John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Sometimes, when there was a shoot on at a neighbouring estate, boys would be recruited as beaters. David has always been squeamish; he remembers his disgust at the line of dead animals nailed up by the gamekeeper afterwards, the birds’ wings spread wide. Ward-Clarke was a keen shot, and when he bagged anything unusual like a barn owl, he would bring it back to the school and pin it on the noticeboard. This inspired the scene in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which a master efficiently despatches an owl that has emerged dazed from a chimney into a classroom full of rapt boys. While staying with one of his father’s landed girlfriends in the holidays David was made to hold chickens still while the farmhand cut their tongues so that they bled to death.

  After David and Tony had been at Flint Cottage a year or so, Herons Farm went bust, and they moved into dormitories alongside the other boys. Boarders were given a prayer card before going to bed, which included prayers for the army one night, for the navy another and for the air force another. ‘For love, at dead of night, we had one another’s trembling little bodies, which stole from bed to bed like sticky frogs in search of a pool,’ David wrote in a memoir of his schooldays. ‘There at last we embraced like the infants we were not supposed to be, whispered fantastic lies to each other about our parents, and listened to the slow chug of airplanes, wondering whose they were …’12

  On Sunday, there was compulsory chapel, and in the afternoon Mrs Robertson-Glasgow would read from the Bible. For the rest of the day the boys roamed free within the grounds, where gangs clashed frequently over territorial control. As at other schools, there were periodic crazes which preoccupied the boys for a while and then ended: marbles, conkers, roller skating, ‘Battleships’ during exams, and twirling tin lids on a loop of string against the brick wall of the gym, producing a shower of sparks.

  The war loomed large in the imagination of the St Andrew’s schoolboys, who soon learned to identify aircraft in the skies overhead. After dark they would gaze out of their dormitory windows and sweep the school grounds with their torches in search of enemy parachutists. At Herons Farm David and Tony peered through gaps in the doors at Spitfires stored inside an octagonal brick barn. In the winter of 1940, after term had started, a boy arrived at the school without a uniform, one of only thirteen survivors of the ninety children aboard the passenger ship City of Benares, which had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. Later in the war the boys would collect the strips of metal dropped by aircraft to confuse radar, called ‘Window’ by the British and Düppel by the Germans. Before D-Day the St Andrew’s boys were taken to see tanks assembled in woods near by, and to watch Dakotas with gliders in tow practise take-off and landing.

  As an adult David would write scathingly about all his schools, and claim that he was ‘not educated at all’.13 He depicted St Andrew’s as a reactionary, philistine institution, riddled with snobbery and prejudice, in which pupils were terrorised into becoming loyal servants of a fast-fading empire. ‘For History, we had “Our Empire Story”, written by I forget whom;* for Literature, we had Percy Westerman,† Sapper and Henty; for Heroes, we had Biggles, Bulldog Drummond and, later, Dornford Yates’s Berry: the whole stable, you might say, of Empire-bloodstock novelists.’ Colonel Airey blamed the world’s troubles on ‘niggers’, and extolled the benefits of colonial rule in Kenya, Rhodesia, Malaya and Burma.

  Yet a contemporary of David’s rated the quality of teaching at St Andrew’s as ‘pretty good’. In particular, ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow seems to have been an inspirational teacher, who more than anybody else was responsible for introducing David to the pleasures of literature. In class ‘Crusoe’ read aloud to the boys, from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, or the Father Brown stories, or the stories of Sherlock Holmes; David has never forgotten his mellifluous reading of ‘The Speckled Band’. ‘I loved him because he knew he was crazy,’ David has said.* ‘Crusoe’ had written several books himself, mostly about cricket; among them was a collection of fictitious autobiographies, I was Himmler’s Aunt (1940). He had an extensive vocabulary, and loved new coinages. While he was playing cricket for Somerset his fellow team members would take a dictionary to dinner, so that they could challenge him whenever he used an unfamiliar word.14

