by Adam Sisman
Ann’s father turned up at the cottage unannounced that summer, accompanied by Lynn, an American woman fascinated by English ways. His manner seemed to Ann unnaturally jolly; she was still angry with him, and unwilling to be reconciled. This would be the last time that she would see him, since he died six months later: only after his death did she discover that he and Lynn had married. Ann’s mother had also remarried, and was living some twenty miles away in Taunton with her new husband, Guy Shacklock, a retired brigadier; later she would persuade him to buy a manor house near Chard in Somerset. This marriage too was short lived.
In September 1955 the Cornwells moved to Oxford, bequeathing Bobby, their mongrel puppy, to Green’s mother. To begin with they rented a room in Summertown, from a landlady who soon yearned for David and vented her frustration on Ann, criticising her cleaning and telling her to be a ‘proper wife’. After a few weeks they decamped to a furnished flat occupying the upper two floors of a house in Polstead Road, on the other side of North Oxford. It was owned by John Thring, of the family of Gabbitas-Thring, the agency founded in 1873 to recruit schoolmasters to public schools.* Thring knew Oakeshott, and had asked him if his prospective tenant was likely to have ‘uproarious parties’ in the flat, concerned for his nonagenarian aunt who lived with a housekeeper on the ground floor. The Rector replied reassuringly, and provided some family background. ‘His father is one of those wild businessmen who is worth six figures one year and is an undischarged bankrupt the next three,’ wrote Oakeshott. ‘The boy, who went to Sherborne, has had a very rough time with the father, ending in a flaming row that was all to the boy’s credit.’12 His concerns alleviated, Thring accepted the young couple as tenants, and even allowed them to take a lodger to help with the rent. The Cornwells took in an undergraduate from a northern grammar school who spoke with a Yorkshire accent; in retrospect, Ann blushed with shame to recall how ‘snooty’ she and David had been towards him.
A disadvantage of the flat was that it lacked a double bed, but the young couple managed to share a single bed until David’s finals, when they slept apart. On the other hand the flat had three bedrooms, which meant they could accommodate weekend visitors, among them the Bosanquets, Colin Simpson, Sandy Llewellyn and Hugh Peppiatt, who brought his glamorous Russian girlfriend.
David worked very hard in his third year. He wanted to vindicate the faith shown in him by Oakeshott and Green, though he found it more difficult because the syllabus had changed while he was away. Ann helped by typing his notes and essays, and by reading all his set books so that they could discuss them together. David would later describe their flat as being ‘like an ops room’, littered with Ann’s files and card indexes. He confessed to Vivian Green that he found some of the work ‘awfully dull’.13 But as Green later recorded, he ‘developed a lasting interest in seventeenth century German literature, especially that picaresque classic of the Thirty Years’ War, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, references to which are sprinkled through his novels’.14 David’s diligence was evident in his report for the Michaelmas term, in which he was awarded an α rating. ‘Cornwell is a first-class man,’ commented his tutor. ‘He is industrious, thorough, and frequently brilliant.’
David had few friends to distract him from his work, since those whom he had known in his first two years had left Oxford; being married, and living out of college, he had little to do with other undergraduates, and had gratefully given up pretending to be a Communist. (MI5 had not reactivated him for his final year.) On most evenings David stopped working at about seven o’clock; he and Ann would then stroll to the pub at the end of the road, where he would have a beer, she would sip a ginger wine, and they would play bar billiards together. Sometimes they would go and see a foreign film at the Scala cinema in Walton Street. At weekends they would take walks, or fly kites on Port Meadow. ‘We can’t spend much money ’cause we haven’t much,’ David wrote to Robin Cooke, ‘but we can still have a lovely time, can’t we?’ David addressed his old friend as ‘sweetheart’ or ‘dear’, and affected a camp manner: ‘Do you see that Peter W has published his book “Against the Law”* and that we’re both in it, with our photograph on the front page surrounded with irises and violets? Honestly, some people sell themselves.’15
Occasionally the Cornwells went to stay with friends; though they tried to avoid ‘smart weekends’ away because they felt obliged to tip the servants, which they found prohibitively expensive. Dick Edmonds invited them several times to The Round House, a former lock-keeper’s cottage on the banks of the Thames at Lechlade, shaped like a windmill without the sails, that the family used as a country retreat. On one of these visits they met Dick’s sister Susan and her Scots husband James Kennaway, a lively and good-looking couple. Kennaway was then working for a publishers; his first novel Tunes of Glory, based partly on his own experiences of National Service, would appear in 1956. He regaled his fellow guests with stories of the low-level and absurd tasks he had carried out at the request of an MI5 friend, Harold ‘Hal’ Doyne-Ditmas, who had summoned him to a rendezvous in Berkeley Square, which seemed to him a ludicrous place for secret meetings. After talking about this too openly Kennaway had been summoned by Doyne-Ditmas and given ‘a hell of a bollocking’. Typically he made this into another amusing anecdote, complaining that ‘For God’s sake, they didn’t even pay me!’ Later David told Ann that he had reported this further indiscretion to his MI5 contacts.
