John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Ronnie went on to express his satisfaction that ‘the electorate of this division will not be misled by such tactics’.19

  After Ronnie had delivered his address, a woman at the back asked whether it was true that the candidate had served a prison sentence for fraud – just as Peggy Wentworth does in A Perfect Spy; and Ronnie dealt with the question just as his fictional equivalent Rick Pym did. He moved forward and looked into the faces of the thirty or so people gathered in the hall that evening. ‘I see here mothers, fathers and grandparents. I ask each of you, if one of your sons or grandsons had made a mistake, and paid the price for it, and then he asked to be taken back, which one of you would slam the door in his face?’ The response was tumultuous applause. There was a repeat performance at subsequent meetings in the run-up to the poll, to the extent that David began to suspect his father of having planted the question.

  So David remembers, though if this is a true record of what happened it seems odd that no hint of the allegations against Ronnie appeared in the local press, which covered the election in considerable detail. Perhaps his threat of legal action explains why. In another version of this story, which David told in a television interview, the question from the woman in the audience was his first intimation that anything was wrong, and Ronnie explained himself only afterwards, in the car on the way back from the meeting.20 This parallels the storyline of A Perfect Spy, which suggests that, in David’s memory, fiction may have replaced reality.

  In any case the bluff worked. On polling day, 23 February, 5,854 of the electors of Yarmouth voted for Ronnie, 13.6 per cent of the turnout – a respectable showing, about 2 per cent more than the average vote across the country for a Liberal candidate, ensuring that he saved his deposit. The sitting Labour MP was re-elected with a majority of only 1,162, which convinced many on the Tory team that the Liberal interloper had cost them victory, as they had feared he would.

  After the election Ronnie spoke to a reporter from the local paper, and stated his ambition of winning the seat ‘for Liberalism’ at the next election. Far from drooping, the tails of the Liberals of Yarmouth ‘were well up’. A fortnight after the poll, he spoke to a crowded meeting at the Central Liberal Club and pronounced ‘the rebirth of Liberalism in Yarmouth’. But it was all bluster. Ronnie had shot his bolt.21

  * Gottfried Keller (1819–90), novelist and short-story writer; Carl Spitteler (1845–1924), poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919.

  * So David recounted in a lecture given in Oxford in 2010. In another verison of this exchange, provided in a 2000 television interview, David said, ‘I’m a refugee from England,’ to which the Professor replied, ‘You’d better stay.’

  † Hesse lived in Bern before the First World War.

  * So David said in his 2010 lecture. In his 2000 television interview he said that the police had come to his house while he was out, and had confiscated his bicycle.

  * Development.

  * So called because, uniquely in the Alps, Wengen had a cog railway right to the centre of the ski slopes, from Lauterbrunnen to Kleine Scheidegg. Skiers in Wengen could enjoy the downhill run without having to walk up or climb the mountains first.

  * David claimed that Ronnie’s failure to settle his account had ‘brought the hotel to its knees’, but this seems hard to believe.

  * Her first name was Alison, but she was always known by her second name Ann to avoid confusion with her mother, also called Alison.

  * In the post-war years Constantine made regular appearances on BBC radio panel shows.

  * A phrase with which Ronnie was of course familiar, from his frequent appearances in court.

  5

  Serving your country

  David had postponed his enlistment date to assist his father in the Yarmouth election, but once the poll was over there was no excuse for further delay. He enlisted in the 17th Training Regiment of the Royal Artillery, and soon afterwards presented himself at Park Hall Camp, Oswestry, to begin his Basic Training.

  The first days passed in a whirlwind of Blanco and Brasso, Dos and Don’ts, instructions on how to lace boots and make a bed. David polished buttons and buckles, and rubbed the toecaps of his boots with spit and polish – and then was made to do it again after the sergeant had hurled the boots across the room, shouting that it had not been done properly. The day began with Reveille at 6.15 and ended with Lights Out at 22.30. It seemed that David had barely gone to sleep before he was woken by a screaming drill sergeant.