  According to Tony, his brother was ‘noticeably bright’ even as a small boy. At this stage, however, David does not seem to have been an exceptional student. It tended to be Tony who won the form prizes as he progressed up the school, rather than his younger brother: though at eleven David did win the IVth-form ‘Good Work’ prize, and at thirteen, just before he left, he would be awarded the Greig Character Cup. It was on the playing field that David excelled. At only ten years old, he joined boys two or three years his senior in the cricket 1st XI (captained by Tony), showing promise as both batsman and bowler. (‘May become a leg-break exponent’, speculated the coach.) By the time he reached eleven, he was a regular member of the football 1st XI, playing in goal, where he won a reputation for courage and ‘a safe pair of hands’. David would also play hockey and rugby for St Andrew’s, and be runner-up in the school lawn tennis singles competition.

  From the outside David appeared well integrated into the life of the school. But inside he seethed with misery and resentment. His anger at the corporal punishment inflicted on him was palpable when he wrote about it half a lifetime later:

  … I see myself, sprawled inelegantly over the arm of the headmaster’s chair, waiting for the pain, which was acute. I smell pipe smoke and leather, like the smell of a limousine.

  I always knew when he was going to beat me because he became dreadfully slow in his movements, like a man moving through water. He would stand up, put down his pipe and stare at me in dull confusion before waking to pronounce sentence. ‘Cornwell,’ he would say … ‘there’s only one thing for …’ – followed by the definition of the crime: cheek, slackness, filth, lying; the menu was awesome.

  After the beating, we showed off our marks. When our bottoms bled, Matron dabbed iodine on them.

  The headmaster used a riding whip to punish the boys. Other masters hit them with their hands; David bitterly attributed his later deafness in one ear to a Mr Fansworth, ‘now eking out a well-earned retirement on the esplanades of Eastbourne’.15

  St Andrew’s boys referred to those who hadn’t been to private school as ‘oiks’, and doubled up with mirth at the sound of lower-class accents. David was soon doing the same, ‘while I hugged to myself the shameful secret that my aunts and uncles spoke that way themselves’. He became especially sensitive to social nuance, noticing details to which boys from more secure backgrounds might be oblivious.

  To avoid being thought different, David pretended to share the attitudes and assumptions he found around him.16 The unthinking propaganda with which they were force-fed led him to sympathise secretly with the Germans, ‘since everyone hated them so much’.17 His was a hidden life, of outward conformity and inner rebellion. In retrospect, he would feel that he had been schooled into becoming a spy, learning the enemy’s language, wearing his clothes, aping his opinions and pretending to share his prejudices. Like Graham Greene, he learned to live a secret life, and would later liken his boyhood to living in occupied territory. ‘The catastrophes in our family were so great and the disproportion between the domestic situation and the orthodoxy of my educated programme was so great that I seemed to go about in disguise.’18

  Parents were not much in evidence at St Andrew’s, as the shortage of petrol during wartime made travel difficult. Ronnie had his own ways of overcoming such difficulties, however; from time to time he would announce that he would be coming on a ‘leave-out day’. His habit was to pick the boys up in the car from the end of the drive, presumably to avoid being accosted by the bursar, who might want to raise the awkward issue of overdue school fees. Then they would be carried off to a restaurant, or to the home of Ronnie’s current lady friend. More than half a century afterwards David would provide an ironic description of these occasions: ‘He would bring the late
st candidate for Olive’s job and a member of his Court for protection. Lunch would be a three-hour affair with a lot of brandy, which at that age we didn’t drink. At some point before the treat ended, we knew he was going to take us aside and ask us what we thought of the candidate, and we were going to reply “not much”.’ The boys were invited to share Ronnie’s disrespectful attitude towards women, as supplicants to be recruited and dismissed.

