by Adam Sisman
Like St Andrew’s and every other school throughout Britain, Sherborne had been depleted by the war just ended. Almost one-third of the regular teaching staff had left to serve in the forces; many of these had not yet returned when David arrived. For obvious reasons it had been the younger and fitter masters who had left; those who had taken their place were often elderly, and not necessarily of the highest quality. To some extent the boys were able to exploit this. One of those brought back out of retirement to fill the gaps in the ranks was an elderly brigadier. ‘Please, sir,’ the boys would ask him, ‘is it true that you were at the Battle of Ypres?’
‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact I was,’ the retired soldier confessed.
‘Please, sir, what was it like?’
‘I’ll tell you exactly what happened,’ started the brigadier, and continued for some time while the boys enjoyed a period of relaxation.
David’s housemaster, R. S. (Stanley) Thompson, known to the boys as ‘Thompers’, was an awkward, balding man, another high Anglican, inflexible in his beliefs and inclined to be pompous in manner. In the mid-1930s, soon after Wallace had become headmaster, Thompson had arrived to take control of Westcott House, a much extended building several hundred yards from the main school site, the most distant of the boarding houses. By 1945 there were around sixty pupils at Westcott House, and as Thompson seemed unable to turn anybody away the number grew every year, so that by the late 1940s it was becoming uncomfortably crowded. Thompson was forced to send some of his boys to board with families around the town; far from feeling exiled, they considered themselves privileged, delighted to escape from Westcott House’s cold, noisy and smelly dormitories,* and the crushed scramble in the dining room at mealtimes. Worst was the tyranny of the prefects: whenever one of them yelled ‘fag’, the smaller boys near by scurried to his summons, and the last to arrive was punished with a chore: cleaning his shoes, tidying his study, cooking him toast on his gas range.5
It was Thompson whom Ronnie had met at a cricket match in Bruton early in the war, and with whom he had corresponded about sending both his sons to Sherborne. Thompson had been irritated when Ronnie had chosen to send Tony to Radley instead. This irritation developed into dislike, which increased with familiarity. David’s school fees were always in arrears, a matter of personal concern to a housemaster, since the deficit came out of his pocket.† Ronnie innocently made matters worse by advising Thompson how he should run Westcott House as a more effective business. He may also have irritated Thompson by carelessly addressing his letters to ‘Westgate House’.
David would provide a recognisable portrait of Thompson in A Perfect Spy. ‘Mr Willow was a big homely man in tweeds and a cricket tie, and the Christian plainness of his home after Ascot filled Pym at once with an assurance of integrity.’ Pym is David’s imagined self, and Willow’s loathing for Pym’s corrupt father is immediately apparent, as is his determination to beat the bad out of the boys under his care.6 But here the novel deviates from life, for David was never beaten by Thompson. He was not the sort of boy to be beaten by a housemaster: more likely to be invited to tea.
David’s autobiographical fiction provides clues to the mysteries of his past, but such clues can be misleading. Even when describing real experience, he is doing so from a different perspective. The satirical, self-mocking attitude of the fifty-something-year-old John le Carré should be distinguished from the much less confident, less detached mental state of the fifteen-year-old David Cornwell.
In general it was the head of house (the most senior schoolboy) rather than the masters who beat the boys, having first obtained Thompson’s permission. Punishment was administered in a silent ritual that accentuated the terror of the regime. In the early evening the younger boys would be seated in the day room, quietly doing their homework, when the door opened. A prefect would enter, identify the miscreant and march him off to a washroom, without a word being uttered. There the unhappy boy would be made to lower his head into a filthy hand-basin; clutching both taps with throbbing hands while his forelock hung limp, he would be flogged with a swishy bamboo in the shape of a walking-stick, until it was judged that he had expiated his crimes. This happened once to David, and even twenty-five years later he still burned for revenge.7 According to him, the long list of beatable offences included untidiness, and failing to put the Bible on top of the pile of books you were carrying to school. Some of David’s contemporaries say that this is an exaggeration; but one remembers that you could get a black mark for ‘almost anything’, and that three black marks meant being beaten. Others say that this too was an exaggeration, and that beatings resulted from a large accumulation of black marks.