  Basic Training was designed to teach recruits to obey orders without questioning them. For ten weeks, they were bullied by foul-mouthed NCOs, to break their spirit. ‘Discipline is the foundation of the Army,’ they were told repeatedly. David remembers being frightened all the time, though one gains a different impression from A Perfect Spy. ‘He reaped the plentiful rewards of his upbringing,’ David wrote of his fictional self. ‘While Welsh miners and Glaswegian cut-throats wept unashamedly for their mothers, went absent without leave and were carted off to a place of punishment, Pym slept soundly and wept for no one … He neither took fright at being shouted at nor expected the logic of authority.’1 It was often remarked that those young men who had been to boarding school found it easier to adapt to the harshness and the arbitrariness of the regime.2

  In retrospect David would look back at his service in the army with wry detachment. Like many other former National Servicemen, he would find much of what he had been required to do meaningless and occasionally ludicrous. The experience would heighten his scepticism about the wisdom of authority. At the time, however, he was eager to conform. The moral clarity of the army was a relief from the murkiness of home.

  During his training David was selected to lay a 25-pounder field gun during an exercise in the Welsh hills, chosen to do so because of his supposedly superior education. When ordered to open fire, David hesitated, as a flock of sheep had wandered into range. His non-committal gesture was interpreted as ‘optically demonstrating resistance to an order’, a breach of military discipline which might have earned him a court martial.

  The recruits were granted two weeks’ leave at the end of Basic Training; then David and those other recruits identified as ‘potential officer material’ were ordered to report to the War Office Selection Board (WOSB, known colloquially as ‘Wosbee’) at Barton Stacey in Hampshire for three days of interviews and tests of physical endurance and initiative. Selectors also observed the potential officers’ table manners. The army favoured young men who had been to public school or grammar school – not least because most of these had received OTC training there.

  Those that failed the Board faced the humiliation of being ‘RTUd’ (Returned to Unit). But David proceeded to the infantry’s Officer Cadet School at Eaton Hall in Cheshire, a magnificent Gothic-revival mansion designed by Alfred Waterhouse in the late nineteenth century for the 1st Duke of Westminster. The building’s sumptuous interiors were neomedieval, with rich furnishings, marble mosaics, alabaster chimneypieces and Chinese silk wallpaper. Officer cadets slept four to a room in elegant staterooms, and washed in luxurious bathrooms, with outsize baths and marble hand-basins equipped with brass taps.

  After a few weeks at Eaton Hall David received a note from the War Office, directing him towards the Intelligence Corps. He assumed that this was a consequence of his work for the SIS station in Bern. Once he received his commission he would wear the Corps’ cypress-green beret and its badge, provoking the inevitable taunts about ‘intelligence’ from NCOs.

  Officer training was divided into two phases: a primary phase, lasting six weeks, devoted to basic military subjects; and a secondary phase of ten weeks, concentrating on tactics, weapons and ‘Tewts’ (tactical exercises without troops). Asked in a Tewt how he would defend his position, David replied that he would dig a very big trench and fill it with poisonous snakes. This flippant response was not well received. Cadets also undertook two three-day Battle Camps, on Dartmoor and in the Brecon Beacons, which included live
firing with .303 rifles and the use of thunder flashes to simulate grenades.

  An underlying principle of officer training was (and remains) constant competition at every level, whether between individuals, platoons or companies. This encouraged a strong esprit de corps, as each unit was judged by the standard of its weakest member. David was part of 17 Platoon, ‘C’ Company. Because he was considered hopeless at ‘Turnout’, always scruffy and never ironing his battledress properly, the other members of his platoon took him in hand, helping to smarten him up before parade. One of them, Bryan Cartledge, would later join the Foreign Office, eventually becoming Ambassador to Moscow.

