by Adam Sisman
In the hotel register David was excited to find the name Pontecorvo, whom he took to be the British nuclear physicist who had defected to the Soviet Union while on holiday in Italy some years earlier. In fact, as he later learned, he had been mistaken: the man who had stayed in the hotel was not the defector, but one of his brothers.
The peace of the mountains was disturbed further by the Swiss army on manoeuvres; no sooner had the clatter of machine-guns died away and the artillery ceased its bombardment than the Alps rang to the sound of thousands of cow bells, as the herds made their way up from the valley below to their summer pastures. The two walkers fled to the relative calm of the upper Rhône valley. In the pouring rain they arrived bedraggled in Bern, where David’s former landlady, Frau Schreuers, gave them salami and herbal tea for breakfast. Their last excursion was to the Lauterbrunnen valley, ending with strawberry tarts as guests of Kaspar von Almen at his family’s Trümmelbach hotel, before he drove them at speed in his Jaguar to Interlaken, to catch the train to Calais.
This holiday was the beginning of an important friendship for David. Vivian Green appears to have been a remarkable man, someone whom one needs to have known in order to appreciate fully.18 Perhaps those who did not have this opportunity can best understand him in the depiction of his fictional counterpart, George Smiley. Of course the two are not the same; but David would use many of Green’s characteristics in his portrayal of Smiley – in the silences which punctuated his conversation, to take just one example. David acknowledged that Smiley’s conscience derived from Green’s ‘strong moral intellect’. Green was famous in Oxford for his eccentric dress sense; Smiley ‘appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes’. Years later Green himself would identify some of his own qualities that David might have drawn on in his creation of Smiley: understanding of human nature, sympathy for human frailty and a capacity for listening – indeed David found him a natural confessor.19 Even at Sherborne ‘Gumboil Green’ (so called by the merciless schoolboys because of an unsightly growth on his face, later removed) had been recognised to be vaguely seditious, a trustworthy bridge between the young and those in authority. Among his appealing qualities was that he appeared not to take himself too seriously. Green was a scholar with a well-stocked mind, with whom David could enjoy a stimulating intellectual discussion; but he was also an irreverent companion with whom to share a meal or a giggle. Above all David found him a firm friend, gentle, kindly, wise, tolerant, discreet, patient, dependable and honourable.20
One small sign of their growing intimacy was that until now he and Green (sixteen years his senior) had addressed each other by their surnames, as was usual for tutors and undergraduates in the 1950s; from this point on they would be on first-name terms.
The walking holiday had provided some relief from the troubles at home. ‘What news of papa, I wonder?’ David had written to Ann from an isolated village near the Italian border. ‘I don’t see much news here …’21 A headline appeared in the Daily Express: ‘Liabilities – £1,359,570 / Assets – a big smile and “lots more” ’. Ronnie had been waylaid by a staff reporter as he left the bankruptcy court, outwardly jovial and even chuckling. ‘Disaster? Not a bit of it,’ he was quoted as saying – ‘just the beginning of a fight after a temporary setback.’22 A fortnight later he was adjudged bankrupt. Though the publicity was unwelcome, the immediate effects were few. Ronnie had been careful to place most of his personal assets in Jean’s name, so that in the short term life at Tunmers carried on much as it had done before. Though he was forced to surrender his Mount Street offices, he remained unbowed, apparently confident that this was no more than another hiccup in his business career. But David was keenly aware of the damage Ronnie had wrought in the lives of others. Jean discovered belatedly that her husband had mortgaged her family business. One of her aunts had a cheque for £1,000 returned, marked ‘account closed’, in proposed repayment of an unsecured loan of almost her entire savings; she was left with only £28. The proximity of the Ansorges, just across the road from Tunmers, was an ever-present reproach. Perhaps worst of all was the case of Gordon Hobson, a sandy-haired, upper-class remittance man down on his luck who had attached himself to Ronnie like a lost dog. Ronnie had cleaned him out, but Hobson refused to recognise that he had been duped. He loved Ronnie, and believed that if he hung around him, somehow things would right themselves. ‘I hope your father knows what he’s doing,’ he would say to the boys in his apologetic way, ‘because he’s had all my money!’ Hobson appointed himself a member of Ronnie’s Court and would run errands for him, place bets for him and lie for him, even as he was being lied to himself. He was a regular house-guest at Tunmers, referred to by Ronnie in patronising terms as ‘dear old Gordon, a first-class chap and the salt of the earth, even if he is a bit too fond of the bottle’. But then David noticed that Hobson was no longer in attendance, his name ominously unmentioned. It would be a long time before he was allowed to know what became of him. Hobson had found himself a lady of the night and taken her to one of the grand London hotels, where they had signed in as Sir Gordon and Lady Hobson and enjoyed a splendid meal, fine wines, the best of everything; and then, in the small hours of the night, he had sent the woman home and killed himself.23
During the police investigation into Ronnie’s business affairs, David was summoned to a meeting at the Royal Courts of Justice, to appear before the Receiver in Bankruptcy. He learned that he was a director of several of Ronnie’s companies; his signature appeared at the foot of a clutch of company documents. He wondered: was that really his signature? And if he denied that it was, what would be the inference? David chose to tell the Receiver that yes, the signatures were his, and heard no more about it.24 Typically he would make light of this episode in years to come, but at the time he found it worrying and upsetting.