Like Wallace, Thompson was a man of deep Christian faith. Some boys found his concern for their moral well-being intrusive. In the late evenings he would summon them individually to his study in their pyjamas and dressing gowns, to conduct embarrassing conversations about masturbation and the ‘facts of life’. Usually the interview would conclude with a prayer. At moments of particular intensity, Thompson would put his arms around the boy and plant a fervent kiss on his forehead. David never forgot the texture of Thompson’s thick tweed jacket as he was enfolded in such embraces.
Ronnie may have unwittingly encouraged Thompson’s pastoral interest in his son. Towards the end of David’s first year at Sherborne he wrote to the housemaster commenting on ‘the very great improvement in David’s outlook this term’. He was sure, he continued, that ‘you must have given him a good talking to, with very profitable results’. In his first term Jean had written to Thompson expressing her conviction that ‘your influence on David will be invaluable. Needless to say he wraps me around his little finger and I have to guard constantly against spoiling him!’8
Thompson’s rigid and uncompromising beliefs left little scope for disagreement. He would not take contradiction, not even from his colleagues. According to his deputy, the house tutor Peter Currie, ‘Thompers was the worst possible housemaster for David,’ who was noticeably more independent than most of the boys, as well as being more sensitive. But the looming confrontation was not immediately apparent. Indeed, one might say that at the start David was one of Thompson’s best prospects: intelligent, artistic and athletic. He was no longer the vulnerable little boy who needed protection from his elder brother; he was growing into a good-looking young man, with startlingly clear eyes and thick fair hair, parted at the side. By comparison with his peers David seemed mature both physically and psychologically, successful in his academic work and on the sports field (he was captain of the junior cricket team), witty and popular with his schoolmates, a charismatic individual apparently at ease with himself – though guarded about his family.
To Gerald Peacocke, who studied School Certificate (the equivalent of GCSEs) alongside David, he was almost unfairly gifted. It seemed that he could turn his hand to anything, and the only question was: which gift would he fulfil? Peacocke remembers David’s cartoon displayed on the classroom wall, which depicted Hannibal’s army, complete with elephants, crossing the Rhône and routing the Gauls drawn up on the far bank. Possibly this inspired the classics master’s pithy report: ‘Full of ideas, but many of them not Latin’.
Peacocke had come to England in 1945 from German-speaking Switzerland, where he had been marooned for the duration of the war, after being sent there in 1938 for the sake of his health. Cut off from his family, and under the remote care of the British Consul in Zurich, Peacocke had spent the war in St Moritz, where he had formed a lifelong friendship with one of the Badrutt sons, and become friendly too with a boy from Germany; these two played together happily while elsewhere their fathers and uncles were trying to kill one another. For David, Peacocke’s story brought back memories of that glorious holiday in St Moritz before the war, the last with his mother. Perhaps he stored away the image of an isolated child, confined to a half-empty Swiss sanatorium, to fetch it out again half a lifetime later when he came to write the story of Karla’s daughter Tati
ana in his novel Smiley’s People.
David was especially friendly with Robin Cooke, who had arrived at Westcott House late one night, and awoke the next morning to find himself in a dormitory, surrounded by strangers. Cooke’s father, an Indian civil servant, had died suddenly, and his mother had sent him back to England, while choosing to remain in India herself. Perhaps his lack of parents was one of the reasons why he and David were drawn to each other. Whatever the reason, they became close friends, and Cooke would spend many of his holidays at David’s house. An affectionate playfulness characterised their relations; David suggested that they should call each other ‘Tig’, a nickname that stuck. Cooke proved to be a fine actor, who ‘walked away’ with the school elocution prize and took leading parts in plays and play-readings. To Gerald Peacocke, he and David seemed very sophisticated, the jeunesse dorée of their generation at Sherborne.
Thompson’s high hopes for David are obvious in his house reports. ‘After a somewhat uncertain start he has settled down to a quiet and steady outlook,’ he wrote at the end of David’s first term at Sherborne. ‘He is intelligent and very responsive and straightforward. If he keeps his head he should do very well here.’ At the end of the second term Thompson assessed him as ‘a lively and interesting person … apt to be a bit domineering and obstinate among his contemporaries’; and at the end of his first year he summarised David as ‘a very cheerful and pleasant boy, whose main problem at the moment is how to control his rather nervous temperament’.
