by Adam Sisman
Towards the end of September Tony received a paternal summons to Ronnie’s office in the West End, where he found David and his father with a stranger, a middle-aged woman who spoke in a strong Middle European accent. She was introduced as a baroness, the widow of a member of the Rothschild family murdered by the Nazis. Ronnie explained that the baroness had come to him in great secrecy for help. He asked her to repeat her story for the benefit of his sons. This she did, partly in German which David translated, and punctuated by tears. At the time of the Anschluss she and her late husband had entrusted a treasure chest to Roman Catholic priests, who had kept it hidden throughout the war. Its contents included American bullion, a Gutenberg Bible and rolled-up canvases of Old Master paintings.* She now planned to reclaim the chest by smuggling it across the Swiss border. All she needed was a little seed-capital to pay off the priests and bribe the customs officials as necessary. Once the chest was secured, she would be content to entrust its contents to Ronnie, asking only a few thousands to cover her expenses in locating the treasure. She was not interested in money for herself, she said, and seemed content to be guided by Ronnie in managing the capital; she required merely a modest annuity.
Tony saw his brother’s eyebrows rise as the ‘baroness’ recounted her story. Once she had left, Ronnie asked their opinion of what they had heard. David said at once that the woman was a fraud and her story ludicrous. When he suggested that they should contact the Rothschild family to check her identity, Ronnie would hear nothing of it. The poor woman was living in hiding, under an assumed name. The whole family was after that treasure, and they might be after her blood too. He appealed to his sons to suppress their cynicism just for a few days, in order to accompany the baroness to Switzerland. It was touching, David later reflected, to note the chivalry with which his father rushed to the defence of a fellow artist.
As so often in the past, David surrendered to his father’s wishes. ‘Afraid I’ve got to go to Switzerland – possibly Austria,’ he wrote to Ann. ‘Hope to be back early next week. Sorry. Business calls!’40 He asked her to write to the Dolder Grand Hotel, Zurich. Thus David escorted the baroness to Switzerland, an adventure relived by Magnus Pym. The Dolder was a smart hotel overlooking the city, frequented by royalty and film stars. The Baroness did a lot of shopping, and charged everything to the room. She warned David that it was too risky for her to accompany him to the Austrian border, as she might be recognised. ‘They’ would stop at nothing. Now committed, David set out for the rendezvous with the Catholic priests alone. For two days he lurked around the railway station of an Alpine hamlet while rain fell unceasingly, waiting for a contact named ‘Turi Amsler’. When he gave up and returned to the Dolder, he found that the baroness had vanished, with only a stack of unpaid bills to record that she had ever been there. Ronnie never spoke of her again. ‘The most he could manage was a martyred frown and a pious lowering of the eyes, indicating that human decency forbade comment.’41
On the morning of 6 October 1952 David went up to Oxford to begin his undergraduate career. ‘Henceforward I am a strictly intellectual beast with rapidly greying hair,’ he informed Ann.42
* In Murree, the summer capital of the British Raj in the Punjab, part of Pakistan since partition in 1947.
* A career RAF officer, he was admired as a fearless pilot and commander, and had been awarded the DSO in recognition of his outstanding courage, skill and leadership in commanding a light bomber squadron during the early years of the war. Air Commodore Sharp (as he then was) had continued to fly sorties over Germany after he had been promoted out of the front line. While commanding officer of RAF Coningsby, he had flown with the legendary 617 Squadron, then led by Leonard Cheshire, who was always pleased to take ‘passengers’ under his wing. (As a schoolgirl, Ann had served bacon and eggs to the 617 bomber crews.) Following his appointment as Deputy Chief of Staff to the US 8th Air Force in February 1943, he had taken part as a volunteer in numerous B-17 bombing raids. On one of these, acting as gunner, he had driven off repeated attacks by enemy aircraft, displaying gallantry which earned him the Silver Star, an unusual award for a British officer. In fact he had continued to fly B-17 missions until an order came through prohibiting him from doing so any further. For a while he had served as air aide de camp to King George VI. The tradition of patriotric sevice in Ann’s family contrasted with the lamentable record of the Cornwells.