David contemplated going to art school after leaving Oxford, reckoning that they could subsist on an inheritance Ann had received from her father’s estate. Meanwhile he tried to supplement his meagre grant from Buckinghamshire County Council by obtaining commissions for drawing and painting. Dick Edmonds paid him £20 to illustrate the Clements annual catalogue. David was ‘quietly optimistic’ about his prospects of becoming a commercial artist on leaving Oxford, as he told Robin Cooke in a letter written soon after returning there. He had been seeing publishers and others, who had assured him that he could make a living from his work. The Bodley Head had already commissioned him to illustrate a book jacket,* for which he was paid £7. Ann found him an agent.16 Through an acquaintance of Ronnie’s, a commercial artist who drew a strip cartoon featuring a racehorse as a character, David was introduced to the principal of an art school, who inspected his folder and told him that he was far too intelligent to be doing ‘this kind of stuff’.
Nothing had been heard from Ronnie for some time, but towards the end of the year he made contact and sought to persuade them to join him on a skiing holiday by offering to pay their costs. ‘Ann, as you can imagine, is having a fit at the prospect of his turning up here with tickets to Davos, and frankly so am I,’ David wrote to Vivian Green. ‘I don’t want to see him again.’17 The offer must have been tempting to him nonetheless, as he could not afford to go skiing out of his own resources. At Green’s recommendation David wrote to his father declining the offer. After a period of pained silence a note from Ronnie arrived, to say that the decision was as he ‘had expected’ and that he would ‘make other arrangements’.18
Since the cottage in Pilton was so cheap the Cornwells had kept it on as a ‘country seat’, for use during the holidays. They invited Jean and the children, now evicted from Tunmers and living in a mean house in a bleak London suburb, to join them there for Christmas 1955. Despite his father’s bankruptcy Rupert had been able to remain at his prep school, and would be able to go on to Winchester, because some years earlier, at a moment when his fortunes were high, Jean had managed to persuade Ronnie to pay his school fees in advance; but Charlotte would be compelled to give up her ponies and enrol in the local state school. Early in the new year Jean asked Vivian Green to christen her two children in Lincoln College Chapel. ‘It was so nice also to be with David and Ann again,’ she wrote to him in a letter of thanks afterwards. ‘They’re such a sweet pair and have been so good to the children and me.’19
As David’s final year progressed, it became urgent to decide what he was going to do n
ext. One possibility was to join MI5; but the Service preferred its officer recruits, however well educated, to have experience of the outside world and to be in at least their mid-twenties.20 Early in the 1956 Hilary term, his penultimate as an undergraduate, David wrote to various schools about the possibility of a job after he finished at Oxford – despite having sworn to Ann after resigning from Edgarley that he would never again teach. It seems possible that, like MI5, his potential employers in the ‘Foreign Office’ may have encouraged him to pursue a conventional career for the time being. An indication of their continuing interest in David came the following March, when Green was asked to provide another written reference for him to the ‘Foreign Office Co-ordination Staff’.