  Often Ronnie would not turn up at all, which was too humiliating to admit. After waiting in vain for an hour or so, Tony and David would take themselves on a long walk, and on their return to school pretend that all had gone to plan. (‘Had a good day, Cornwell?’ ‘Super, sir, thank you.’ ‘Parents OK?’ ‘Fine, sir, thank you.’)19

  In 1943 Tony left St Andrew’s for Radley, about twenty-five miles away. Ronnie had originally intended for both boys to go on to Sherborne, and to this end he had been corresponding with one of the Sherborne housemasters for more than a year, after meeting him at a cricket match; but when Tony won a scholarship to Radley, this seemed an opportunity too good to be missed, though it meant sending the boys to separate schools. Tony was aware that his little brother would feel desolate without his comfort and protection. From Radley he wrote David long letters to cheer him up. Tony even managed to telephone him once, a considerable feat for a schoolboy in those days. At weekends and half-holidays, the brothers would cycle to a prearranged rendezvous in a wood or in a field, for a hug and a picnic.

  Once Tony had gone, David retreated still further into fantasy. ‘Much of my time was spent planning escapes across moonlit playing fields partly given over to wartime agriculture. In the romantic dreams that temporarily released me from those huge and lonely dormitories, I likened myself to those young pilots of the propaganda films that were our sole entertainment.’

  Sickness provided another escape route. During this period of early adolescence David twice pretended to be seriously ill. On the first occasion he faked epilepsy convincingly enough to be admitted to hospital. Emboldened by this success, he simulated a hernia, so successfully that doctors operated on him. While he was recuperating in bed, one of his father’s girlfriends read him The Wind in the Willows, and he liked it so much that he asked her to read it to him again, and again.

  For Ronnie, the outbreak of war had presented new opportunities. In 1939, as the nation girded itself for the coming struggle, he had formed Moore Medicinal Products, to manufacture and market his own versions of proprietary medicines formerly imported from Germany. The boys spent one of their school vacations in the cellar of an Aberdeen boarding house, squeezing figs and prunes through a press and rolling the resulting sludge in glucose, to be sold as laxative pills. Why they were in Aberdeen is difficult to ascertain, except that Ronnie had influential connections among the masons in Scotland. Later they accompanied him on a tour of chemist shops in the Midlands, sitting bored in the car outside as their father tried to offload nasal inhalers on to sceptical shopkeepers.

  In June 1940 there had been an irritating interruption to Ronnie’s money-making operations. The proceedings to wind up Moreland Developments Limited had revealed that he had taken an active part in the management of the company, breaching the conditions of his 1936 bankruptcy. He was tried at the Central Criminal Court in London, sentenced to two days’ imprisonment and ordered to pay a comparatively modest fine. Once again the boys were told nothing of this.

  In school holidays the boys would be taken to stay with proxy ‘mothers’, usually landed or otherwise prosperous ladies with conveniently remote husbands whom Ronnie had somehow befriended. Among them David remembers ‘Topsy’ Holcroft of Shrewsbury, a Mrs Mole of Honeyback Hall, Kidderminster, a Mrs Grove of Abergavenny, and a Mrs Fowler who ran a boarding house in Dawlish, where he was reprimanded for shooting at fish in a local stream with an airgun. In intervals between such stays Ronnie would often dump his sons with their grandparents; and, as they grew older, they sometimes hitchhiked down to Parkstone of their own accord, weary of their neglected existence at home. Or they were sent to holiday schools, including one outside Bruton, in North Somerset, originally a field barracks, where they slept in tents recently occupied by soldiers, and the discipline was as harsh, and as apparently random, as in the army itself. On the night of 25 April 1942 the Germans launched a ‘Baedeker’ bombing raid on Bath,* only twenty-five miles to the north. The boys heard the distinctive roar of the bombers approaching and emerged from their tent to watch them passing overhead.

  This was a rootless, itinerant existence. Like a soldier on the move, David learned techniques for making himself comfortable: picking out the best bed in the dormitory, fixing an eye on the most susceptible lady members of staff, getting to know the cook, and so on.

