforcing their sense of difference.

  Hours after the boys arrived at Flint Cottage the air-raid warning sounded. Frank led them into the woods to shelter until they heard the ‘all clear’. He had been exempted from military service because of a heart condition, and ran the nearby Herons Farm. Sometimes he would take the boys with him as he did his milk rounds by horse-drawn cart.

  Vi had a stiff leg and walked with a stick. Unlike her sister she did not treat the boys kindly. David was only seven when he arrived at St Andrew’s, a sensitive, vulnerable child. Instead of sympathising with his distress when he wet the bed, she beat him – repeatedly, as David remembers it. Cruelly she made him wear a nappy to school. Every morning when he arrived, he would have to find a private place to take it off, to escape the ridicule of his peers; and then, at the end of the day, to put it back on again, because she would check and punish him if she found him not wearing it. He would continue wetting his bed into his middle teens, a constant humiliation because it was impossible to conceal.

  St Andrew’s had been founded only five years earlier, as a partnership between two men who had themselves met as schoolboys some thirty years before, Bill Ward-Clarke and Robert Robertson-Glasgow. These two, one a short and bespectacled Englishman and the other a tall and bald Scot, acted as joint headmasters, though Robertson-Glasgow tended to take the senior role.10 They had adopted a school motto: Altiora Petimus (‘We seek higher things’). Being so new, St Andrew’s was still a small and growing school, with fewer than a hundred pupils. This meant that the atmosphere was more intimate and less impersonal than in a larger institution, for better or worse. Robertson-Glasgow made a practice of awarding humorous nicknames to the boys, such as ‘Titus’ or ‘Beetle’. David was known as ‘Maggot’.

  Many of the younger masters were absent on war service. The shortfall was made up largely by older men called out of retirement, including one who had taught the headmasters themselves when they were schoolboys at Radley. Another of the older men, the mathematics master Colonel Airey, had lost a leg during the Boer War. The music mistress was a Frenchwoman stranded in England with her son at the outbreak of war; she was delighted when a young maquisard joined the staff after escaping from occupied France. For a short period David scratched away at a violin, until she made him stop and promise never to try again. By contrast, he showed an aptitude for art, especially for humorous cartoons. In this he was encouraged by the art master Peter Probyn,* a successful commercial artist who illustrated books and designed dust-jackets for publishers. Probyn was responsible for several Guinness advertisements and Punch cartoons, and drew a comic strip for the boys’ magazine Eagle after the war.†

  The English master was the headmaster’s brother, Raymond Robertson-Glasgow, a celebrated Somerset cricketer in his time and afterwards a cricket correspondent. ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow‡ was a big, kindly man, with a reverberating laugh and a powerful baritone singing voice which rang out in the dining hall; the boys were hugely impressed when he responded to their urging and punted a football right over the roof of the three-storey school building. He was known to the boys as ‘RG 2’, to differentiate him from his elder brother the headmaster, who was ‘RG 1’. The Cornwell boys were of course known as ‘Cornwell 1’ and ‘Cornwell 2’.

  The main building of St Andrew’s was a Victorian mansion in the Gothic style designed by Alfred Waterhouse for one of the Watney family of brewers, set in fifty-four acres of woods and playing fields, and reached by a mile-long drive from the school gates. Every morning the Cornwell boys would bicycle from Flint Cottage along this drive to school. Once David fell off his bike, and Tony stopped to wait for him. Seeing his little brother in tears, though not obviously hurt by his fall, Tony laid his bike on the ground and walked back to comfort him. ‘Are you unhappy?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ sobbed David.

  Embracing him, Tony told him not to worry. ‘I will look after you,’ he promised. ‘I will be your mother.’

  Beyond the main school building was a stable yard, and then a track continued to an old chalk-pit, now grass covered, with tall hummocks on the northern side, a privileged lair for the biggest and strongest boys.* Each year group of St Andrew’s pupils speculated about this pit: some said it had been an open-cast silver mine, others an ancient fort. Naïve newcomers were told that it was a bomb-crater, but initiates knew where bombs had dropped, and most had
examined the resultant craters in person. Only two had fallen in the vicinity of the school: one in a field between Moulsford and Streatley, and the other between the railway and the river at Cleeve Lock.

  Soon after arriving at St Andrew’s David read Oscar Danby V.C., a story by Rowland Walker about a brave boy scout who volunteers for espionage duty during the First World War. This patriotic tale filled him with a strong desire to die a hero’s death before a German firing squad. David was conscious that the fathers of many of his schoolfellows were serving in the forces, so it was awkward that his own father was something of a spiv. For boys of David’s generation, the participation or otherwise of their fathers in the national struggle was a matter of intense pride or shame, a test of manhood. David quietly let it be known that Ronnie had joined the secret service, was being trained for an important mission and would soon be parachuted into Germany. Unknown to him, his father was peddling similar stories to his cronies in London, even as he traded in black-market goods such as petrol coupons, ration coupons and emergency ration cards.

  The Robertson-Glasgows were high Anglicans, with a low opinion of nonconformists. This religious difference distanced the Cornwell brothers from family and home. Schoolboys at St Andrew’s attended chapel services twice daily, and were expected to say prayers before bedtime. On Sundays there were extra services.

  The school day began with lessons in the morning. Lunch during wartime was frugal, with meat (or occasionally fish) served only once a week. During the shooting season, the more privileged boys received pheasants from their fathers’ estates, which they ate at a special table reserved for the offspring of landed families. David once sat as this table as a guest. He had never before tasted pheasant, and this one was high and undercooked, but he ate every morsel before vomiting in one of the doorless lavatories.11 After lunch the boys would be sent to rest in their dorms, while masters relaxed in the common room, correcting the boys’ work or reading the papers. Then classes resumed, following a tea of buns and milk. Each class did a ‘working-party’ once a week, undertaking chores such as shoe cleaning or picking fruit in the walled garden, and occasionally lifting potatoes at a nearby farm.