St Edward’s School had the advantage of being only a short walk from their flat in Polstead Road. The Warden (headmaster), Frank Fisher, interviewed David and found him both pleasant and able. In response to Fisher’s request for a reference, Oakeshott replied that ‘young Cornwell is an attractive person who has already taught with success’.21 Fisher also sought an opinion from R. S. Thompson, by now a headmaster himself. ‘With the right kind of guidance, encouragement, and atmosphere, David will make an excellent schoolmaster,’ replied Thompson. ‘I don’t suppose he has sorted himself out yet by any means. If he has married wisely it will be the making of him. But don’t let the charm work too easily with you!’22
David had also applied to Eton and to Charterhouse, and went for interviews at both. The headmaster of Eton, Robert Birley, was looking for an assistant master to teach modern languages as a replacement for Gerald Peacocke, who had been teaching there for two terms on a temporary basis and was due to leave in the summer. Like Fisher, Birley was impressed by David and decided to offer him the job. The interview with the headmaster of Charterhouse, Brian Young, went less well. When Fisher offered him a post at St Edward’s, with a higher starting salary than that available at either of the other two schools, David promptly accepted, and telephoned both Birley and Young to withdraw his application. ‘I wouldn’t have taken you anyway,’ Young told him. Birley, however, was keen to have him and asked Oakeshott (himself a former headmaster) if he might persuade David to change his mind. ‘I wonder whether Cornwell is not perhaps making a mistake,’ Birley wrote to Oakeshott. ‘If he wants to become a schoolmaster this is certainly a very good chance for him.’ While he did not say as much, he meant of course that a post at Eton was more prestigious than one at St Edward’s. Birley expatiated on the subject of Eton salaries, which he feared had fallen behind those offered at other public schools.* After Oakeshott convinced him to reconsider David extricated himself from St Edward’s and accepted the offer of a job as an assistant master at Eton, teaching modern languages at an annual salary of £850.23 By comparison, Ronnie would explain to the London Bankruptcy Court that summer that, though he had cut all unnecessary expenses, he had to do a great deal of entertaining and found it very difficult to get his household and domestic expenditure below £3,600 a year.24
‘Though the salary isn’t brilliant to begin with,’ wrote Ann, in a letter to her recently widowed stepmother, ‘it rises quite rapidly and of course one couldn’t do better in the teaching profession than start there.’ She outlined the thinking behind David’s decision to become a schoolmaster. ‘The chief thing about school teaching,’ she explained, ‘instead of the FO, which he was also thinking of, is that there are four months’ holiday a year, in which he can do his painting. Eventually we hope he’ll earn enough to stop teaching, but it will be a relief to have a regular salary, so that he can paint what he likes and not necessarily for the money.’25
In a 1999 interview, David claimed that he had been ‘drawn to Eton by a great sense of service, which paradoxically I still feel’. He linked this decision to his ambivalence towards the institutions of the establishment, loving them and criticising them simultaneously.26 At the time, however, it seems that his motives were less lofty; his principal aim was to earn an income to support himself and his wife.
David’s reports for the Hilary term were less positive than for the previous term, though still good. ‘He is not a brilliant linguist, and his work is not always free from illogicality,’ wrote his tutor for German philology, ‘but he is in general a man of very high intelligence and it has been a pleasure to teach him.’ The tutor who had awarded him an α mark for the previous term now awarded him an α/β.
His reports for his final term at Oxford were perfunctory, as the focus for tutors and pupils alike was on the forthcoming final examinations (known in Oxford as ‘Schools’). ‘His knowledge is good, with, however, several gaps in it,’ wrote one tutor; another reported that his work was ‘intelligent and on the whole quite well balanced and he has obviously read with care and discrimination’. There was no doubt that he was working very hard: in May he decorated a hall in Oxford for a college ‘Commem’ Ball, in exchange for a pair of tickets, but then was too exhausted to go.
After Schools were over David characterised them in a letter to his mother-in-law as ‘an awful strain for both of us’. The whole thing had been ‘such a marathon – 30 essays, and commentaries as well, in a week; it seems potty as the climax to three years’ work’. He had ‘simply no idea’ of how well he had done – ‘certainly badly enough on the philology papers to exclude any thought of a good degree’.27 He was wrong, as he would soon discover, when he was invited to undertake an oral examination (a viva) for a first-class degree; but he had been right to deduce that his lowest mark had been in his philology paper.
