by Adam Sisman
Both Cornwell boys were good cricketers, Tony exceptionally so, good enough to play for Dorset in the Minor Counties Championship. Ronnie saw him as a future England fast bowler, and somehow arranged for the famous Bedser twins, Alec and Eric, to give him private coaching in the nets at the Oval. This was like arranging for Don Bradman to give him batting lessons. Indeed, Bradman credited Alec Bedser with bowling the finest ball ever to take his wicket in his long and illustrious career.
From time to time Ronnie would arrive at Radley or Sherborne to watch a match. In the summer of 1947, for example, he announced to Thompson his plans to come down to Sherborne with Jean and a carload of friends for the annual cricket match against Radley. Tony would be captaining the visitors, and Ronnie hinted that David might be picked as wicketkeeper for the home side. He grandly offered to entertain both teams to dinner in a restaurant after the match. Disappointingly it was cancelled, when a case of infantile paralysis (polio) caused the whole school to be placed in quarantine.
To David, Ronnie had become an embarrassment, simultaneously flamboyant and not quite the thing, arriving at school to collect him at the weekend in the Bentley and offering to take his schoolfellows out to lunch or dinner, while failing to pay the school fees on time. ‘Is it true that your father keeps racehorses?’ asked an exasperated Thompson.
In his housemaster’s report at the end of the 1948 spring term Thompson wrote that David ‘is going though an effervescent stage in his general outlook and he needs a calm and controlled mind if he is to solve his problems satisfactorily; and a sympathetic patience from others’. Thompson and his family often invited boys to join them at their holiday home in North Cornwall; he suggested that David might spend the Easter break with them there. A curt reply from Jean suggests that she thought this suggestion inappropriate. She thanked Thompson for his kind invitation, but explained that she had already made arrangements for David’s holidays.27 A letter from Ronnie to Thompson written during the Easter vacation refers to ‘David’s possible visit to America under the auspices of the English-Speaking Union’.28 This suggestion may have antagonised Thompson further. Perhaps he felt his grip on David slipping. When the term resumed, he increased the pressure. During one of their intense, late-night conversations, David confessed to finding a disturbing contrast between home and school. He feared that if he stayed at Sherborne he might ‘lose’ his family.29 Thompson told the boy that he must choose between God and Mammon. It was obvious to David that ‘Mammon’ meant Ronnie.*
One episode in particular was troubling David. It seems that Ronnie was going through a bad patch, his whole edifice tottering. During the holidays he had ordered his sons to reassure an elderly neighbour, Sir Eric Ansorge, who lived across the road from the Cornwells. He was a former colonial administrator from the Indian Civil Service who had retired to Chalfont St Peter after serving thirty-five years in Bengal, a lepidopterist who kept his collection of butterflies and other insects and spiders in glass-covered drawers. He and his wife were on friendly terms with the Cornwell children, particularly Tony, now doing National Service in the RAF before going up to Cambridge, where Sir Eric had been an undergraduate some forty years earlier. ‘Get yourselves over to Sir Eric’s house,’ Ronnie had barked down the telephone, ‘and tell him everything’s all right.’
‘How all right?’ the boys had enquired.
‘All right, for God’s sake! Don’t shilly-shally! Tell him if he kicks up a stink he’ll spoil everything. It’s going to be all right. The cheque’s on its way.’
Reluctantly the boys had called on the Ansorges, and sipped their sherry, while Sir Eric and his wife explained their fears. They were anxious about the capital that they had entrusted to Ronnie. He had offered to invest this on their behalf, claiming to be able to obtain for them a much better rate of interest than they could find elsewhere. The sum that they had handed into his care represented most of their life-savings. Could the boys assure them, from everything they knew of their father, that he could be trusted with their money? The elderly couple phrased their question politely, but they could not conceal their terror that they might have lost the savings on which they depended for their security.* Being faced with this frightened elderly couple had obliged the boys to confront the reality of Ronnie’s business practices. He bullied them into making several more reassuring visits across the road before they told him that they couldn’t go again.30
At the end of the 1948 summer term Thompson congratulated David on ‘an excellent report’. Even so, he continued, ‘I do not feel that he is happy and I wish I knew how to help him solve his fundamental problems.’ The headmaster echoed Thompson in complimenting David on ‘a very creditable and successful term’. He was sorry to hear that David was unhappy, ‘and I wonder why for he has all the ingredients: good brains, poetic and artistic sense, good health, the high regard of the whole community. What is lacking, I wonder?’
David was struggling with what he would later term ‘an unbearable moral conflict’. He was torn between loyalty towards his father on the one hand, and what the school told him was doing the right thing on the other. Sherborne instilled in its pupils ethics of honour, decency and duty, and never telling fibs. By contrast, Ronnie co-opted his sons as accomplices, so that they were covering up his deceits, making excuses for him, keeping creditors at bay. At school David was being trained to run an empire; at home he was helping to diddle widows out of their pensions. His attempt to reconcile the two, as he would later admit to Thompson, ‘nearly drove me mad’.31
During the summer holidays David screwed up his courage to tell Ronnie that he was not going back to school for his final year. Instead he would go to Switzerland, and enrol at the University of Bern, a city he had visited only briefly, en route to St Moritz. He had no guarantee of a place, but was willing to chance his arm.