David’s outward poise was a mask for his inner unrest. This was a motherless boy, uneasy about his father, searching for something worthwhile, something to believe in. He confessed his disquiet to Thompson, who steered him towards Father Algy Robertson of the Franciscans. Thus began a struggle for David’s soul. In keeping with the teachings of their founder, the Franciscans emphasised poverty, simplicity and ascetism, not virtues that Ronnie celebrated. Father Algy was a powerful preacher, whose mission was to recruit public schoolboys and undergraduates into the monastic life – ‘the Christian equivalent’, as David later perceived, ‘of the secret Communist recruiters who threw their net over the likes of Kim Philby in the thirties’. Prompted by Father Algy, David signed up for a series of three-day retreats. In farm buildings on a Dorset hillside he mouthed plainsong, breathed incense and tried to feel holy. The part he enjoyed most was looking after the white rabbits, until he discovered that they were being bred to make gloves. Denis Marsh, the Father Guardian, was his confessor. In response to David’s anxious questioning about Ronnie, the Father Guardian rather unhelpfully advised him to endure his natural father as a sacrifice.9
By the middle of David’s second year a note of caution entered Thompson’s reports: ‘I am all in favour of originality, but as a means to an end, not as an end in itself,’ he commented. ‘I do not think he has lost his sense of proportion yet, but he must guard against it.’ No doubt Thompson was responding to the recent reports on David’s work, several of which had used the word ‘original’ in assessing his performance. David’s English master wrote that ‘at present his work is largely experimental’, a description that was clearly not intended as a commendation. ‘When he settles down he will do very well,’ the report continued. The same master used the term ‘experimental’ again in his report at the end of the summer term, adding, ‘I can never be sure of results.’
David’s verse, which appeared regularly in the Shirburnian, could hardly be styled experimental, showing as it did the influence of such diverse masters as Gray, Betjeman and A. A. Milne. His poems were generally comic, or at least mock-heroic, like his ‘Ode to Gertrude’, whom he addressed as ‘thou withering rose of love, false vegetable of passion’:
For thou with reckless perfidy encouraged my elation,
Since first the fates united us upon Victoria Station.
And now with deadly sword I pierce my broken heart yet through;
My loving-kindness sheds its oyster’s tears anew,
That e’er Victoria Station formed my only Waterloo.
In the Vth form, David was taught English by a younger master, recently demobbed, called Robin Atthill, who would publish a volume of his own poems in 1947. Atthill was more appreciative of David’s talents than his predecessors. ‘He is not afraid to experiment and the result has been some very promising work,’ he reported at the end of his first term teaching David. ‘He has a sensitive and original mind – a real artist with words,’ he wrote at the end of the year.
Atthill encouraged play-reading, at which David was generally acknowledged to be outstanding. On the other hand, his performance as the soothsayer in a school production of Julius Caesar, though ‘clearly played’, was criticised by the reviewer in the Shirburnian as not conveying ‘the quality of mystery and tension which Shakespeare surely intended that it should’.10
In 1948 David would be awarded a school prize for a long free-verse poem called ‘The Dream of the Deserted Island’ – an island deserted by the god Pan. He had longed for the prize ‘more than anything else I had heard of, even girls’. In later life David would cringe to be reminded of this mannered, adolescent work, but according to the adjudicator Littleton Powys, ‘it showed great imagination and was full of pleasing poetic imagery’. He praised it as ‘a joy to read with its musical rhythm and mastery of vowel sounds’.11
Littleton Powys, a former headmaster of Sherborne preparatory school, was one of the Powys family, brother to the poet Llewelyn and the novelists John Cowper and Theodore Francis, all of whom had been pupils at Sherborne. He wrote David an encouraging letter, urging him to ‘write your heart out’, and invited him to tea. Powys showed David a letter from one of his brothers, to whom he had sent the poem.* ‘The boy has IT,’ the brother had written, underlining ‘IT’ three times.