Dick Edmonds offered David a holiday job during Clements’s Grand Summer Sale. They agreed that he would work for three weeks in exchange for a charcoal-grey suit with two vents and narrow trousers. But on the very first day of the Sale he was fired from the towels and white linen counter for upsetting a customer, a tiny German lady. ‘You’d better try carpets,’ Edmonds told him – but David was no more successful there, selling the same carpet remnant to twenty different customers in the mistaken belief that there were plenty more knocking around the warehouse. Disappointed customers complained, threatening litigation; the inexperienced temporary salesman was rapidly laid off. For weeks afterwards, as Edmonds never tired of telling him, Clements was obliged to devote considerable resources to repairing the mayhem he had caused. Edmonds gave his friend a year to come up with the money to pay for the suit.25
By the end of the summer, when he was ordered back to Maresfield for his annual training commitment, David was in distress, repelled by his father’s way of life and trying to find a moral basis for his own. In retrospect Ann felt that he underwent a ‘mini-breakdown’ at this time. ‘I have just spent a terrible two weeks at home,’ David wrote to Vivian Green, who had been providing him with pastoral counsel – ‘so much so that I am positively relieved to find myself back in the Army for two weeks.’ David’s disenchantment with his father was now complete. ‘His very existence is a complete mockery of any moral consideration,’ David continued. He had already told Green of his plan to marry Ann as soon as possible, indeed had asked him to officiate. It seems that they had discussed married life in detail: Green had assured David that he and Ann would be able to give their children the stable family background which they themselves had both been denied. ‘I’ve always wanted to become a Christian, and try & live like one,’ David explained. ‘Ann is a very religious girl and I think together we could manage.’
Green urged him to stay at Oxford, now that Buckinghamshire County Council was offering to pay his college tuition fees; but, for David, money was no longer the principal issue. Staying at Oxford, he argued, would mean remaining dependent on Ronnie – at least during the vacations. It also implied – though he did not
make this point in his letter to Green – postponing his marriage until he had taken his degree, because undergraduates were forbidden from marrying without special permission. But that was a lesser consideration: David was focused on his father. What troubled him most was the fact that ‘if I live with him or under him for another year, I shall be quite incapable of coming to any moral decision whatever’. He had come to appreciate that ‘every time I take money from him, or even a meal, I am acquiescing to his way of life, and weakening my own position’.
Having made a stand, and having tried to shake myself out of a state of indifference, I find I have slipped back into that horrible state of mind where I have no more resistance to his demands or his way of life. What do I do if he offers me five pounds, and I know that he has not only borrowed it from someone else, and owes it thousands of times over to people much more deserving than I, but also has refused the same sum to my stepmother for housekeeping?
For all these reasons David had concluded that he must quit Oxford immediately, without beginning his third year or taking a degree. He asked Green’s forgiveness and understanding for this decision. ‘I know it’s all very impulsive and silly, and probably immature too, but what else can I really do?’ David referred to the ‘Kemsleys offer’ – ‘but again, I am committing myself to something I don’t really want to do’. The offer was soon withdrawn in any case. Dick White asked to see David. He did not like the idea of setting up such a young man to become a double agent, which he felt might be putting too much pressure on him, a feeling which hardened into conviction during the interview.
‘I love you so much that I am losing ambition for my job, which you must rekindle in my mind,’ David wrote to Ann from Maresfield Camp. ‘I seem to have all I ever wanted and money doesn’t matter.’ After a long talk with Sir James Barnes he warned her that ‘the matter of immediate employment with the Kemsley Press’ was by no means settled.26
Ann would later characterise David’s state of mind at this time as wanting to run away from his father to a new family where he could hide and feel safe. He was now planning not only to leave Oxford but to leave the country altogether – ‘as long as I stay in England I shall not be able to get away from him’.27 He wrote to several friends in Switzerland asking them to find him work there. ‘This is not an uncalculated and foolish flight from nothing,’ he assured Kaspar von Almen, ‘but a seriously considered plan to get away once and for all from things over here, and begin a new life.’ He was willing to take any teaching job. ‘Money is not the problem,’ he insisted. ‘The problem is to live happily with my wife away from the degrading publicity of the present court case, to live an intelligent life. I am miserably tired of trying to live for the future indefinitely. I want to live for the present.’28
In a further letter to von Almen, written from Oxford, David announced some good news: in principle Lincoln would allow him to ‘go out of residence’ for a year, and to return as a married undergraduate a year later to complete his degree, subject to the approval of the Rector.29 David would spend a year teaching, not in Switzerland, but in Somerset, at Edgarley Hall, the preparatory school for Millfield. The suggestion had come from an old suitor of Ann’s mother, George Turner. There was another link with Ann’s family, in that her grandfather, George Wollen, had been teaching at Edgarley since 1948.