* In A Perfect Spy Magnus Pym is driven to a rendezvous on the Czech frontier by a Corporal Kauffmann, a self-confessed coward.
* David’s spelling was surprisingly poor for someone of his age (nineteen) and intelligence, one result perhaps of the premature end to his schooling. In other letters written around this time he spells ‘weather’ as ‘wheather’, ‘bizarre’ as ‘bazaar’ and ‘vacuum’ as ‘vaccuum’.
* In The Spy who Came in from the Cold an East German agent makes a similar offer to Alec Leamas.
* One of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology. All who drank from it forgot their past lives.
* He illustrated this comment with a cartoon showing himself in alternate poses: one leaning against a bar, on which rested a soda siphon; the other declaiming in wig and gown.
* The head of Lincoln College, Oxford, is known as its Rector. This post has no ecclesiastical status.
* He contemplated using the title ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ for several of his books: among them The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
* A nice donnish discrimination, somewhere between alpha minus and alpha double minus.
* Eighty-four and thirty-nine miles respectively.
* The details remembered by the two brothers differ. According to Tony, the treasure was all gold, and was to be smuggled across the border concealed in a hay cart.
6
‘That little college in Turl’
In A Perfect Spy, David’s alter ego Magnus Pym represents Oxford in the early 1950s as ‘a conventional sort of place’. Just to appear in public in an open-necked shirt was a statement of rebellion. Undergraduates wore tweed jackets, club or regimental ties and flannel trousers; some clenched a pipe between their teeth to demonstrate their manliness. Most came from public schools, and spoke in accents that would nowadays seem laughably posh.
Undergraduates were still woken every morning by college servants (‘Scouts’), who expected to be addressed by their first names. Discipline was imposed by dons known as ‘Proctors’ (‘Progs’), whose bowler-hatted deputies (‘Bulldogs’) patrolled the streets of the city and punished undergraduates detected in misbehaviour. Bulldogs still toured the pubs of Oxford in the evenings and took the names of undergraduates they found there. For though students were known collectively as ‘men’ and addressed respectfully as ‘Mr ——’, they were treated much like schoolboys.
Such a regime was especially irksome to those who had served in the forces. Among the undergraduates there was a clear distinction between those who had already done National Service (and who used service jargon) and those who had chosen to defer it until they had taken their degree (many hoping that it would have been abolished by then). Of course, those who had done their National Service straight after leaving school were on average two years older than those who had not, with correspondingly more experience of life. Moreover the majority of them had served as officers, with authority over older men; accustomed to command, they were reluctant to accept the restrictions imposed on undergraduates.
There was a scattering of female undergraduates, of course, but these occupied their own colleges on the suburban periphery. Women appeared at lectures, dressed, like the men, in gowns, and could be seen bicycling through the streets of the town in bell skirts, but they were barred from the Union, and were permitted to visit men’s colleges only at restricted times, and certainly not late in the evening.1 They were anyway regarded with some derision as bluestockings. Girls from the local secretarial schools were generally reckoned more desirable.
; Lincoln is one of the smaller Oxford colleges, and in the early 1950s it was smaller still. David was one of an intake of only fifty-five undergraduates in October 1952. This small size gave the college an intimate atmosphere. Among the intake were a handful of overseas students, including Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, who fifteen years on would become leader of the short-lived independent republic of Biafra. The evidence suggests that Ojukwu was a popular figure in the college, though he had to endure some heavy-handed ribbing about his colour of a kind that would nowadays be considered unacceptable.