Towards the end of June David and Ann made the journey to Eton, to take tea with the Birleys, and to inspect a house that the Bursar had found for them in the then semi-rural hamlet of Eton Wick. Wheatbutts was a three-storey brick building dating from the early eighteenth century, almost smothered by a rambling rose; until recently it had been inhabited by the film star David Niven. Compared to the Somerset cottage, it seemed enormous, with two bathrooms, four bedrooms, one very large drawing room, a dining room, a kitchen and a study, and a large hedged garden outside, ‘with lots of birds but no bees’. The upstairs rooms offered a distant prospect of Windsor Castle. In front was a village green; behind was a duck pond, with cows grazing in fields beyond. The rent of £80 a year was deducted from income at source, rather than from taxed income.28 In a letter to Vivian Green, David portrayed Wheatbutts as ‘unbelievably charming’, and commented that it might be in the middle of the country. ‘What a blessing we came back to Oxford!’29
As the house was unfurnished, they needed the furniture from the Pilton cottage, which they therefore decided to give up, a decision which Ann later regretted.
‘I couldn’t feel less like working for my viva but must I suppose,’ David complained to his mother-in-law. ‘It’s so dismal going over the papers again and finding out what I should have said.’
The viva lasted more than an hour. David perceived it as a ‘shoot-out’ between his philology tutor, Olive (‘O.L.’) Sayce, and his literature tutor, Margaret ‘Peggy’ Jacobs. As he left the room, he was told to wait outside. After a few minutes he was joined by Jacobs, who shook him by the hand and then kissed him on the cheek. He was awarded a first.
The new Oxford Professor of Poetry, W. H. Auden, had delivered his inaugural lecture shortly before the end of term. In a crowded function afterwards, David became aware of a hand on his bottom and, turning around, saw that it belonged to the poet himself.
‘Do you do this?’ Auden asked.
‘I’m afraid not,’ stammered David.
‘Ah well,’ said Auden, ‘it’s nice to be fancied, isn’t it?’*
* Years later David would come across Meyer behind a pile of gambling chips at the White Elephant Club in Curzon Street.
* 35p in decimal currency.
* A Mr Stroll, of the educational agency Stroll & Medely, appears in the opening chapter of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
* Peter Wildeblood’s book Against the Law (1955) detailed the case which h
ad led to his conviction for homosexual activities. His account of his experiences is said to have encouraged the setting up of the Wolfenden Commission, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK.
* They Fought for Children (1956) by Peggy Chambers.
* The Provost, Sir Claude Elliott, though an amiable man in private life, kept expenditure to the minimum: he was described by an Eton master as ‘one of Nature’s bursars’.
* David recycled this line in chapter 7 of Smiley’s People. As Smiley climbs the stairs of a house in Paddington, an old woman in a dressing-gown emerges from one of the flats, holding a cat against her shoulder. ‘Are you a burglar, dearie?’ she asks. ‘I’m afraid not: just a visitor,’ Smiley replies with a laugh. ‘Still, it’s nice to be fancied, isn’t it, dearie?’ ‘It is indeed,’ says Smiley politely.
9
‘Milk in first and then Indian’
Eton is the grandest of English public schools. David would later refer to it as the ‘spiritual home’ of the English upper classes.1 Eton College – always referred to as such, never as a school – was established in 1440. It had been founded, like so many other English public schools, to provide free education to poor boys, though this charitable intention had long since disappeared. In the 1950s the academic standard of entry was lower than it is today, which meant that boys from very wealthy and aristocratic backgrounds could be admitted even if they were not very bright. Among those whom David taught there were peers of various ranks and even one royal prince (Prince Richard of Gloucester). David told Vivian Green that he found life at Eton ‘awfully expensive’ and complained repeatedly about the difficulty of living on such a modest salary.2 He resented that he was ‘paid less than a road-sweeper’ and was ‘always in the red’. Much of his off-duty conversation with colleagues concerned schemes to make money: summer schools, guided tours for plutocrats, tutoring for the richest and thickest, and so on. It was perhaps especially galling to be struggling financially when so many of the boys he was teaching lived in mansions or castles, or on large estates in Scotland or Ireland.