  To his fellow cadets, most of whom had arrived direct from school, David seemed mature and sophisticated. His detached attitude to training impressed them even as it made them anxious that he might appear on parade with a button undone. And unlike most of them, he had a girlfriend. Though he had not written to Ann Sharp as he had promised when he saw her off from St Moritz, they had met again at an RAF dance ten months later, while he was on leave from Eaton Hall. She now looked much more womanly, the childlike plaits replaced by a glamorous bob. ‘She’s got a figure like a pocket Venus!’ he told Robin Cooke excitedly when they next met. On that first evening she had ignored him, preferring to dance with a young RAF officer whom she had been seeing since returning from St Moritz, while David was left to dance with her mother; but they had spent the next weekend together at the house of Group Captain Collins, becoming close enough for him to address her as ‘Ann darling’ when he wrote to her subsequently from Eaton Hall. From this time on David would see her regularly whenever he had any leave. His letters became increasingly affectionate. ‘I love you with all that I possess,’ he wrote soon afterwards, adding, ‘I promise that I have never said that to anybody else.’3

  Ann was the elder of two daughters, clever, serious and bookish, dreaming inwardly of princes and princesses, described by her glamorous but empty-headed mother as a ‘funny little thing’. At her boarding school she was regarded as defiant and argumentative; there she seems to have had some form of lesbian experience that (so David believed) later disgusted her. She was surrounded by women at home as well as at school, since she had no brothers and her mother was one of half a dozen sisters; her grandmother, who had disowned her grandfather, had taught her daughters that females were queens who should be served by the male bee (but only after marriage) and then left in peace. David would come to believe that from childhood he and Ann had been on different sides of the sex-war. While he had grown up in a household devoid of women, Ann had grown up in a household dominated by them.

  Not surprisingly, Ann’s father, Alfred ‘Bobby’ Sharp, was a rogue husband, who neglected his wife and daughters and chased after other women. He was an extravagant, aggressive personality, whose character and behaviour offended Ann as it did her mother. Though educated in England, Bobby Sharp had been born in Bangalore, to an Indian mother; according to Ann, who herself had been born in India,* he tried to conceal his Anglo-Indian origins by acting more English than the English.*

  Training completed, David passed out with the rank of 2nd lieutenant on 21 October 1950. After a short parachute course at RAF Abingdon, in which he jumped from a tethered balloon, he was posted to the Intelligence Corps Depot, at Maresfield Camp near Uckfield in East Sussex, to undergo further specialist training before being sent abroad. By this time he knew that his destination would be Austria, which like Germany was divided into zones controlled by the victorious Allies. Britain occupied the southern zone of the country, with garrisons at Graz, Villach and Klagenfurt, and an infantry battalion stationed in Vienna for ceremonial duties. This was a comparatively cushy posting, given that other National Servicemen were being sent to Malaya, where they faced Communist insurgents, or even to Korea, where British troops were fighting an all-out war under the auspices of the United Nations. The invasion of South Korea by the forces of the Communist North in June had come as a complete surprise. In its early stages there seemed a genuine prospect that the conflict in Korea might escalate into a third world war.4 In response the government had extended the period of National Service from eighteen months to two years.

  David found the months he spent at the Maresfield Camp shockingly directionless. To his fellow Shirburnian Gerald Peacocke, who was already there when David arrived, he seemed to glide effortlessly through the exercises. They were taught methods of interrogation by one Sergeant Kauffmann,* who horrified them with accounts of methods used in the field which seemed to David indistinguishable from torture. Among the practical tips David learned during the course was not to interview prisoners across a narrow, flimsy table, but always to use one too wide to reach across and too heavy to overturn. But most of the training exercises took place on paper, which was hardly exciting for restless young men. To relieve the boredom, David staged a play for the NCOs and other ranks at the Depot, The Ghost of Jerry Bundler, in which he took a leading part himself. This one-act play, first performed in 1899 and combining comedy with a supernatural frisson, was well received.

  David’s training was interrupted by an accident, after he had escorted Ann to another RAF dance. A staff car was driving them to the railway station late at night. The driver, perhaps distracted by the young couple’s passionate embraces visible in his rear-view mirror, took a bend too fast, skidded, lost control of the car, mounted the verge and crashed into a telegraph pole. The driver was left unconscious, slumped across the steering wheel. David was concussed, his nose broken; Ann suffered a cut across her eye which required stitches.