  In the early summer of 1942 Ronnie volunteered his services as political agent to a young army officer (later a successful playwright), the Honourable William Douglas Home, standing in a by-election in Windsor. Recently the Cornwells had moved yet again, to a house in Stoke Poges, just outside the constituency. The seat had been made vacant by the death of the MP, a Conservative who had first been elected in 1922 and who had been returned unopposed in the last two elections. Though, in the candidate’s own description, ‘a Liberal of the old school’, Ronnie showed no hesitation in pledging his support for Douglas Home, who was standing as an Independent Progressive. No Liberal candidate had come forward, under the terms of a pact made among the three major parties participating in the National Government, that for the duration of the war they would not contest by-elections against the incumbent party. As a result many wartime by-elections resulted in candidates being returned unopposed. But the pact did not prevent Independents and candidates from minor parties from standing.

  One curiosity of the election was that the Conservative candidate and his Independent challenger had been friends at Eton. Douglas Home was a younger brother of Lord Dunglass, Neville Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary who had accompanied the Prime Minister to Munich to meet Hitler in 1938 (and who would eventually, as Alec Douglas-Home, become Prime Minister himself). Unlike his elder brother, William Douglas Home* was virtually a pacifist. He had been an idealistic appeaser before the war, and even now, in the middle of hostilities, he was still seeking an accommodation with Germany. Earlier in the year he had stood as an Independent candidate in a Glasgow by-election.

  Ronnie organised a vigorous campaign, forming cells of supporters in each district, and ensuring that attendances at the meetings Douglas Home addressed grew to capacity as the campaign progressed, until it seemed possible that he might take the seat from the Conservatives. Against his better judgement, Douglas Home agreed to Ronnie’s proposal that he accept offers of support from other Independent MPs, including the voluble member for Rugby, W. J. Brown. This proved an embarrassing mistake: Brown’s vocal support for a ‘Second Front’† contradicted everything that Douglas Home was standing for. In the Windsor poll he came a respectable second, losing by a margin of 2,000 votes.20

  Douglas Home stood in several more by-elections during the war, each time unsuccessfully. In October 1944 he was court-martialled and cashiered for refusing to obey an order.‡ There was some speculation that he might stand in the general election of 1945: Ronnie, referred to as ‘a close friend’, would tell the Sunday Express that ‘he will contest a seat as an independent, but I cannot say where’.21

  Ronnie’s renewed interest in politics may have been connected with his fear of imminent call-up. Intensive research on his behalf had revealed that political candidates could choose to be exempt from conscription. Though not strictly a reserved occupation, politics was considered ‘work of national importance’. It is possible, therefore, that his involvement in the by-election was a dry run, in case he might want to take advantage of this loophole in the future. In August 1942, two months after the Windsor poll, he succeeded in deferring his call-up by pleading that he was essential to his business, only to be called up later in the year. He disposed of
his half-share in Moore Medicinal Products for £1,500 and made ready to combat Hitler; in preparation for his coming ordeal, he took the unusual step of having a private’s uniform made up in Savile Row. Fortunately he was required to serve only one day before being released to the reserve ‘on compassionate grounds’, following his plea that, as a single parent, he was needed at home.

  For a while after that he traded under his own name, buying and selling ‘general merchandise’, much of it usually available only on the black market, including chocolate, Benzedrine inhalers, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens. When the school bursar, weary of the struggle to obtain settlement of the school fees, demanded payment up front, he received it in kind, in the form of dried fruit – figs, bananas and prunes – plus a case of gin.22

  In April 1943 Ronnie was again summoned for military service, and this time was unable to defer it. After basic training, he transferred to the Royal Corps of Signals, but within a few months he had once more obtained his release on compassionate grounds. By this time he had moved yet again, to Carriden House, a substantial neo-Georgian property in Gerrards Cross. As Tony returned there one day he was greeted by a hail, and looked up to see his father leaning out of an upstairs window, alongside a smiling young woman. This was Jean Gronow (née Neal), a divorcee who worked for the BBC at Bush House as a studio manager on the European Service, broadcasting messages to resistance organisations in Europe. She shared a flat in Weymouth Mews with another young woman, where they entertained a string of male visitors, many of them foreigners exiled in London for the duration of the war. David was billeted there for a while, and took a strong dislike to one of these, the young Claus von Bülow.