Lincoln’s relative poverty has preserved it from being spoiled by ugly development in modern times. Many of its buildings and their interiors have remained virtually unchanged since they were built. According to Pevsner, Lincoln preserves ‘more of the character of a 15th century college than any other in Oxford’. Given that he had been accepted at the last moment, David had not planned to live in college, but a further late withdrawal by another undergraduate meant that Lincoln was able to offer him a room at the top of a staircase on Chapel Quad. He depicted it to Ann as ‘a charming attic room with worm-eaten rafters and a rickety bed’.2 Around the fireplace was an early seventeenth-century wall-painting.
Soon after he arrived, David found a note in his pigeonhole from Hugh Peppiatt, a friend from Beaconsfield, only a stone’s throw from Tunmers. He was the son of Sir Kenneth Peppiatt, former Chief Cashier at the Bank of England, whose signature appeared on British banknotes. Peppiatt was now in his third year at Oxford, reading history at Trinity, generally regarded as one of the smartest colleges socially; he referred to Lincoln dismissively as ‘that little college in Turl’. He was part of a coterie of public schoolboys who called ‘our lot’ Chaps and their social inferiors Charlies, and pronounced bad things Harry Awful and good things Fairly Decent. Peppiatt introduced David to the Gridiron in Carfax, a socially exclusive dining club of which he was an officer. According to David, ‘The Grid’ carried on much as it had done when Evelyn Waugh was up at Oxford in the 1920s: he remembers an evening when a member burst in bearing a police constable’s helmet, and deposited it proudly on the table; as several policemen came crashing up the stairs in hot pursuit, David and his fellow diners dived for cover.
David seemed comfortable with Peppiatt’s friends; he was well liked, and was appreciated as an excellent and witty raconteur. But he remained on the fringes of this set, at least partly because he had not enough money to keep up. And though he appeared socially at ease, he was vulnerable. He admitted to Ann that he had ‘relations he’d be ashamed to be seen with, shop assistants etc.’.3 Occasionally he would make jokey remarks to his smart friends about ‘having to go and see his old man in the nick’ – but, like Eliza Doolittle swearing at the races, these were understood to be a frightfully good joke. ‘It was concealment by confession,’ one of his Oxford friends recalled, ‘like a bank-robber walking down the street shouting “I’ve got a million pounds in my bag.” No one took it seriously.’4
Among Peppiatt’s friends was John Shakespeare: they had been at the same school, had done National Service together in the Brigade of Guards, and both were now in their final year at Trinity. Like David, Shakespeare was studying modern languages and thought himself ‘rather good’ at German, having won prizes in the subject; but he readily conceded that David’s German was ‘vastly superior’. David told Ann that when he undertook an oral for a travelling scholarship, the invigilator asked him to speak English at the end, to prove that he wasn’t German.5
Shakespeare invited David to a birthday party for his girlfriend Lalage, and introduced him to her father, the prolific author S. P. B. Mais, best known for his wartime radio broadcasts. David was always interested to meet writers and artists, not least because he hoped to find an alternative to a conventional career. As a young man during the First World War Mais had been an assistant master at Sherborne, until he had brought out a novel so obviously set at the school that he had been forced to resign.
By now David felt relaxed enough towards his old school for him to attend a Sherborne reunion dinner, perhaps influenced by Vivian Green, and perhaps too by Gerald Peacocke, who like David was in his first year at Oxford. The fact that Thompson had left Sherborne during the summer, to become headmaster of Bloxham, a small independent school in north Oxfordshire, may have encouraged David to return. Former Westcott House pupils had been solicited to contribute to their housemaster’s retirement present; David had chosen not to do so.