David’s premature departure from Sherborne at the age of sixteen seems to have taken everyone by surprise. There is no hint of it in his summer-term report, nor did he sign the leavers’ register at the end of term.* Whatever he may have written latterly, contemporary evidence suggests that his decision to leave was spontaneous and sudden. The fact that he left some of his possessions behind at Westcott House supports this interpretation.
Ronnie seems to have accepted his son’s decision, though he made David write to his housemaster himself to explain that he would not be coming back. There remained the problem of the belongings he had left behind. Not wanting a confrontation with Thompson, David enlisted the help of the matron, Miss Berryman. At the beginning of the autumn term he returned to Sherborne and crept into Westcott House, planning to collect his things and steal away unseen. David was with Miss Berryman when her telephone rang. ‘He knows you’re here,’ she said, clearly frightened. A moment later Thompson himself appeared. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he bellowed. ‘You’ve no business to be in house. Get out.’
Thompson admitted later that he had handled the situation badly. After David had left he summoned Robin Cooke to his study and told him what had happened. Cooke was stunned to hear that his friend had decided not to come back to the school for his final year: it made no sense to him. ‘Do you think that you could get David to change his mind?’ asked Thompson.
Thompson spoke to Ronnie on the telephone, following up with a letter. He referred to David’s ‘mental and spiritual immaturity’, and conjectured that his decision not to return had been impulsive. He told Ronnie that his son had ‘a great future’, which would be jeopardised if he left school prematurely. Thompson urged Ronnie to persuade the boy to return. Not to do so, he indicated, would be cowardly.
At first Ronnie seemed inclined to agree, suggesting that he should come down to Sherborne to discuss the matter in person, with or without David. But on further consideration he decided that such a discussion would be of no avail. ‘I am satisfied from what he has told me that whatever would be in his power to give the school, over the next twelve months, and whatever they migh
t have to give him, it would be a desperately unhappy year for him,’ he wrote. ‘Knowing him as I do I must acquit him entirely of the allegation of cowardice …’
I agree with you entirely that he has infinite possibilities and I admit that they may be for good or ill. So it is with many other boys, and having given this matter serious consideration and with a full sense of the heavy responsibility which must inevitably rest on my shoulders, I have decided, so far as the visit to Switzerland is concerned, to give the boy his head – as I believe in him completely …
He will never be out of our thoughts, and if I may say so with great respect, my prayers. I shall have the additional knowledge that the grounding he has received at Sherborne, and perhaps more particularly at your hands, will stand him in good stead, and make him always conscious of the duty he has to his fellow-men, and to his God.32
Thompson discussed the matter with the headmaster and showed him Ronnie’s letter. In response, Canon Wallace expressed his belief that ‘the parent gives the whole story away when he talks, on top of page two, of giving the boy his head’.
If that is what he has done, then it is one of the oldest of old stories, at any rate, from the schoolmaster’s point of view, though of course fresh for every parent. I can remember literally dozens of similar cases, in which a headstrong boy, anxious to be free of the irksome discipline of bells and school routine etc., has persuaded his parent to let him leave prematurely for the continent. The parent, perhaps not unmindful of the saving to his pocket, has agreed, and in my recollection, in every single instance it has been disastrous, and both have bitterly regretted it. But of course we are powerless, the boy is under the parent’s guardianship. The parent pays the fees, and if he decides to take the boy away and send him to Switzerland, there is no power on earth that can stop him. We can only tell him what is a fact, that he is making a big mistake, and will presently resent it bitterly.33
Thompson knew that the story was more complex than Wallace realised, but there was nothing that he could do. ‘I regretted his leaving very much indeed and did my best to stop it, but unsuccessfully,’ he wrote later. ‘It was all the result of an unsatisfactory home background working unhappily on a very sensitive mind.’34 In another letter he would write that ‘it was a Faustus story in miniature’.35 This was an extraordinary comparison to make. Faustus was a mature scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and earthly pleasures. David was a sixteen-year-old who had decided that he wanted to continue his studies elsewhere.