Fortified by this support, David read ‘The Dream of the Deserted Island’ to his peers at the school’s annual Commemoration. In middle age he pictured his adolescent self, ‘convinced that the new Keats was making his mark on the Barbarians; while they, no doubt, thought how nice it would be to strangle me’.12 The climax of the Commemoration came in a speech by Sir Norman Birkett KC, whose participation had been secured by his old friend Ronald Cornwell, the man whom he had prosecuted for fraud fourteen years earlier.
The award of the poetry prize to David for ‘The Dream of the Deserted Island’ had been opposed by some masters who believed that boys should be discouraged from writing poems that neither rhymed nor scanned; they changed the rules to exclude such work in the future. In response David, together with several of his fellow schoolboy poets, wrote a defiant letter of protest to the Shirburnian.
We feel it is a tragedy that we should be censured for writing free verse for the prize poem competition, and that in future, without exception, only poems in the conventional forms of rhymes and metre ought to be entered. Poetry is an expression of thoughts that cannot always be contained by feet and regularity, and it is an injustice to a poet to force his hand, and demand that he write in a traditional style. The future poets of Sherborne* should be allowed and encouraged to express themselves in the form that their thoughts demand, and remain unfettered by the necessity of subjecting them to a style that is both incongruous with, and unsuited for, modern ideas.13
David’s proficiency in German reflected his interest in, and feeling for, language in general; but it was spurred too by his developing interest in German literature and thought. He was influenced by his German master Frank King, who had taught him that ‘the love we have for other languages intensifies and explains the love we have for our own’. To possess another language, King told the boys, is to possess another soul (a saying attributed to Charlemagne). He was always at pains to remind his pupils that, whatever the crimes of the Nazi period, ‘there was another Germany, a decent one, far removed from the one we thought we knew about, and that was the Germany we would be able to explore once we understood its language’.14 The message sank deep into David, and surfaces in book a
fter book. ‘Nothing I have ever written in my life has been free of the German influences of my youth,’ he wrote recently.15
There was also an element of contrariness in David’s attraction to German culture, of course. While almost everybody around him was expressing bigoted dislike of all things German, David was instinctively drawn the other way.
David’s aptitude for languages was obvious too in his French classes. One of his contemporaries remembers an occasion when the master was preparing them for the oral examination in School Certificate; he wrote on the blackboard a number of questions in French, of the kind that were liable to be asked, and then required each pupil to give his own answer in the same language. One such question was ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est, le métier de votre père?’ This boy listened intently for David’s answer, because he had heard from his own father, a chartered surveyor who knew the commercial property market well, that Cornwell Senior had a reputation as ‘a bit of a vagabond’ – though he had given no details and warned his son not to mention this in the school. When his turn came, David said: ‘Mon père s’employe aux occupations nombreuses: il est un petit peu homme d’affaires, un petit peu politicien, un petit peu voyageur …’ His listener admired the adroitness, as well as the fluency, of this response.
The late 1940s were Ronnie’s golden years, when he lived without restraint; when he rode in comfortable, chauffeur-driven limousines with personalised number plates, beginning with RC 1; when he owned a string of racehorses; when he was a regular at the Goat in Clifford Street and the Albany Club in Old Burlington Street, where showbiz met the underworld, and off-course bookmakers operated illegally but openly, despite the presence of off-duty police officers, while cheerful prostitutes offered their services in upstairs rooms; when he played snooker with music-hall stars, who would stop the show to greet him when he arrived late at the Victoria Palace theatre (‘Why, it’s Ronnie Cornwell. Hello, Ronnie’); when he held court to enthralled suburban neighbours and less respectable business associates; when he contrived to escape ‘Austerity Britain’ on exotic foreign holidays; and when he hosted lively parties for a startling array of guests, including senior officials and civil servants, permanent under-secretaries, members of parliament, peers of the realm, champion jockeys and snooker stars, bookies, film stars, radio stars, members of the Crazy Gang, whichever cricket teams happened to be touring, directors of Arsenal Football Club, judges, barristers, senior police officers and members of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, and a hand-picked selection of ‘lovelies’, mainly dance hostesses from Churchill’s and the Astor nightclubs.16 Ronnie was everybody’s fixer, ‘seeing people right’, finding attractive and compliant young women for his influential contacts, ensuring that those found drunk at the scene of a car accident were not prosecuted, or if they were, that evidence was produced clearing them of any liability.