In the Michaelmas term 1953,* David would be elected to the Goblins, a dining society, perhaps through the offices of the vice-president, an Old Shirburnian. Through Peppiatt and his friends, he was invited to join the Canning Club, whose members gathered at intervals to hear a paper presented by one of their number in his rooms. David began to wear the Club tie around Oxford; in his second year he would become Club secretary. As its name suggested, the original purpose of the Canning had been to promote and discuss Tory principles, and it retained its conservative character. At Club meetings a silver cup was circulated so that members could toast ‘Church and Queen’. David joined in the toast, but perhaps not in the spirit of the Canning. ‘Most of my friends’ views are in total opposition to my own,’ he confided to Ann.6
Only a fortnight into his first term, David returned home to Tunmers for a party to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. Parked in the driveway were several gleaming cars, with the number plates RC 1, RC 2 and RC 3. David made a speech to welcome his guests, a mixture of his own friends and older people invited by Ronnie. The revels continued until the last of them left, some time after four o’clock in the morning. Ann confessed that she had felt jealous when he danced cheek to cheek with a very pretty girl. ‘Darling, you are a chump with a capital “C” to complain that I hardly spoke to you the whole weekend,’ he wrote to her afterwards. ‘On Saturday I had not one but 63 people to speak to, and on Sunday I was still “celebrating my birthday” and could not disappear with you the whole afternoon.’7
Ann’s dreams of literary success were going nowhere. ‘Will I ever be a writer?’ she wrote in her diary: ‘sometimes I doubt it.’ A short story she had submitted to Woman’s Own was rejected. She tried Good Housekeeping, without much hope: ‘another rejection slip in the offing’, she told herself. Meanwhile David sent her his lecture notes to type up, and once a short story of his own: ‘not as good as mine, I think, and I can’t help being glad, and yet in a way I would like him to be better than me in everything’, she noted in her diary. She began writing a novel. At last there was some good news: the Lady accepted an article she had sent them, a travel piece about Chamonix. ‘Oh, the wonderful joy of having something published,’ she exclaimed. ‘All at once the future stretches before me as something that will happen. I will get somewhere and do something.’
In his first term David began drawing cartoons for the undergraduate journal Isis. Pretty girls and besotted boys were among his favourite subjects; but some of his cartoons had a satirical edge, depicting ‘cruel, ugly people’ in positions of authority.8 He was also contributing cartoons to the college magazine the Imp, and attending evening life classes at the Ruskin School of Drawing.
The Lincoln Junior Common Room was supposed to be a place for quiet relaxation. One Sunday night, however, it became the setting for a lively debate, in which three characters from history, one of them taken by David, were invited to plead their case. The other two undergraduates read from prepared scripts in a low-key presentation; but David donned a German uniform and false moustache to act the part of Adolf Hitler. He made a powerful case for the Führer, prompting much hilarity in his listeners. At one point in his address he referred to the pair of ‘incubi’, the two destructive forces in the modern world, ‘and these are …’ – he paused for rhetorical effect, at which point a heckler shouted ‘Syphilis and gonorrhoea!’ – ‘… Jews and Communism’.
Towards the end of his first term David put on a German play, Andreas Gryphius’s one-act comedy Absurda Comica, ode
r Herr Peter Squenz (1663), based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as done by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There would be only a single performance, attended by most of the lecturers in the subject, and broadcast on BBC radio. David intended to play the leading part, but realised that he had taken on too much. ‘Panic, panic, panic – and hellishly little work into the bargain,’ he wrote to Ann. ‘To live as I would like, I require about a hundred thousand pounds, and ten days in every week.’ Instead he offered the lead to Gerald Peacocke, whom he had seen in an Oxford production of Sartre’s Les Mouches. Peacocke found David to be a shrewd and skilled director, who put the actors at their ease. David was able to report to Ann that the play ‘came off very well, and proved a roaring success both socially and financially’.9
He made time too to help organise a production of Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope, and took on the task of organising the Lincoln Ball: ‘arranging for bands, dance floor, champagne, buffet, accommodation, and all the rest’.10 So much extracurricular activity seems to have left him too little time for his academic work, as his reports in his first year were, if not poor, mediocre – ‘Mr Cornwell has made a reasonable start,’ being a typical comment. ‘He is by no means lazy, or limited in mental power, but he seems to need something explosive behind him,’ commented his German tutor, W. D. Williams; ‘he should still try to put himself into his work more.’ Perhaps it was not surprising that the college’s Governing Body refused David’s request to stage Androcles and the Lion during the Trinity term.