David himself has given various explanations for his decision to leave school prematurely, referring to it recently as ‘a blind act of adolescent anger’.36 In trying to justify his action, he has described his three years at Sherborne as the worst in his life, and referred to ‘the indelible scars that a neo-fascist regime of corporal punishment and single-sex confinement inflicts upon its wards’.37 In 1991, forty-three years later, David gave an interview in which he talked about his schooldays. ‘What I remember most about my time at Sherborne was being beaten. In my mind, it was one long act of sadism, broken very rarely by spontaneous acts of kindness. Most of the time I cried alone.’38
When this interview was published in the Mail on Sunday, Thompson was reported to be ‘in high dudge’. Several of David’s contemporaries wrote letters of support to their former housemaster, criticising what David had said. ‘Much of what he wrote just wasn’t true,’ wrote one. ‘David always lived in his imagination,’ wrote another. ‘My belief is that for his first year or so he was actually happier than some … I think that as he found things awful at home … he probably did withdraw from time to time.’39
There are several legends to explain why David left Sherborne prematurely; at least one of them is ascribed to David himself, when up at Oxford some years later. He apparently told an undergraduate friend, an angry young Communist, that he had quit Sherborne after punching his housemaster, who had tried to kiss him. Thompson was certainly fond of David, perhaps over-fond, and perhaps his fondness could become oppressive. But those who knew him judge that such behaviour would have been out of character. And if David had lashed out at Thompson, it is difficult to understand why he should then have written him an apologetic letter following their sharp exchange in Miss Berryman’s office, in which he volunteered to come back to the school, to say ‘a slightly more conventional goodbye’.40 Nor would it explain their comparatively cordial correspondence in later years. It is only fair to add that David has no memory of telling this story. If he did, it seems more likely that he invented the incident to impress on his rebellious undergraduate friend his own anti-establishment credentials.
On 1 April 1948, just before what would prove to be David’s final term at Sherborne, a new system for the payment of school fees had been introduced: henceforth boarding and tuition fees would be paid directly to the bursar rather than to the housemaster. Because David’s fees were always in arrears, one might deduce that this change had precipitated his departure. Indeed the general belief among David’s contemporaries and others connected with the school is that David left Sherborne early because his father failed to pay the fees. But correspondence from the time leaves no doubt that this is a misconception. Thompson had told David not to worry about the money, saying that if necessary he could arrange a bursary. ‘We don’t want to lose you,’ he had assured his prized pupil.
Of course, David was not just leaving Sherborne; he was leaving England. He was escaping from his father as much as from Thompson. As he would write many years later, ‘It was time to move on, and it was definitely time to get away from Ronnie.’41
Almost four years after he had left the school David wrote revealingly to Thompson:
I believe now, more than ever, that what I did was right, though I am sorry that it caused such pain. I have not – as you once suggested – chosen Mammon rather than God. I chose the natural rather than the unnatural; the free rather than the repressed, for the choice was mine, as I think you always knew.42
* There was no heating in the dormitories, and the upper windows were left open throughout the year. Each morning at the bell the boys were made to take a cold shower.
† Ronnie seems to have failed to pay the first term’s school fees, and by 22 March 1947 the outstanding account stood at £71 12s 10d, against annual boarding fees of £165.
* According to David’s later account, the enthusiastic letter had been written by Llewelyn Powys, but this cannot be right, as he had died in 1939.
* Among the past poets of Sherborne was Cecil Day-Lewis, who had been a pupil at the school just after the First World War.
* In David’s novel The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (this page), Aldo Cassidy, who has been a pupil at Sherborne, recalls how his housemaster had told him that his father was the devil, and that his father had said very much the same about his housemaster; and that he ‘had found it very hard to know whom, if either, to believe’.
* Ronnie cannot have robbed them of all their savings, because Sir Eric would leave a bequest to the Amateur Entomologists’ Society on his death in 1977.
* In a memoir of David, Vivian Green recalls shaking hands with him at the gathering to say farewell to those boys who were leaving Sherborne at the end of the 1948 summer term. Green was then chaplain and history master at the school. His account, written many years after the event, is inconsistent with evidence from the time, and I am inclined to regard it as an imagined memory.
4
Wandering in the fog
Bern is a natural fortress. The old town, still largely medieval, clings to the slopes of a high peninsula circled by the fast-flowing River Aare, which sweeps around its base in a great horseshoe. For hundreds of years the only crossing point was the heavily fortified Nydegg Bridge. In the nineteenth century Bern expanded westwards beyond its city walls to create the suburb of Länggasse, where a university was founded in 1834; and north, south and east to new suburbs on the other side of the river, including the diplomatic qua
rters of Kirchenfeld and Elfenau after the city became capital of the Swiss federal state in 1848. But its core remained almost unchanged.
‘Everything is forbidden in Bern.’ The old saying still held true in the late 1940s. Bern was an ordered, sober city, puritan, conservative and suspicious of foreigners. Germans were especially unwelcome after the war, as were displaced persons from the East: as fast as they arrived, the Swiss police rounded them up and sent them back again. Britons, on the other hand, were tolerated.
David arrived in Bern in mid-October 1948, a few days before his seventeenth birthday. For once in funds, he took a taxi direct from the railway station to the best hotel in the city, the Bellevue Palace, where he booked a room for one night only, and admired the magnificent view of the Alps from its south-facing terrace. The next morning he walked the short distance to the Kantonalbank in the Bundesplatz. A kindly Herr Joss opened an account for the young Englishman and gave him directions to the University.