Vivian Green, in his capacity as senior tutor, provided an excellent reference:
Mr Cornwell is an intelligent and serious student with a good knowledge of French and German; incidentally he speaks Swiss German fluently. He has wide general interests; and is a most promising artist with a real gift for caricature. Personally he is very presentable. I am quite sure that Mr Cornwell would be able to interest, control and teach any class and would prove a congenial, pleasant and loyal colleague.
A week later, after being accepted at Edgarley, David wrote to thank Green. ‘I feel I must write and let you know that had it not been for your help and your friendship, I do not think I could have found anywhere near so satisfactory an answer to the present problem. I won’t indulge in one of those awful Teutonic eulogies – but I do feel very deeply how much I owe to your help and understanding …’30
In the short term David had no access to funds, and relied on Ann to pay every bill. With the lack of money a pressing problem, there was a strong incentive for him to start teaching and drawing his salary of £8 a week straight away, rather than wait for the beginning of a new term. He gave up his digs in Oxford and moved down to Somerset, where he found a place to live in the ‘dream-like village’ village of Pilton (now the site of the Glastonbury Festival), about six miles from Edgarley Hall along the Glastonbury road. David cycled there and back every day of the week except Sunday, thereby saving the nine-penny bus fare, on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle given to them by Ann’s uncle. On the few occasions when he took the bus, because it was raining or for some other reason, the conductor sometimes allowed the obviously impoverished young schoolmaster to ride free of charge. Steam trains could be seen puffing back and forth along a railway track running parallel to the road.
David’s new home was Cumhill Farm, on the southern edge of Pilton, looking out over woodland towards the village church. Adjoining the stone farmhouse was a fine tithe barn, still in its original use. David rented four rooms within the main building for twenty-five shillings* a week, and filled these with borrowed furniture, most of it from Ann’s mother. The idea was that Ann should join him as soon as they were married. She was loath to leave her job, but told herself that David needed her. And she would have time to concentrate on her writing.
When David wrote to tell Olive of his plan to leave Oxford and marry Ann, she cautioned him against doing so, arguing that his fiancée was a girl who had lived ‘gaily and well’, no wife for a humble schoolmaster without a degree. Ann was amused to be so misunderstood, but David was furious, and resolved to have no further contact with his mother. She would not be invited to the wedding, and he would not see her again for many years. Yet David himself was unsure whether he was right to marry. He had asked Robin Cooke to be his best man; when Cooke asked if he was certain that he wanted to go through with it, David said no, he was not. Apart from anything else they were still very young, he twenty-three and she twenty-two. But Cooke had the impression that there was more to it than that: he felt that David was slightly ashamed of Ann. She was a very proper young woman, with strong moral values, ill at ease in the company of David’s sophisticated Oxford friends, none of whom would be invited to the wedding.
David had hoped for a private ceremony, and no reception, and told Vivian Green that Ann agreed with him; but her mother Alison insisted on a ‘proper wedding’ and offered to pay all the costs. Bride and groom were rationed to a limit of twenty-five guests (though Alison cheated and invited more).
Ann’s father returned to England to inspect his future son-in-law. Bobby Sharp appeared to doubt whether it was sensible for his precious daughter to waste herself on a young man with so few prospects; but he formed an immediate rapport with Ronnie, who had recently taken up with a woman claiming to be a former girlfriend of Guy Gibson* – ‘a rather iffy South African blonde’ in Ann’s description. The two old roués went chasing after her together. According to David’s later recollection, neither was invited to the wedding. Perhaps jaundiced by his exclusion, Bobby urged David not to marry Ann. ‘Those Wollen women will destroy you,’ he warned.
Ten days before the wedding, David sent Ann a round-up of his news. He had been decorating and had painted a mural in their new kitchen, but was not satisfied with it and had painted it over. Now that he had started teaching at Edgarley, he realised that he would not have much time for drawing during the term-time, but he was sure that he would be able to pursue his art in the holidays, just as she would be able to write. To that end, he had written to his father, asking for an old typewriter. While painting he had been mulling over their future:
I don’t somehow think that I shall ever get back to Oxfo
rd. I don’t want to go particularly, and somehow there is something rather nasty in the idea of becoming a career man with the F.O. or Dick T† or somewhere – so it seems anyway. The most successful men in that line – in the office, not out of it, are competent and plausible, but dishonest and unscrupulous – and these are all qualities that I have, and are best suppressed rather than encouraged! So if I can find a good niche (dreadful word) at Edgarley, and a cottage to match, let’s hang on down here, and draw and write and walk and fly kites and teach a little, and enjoy life.31