  The accident seems to have brought the two of them closer together. Looking back on the incident afterwards David would refer to it as a ‘God-sent car smash’.5

  At Ronnie’s insistence David saw a specialist, who advised that he should convalesce in a darkened room at home for several weeks, not reading or moving his head more than absolutely necessary. In a larky letter to Ann from Tunmers David pretended that the children’s nanny was trying to seduce him. ‘She is rather pretty,’ he wrote mischievously, ‘but has a strong Kentish accent.’6 David’s letters to Ann were characterised by youthful high spirits, and sometimes strayed into fantasy or plain invention. Repeatedly he apologised for being ‘an ass’, for feeling ‘a bit light-headed’, for writing ‘nonsense’. The margins of his letters were illustrated with jokey cartoons. He sent her some poems, which he cheerfully admitted were no good. ‘I have no poetic pretensions whatsoever!’ he insisted. ‘I write to amuse myself and no one else. I do it not as vanity but as a pastime, and I am the first to admit that it is quite hopeless.’7

  In mid-December, by then fully recovered from his accident, David left for Switzerland to take part in the Downhill Only Club’s training scheme, in preparation for the British Ski Championships in January. The War Office had granted him leave from his duties so that he could participate in the annual races held at the main ski resorts. Six young skiers gathered under the guidance of a Swiss professional to undertake an arduous and often frightening programme, racing at up to eighty miles per hour, learning to ski on one leg and to ski-jump.8 Ronnie and Jean watched and cheered him on. David did well enough in the races to be awarded his DHO racing colours, but suffered the greatest disappointment of his skiing career when he was disqualified from taking part in the championships for an infringement. ‘I broke down and cried like a child when I saw what had happened,’ he admitted.

  Ann was due to come out to Chamonix in her capacity as honorary secretary of the RAF Winter Sports Association. To fill the time before her arrival David found temporary work as a ski instructor. One day he paid a visit to a Frenchwoman in hospital who had broken both her legs in a skiing accident. He found her lying on her back, both legs in traction, ‘a little scrap of a woman in her fifties with short peroxide hair and a fat lipstick mouth drawn over the thin one underneath’. She told him that she had been in the Resistance during the war: she had parachuted into France she forgot how many times, but had
never broken anything until she went skiing. She had spent the last year of the war in a concentration camp where they had shaved her head, she explained, as if she had been talking of a few weeks on the Riviera. Though other people’s hair had grown back again, hers for some reason had not, and she feared that it never would. The memory of this remarkable woman with her insouciant humour lodged in his mind, and would form the basis of the character Elsa Fennan in his first book.9

  Once Ann had joined David in Chamonix their relations reached a new level of intensity. ‘A dream came true,’ he wrote to her after they had spent a night together, though stopping short of intercourse. ‘Love was greater than shame, because it was more powerful … There was no law of custom to control, no power to restrain.’10 What had happened between them filled David with wonder. ‘There used to be something rather attractive in longing for the totally unattainable,’ he mused; and continued by borrowing a favourite maxim of his father’s: ‘for ideals are supposed to be like stars: “we cannot reach them yet we prophet [sic] by their presence”.* I am a little frightened at having reached the stars so soon.’ He assured Ann that ‘both Jeanie and Daddy … regard you as “a good influence” ’. There had been some tension between their families, after Rosemary Collins, wife of the group captain, had painted ‘a very black picture of our family to your mother’.11 It seems that the RAF Winter Sports Scheme was at the root of this; though Collins was in on the racket, he would later tell David that Ronnie had gulled him into it.

  By this time David had returned to Maresfield to complete his training. He confided to Ann that he had received ‘an absolute rocket from Daddy for spending too much’ in Switzerland.12 This was a difficult time for Ronnie: the building societies were becoming restive, and increasingly he was having to borrow money to support his position. Moreover he was being harassed by bankruptcy petitions from builders and other suppliers. A receiving order was made against him, though this was rescinded a few days later.