by Adam Sisman
David mentioned to Green that there was ‘a very considerable amount of perversion’ in evidence at Eton. ‘I have even heard a housemaster mention it with jocularity in connection with his own house!’ He had learned from Nigel Althaus, an Old Etonian, of a ‘tradition’ that ‘the needs of the “bloods” must be served by the smaller boys’. It seems unlikely that David would have written in these terms had he realised that Green himself was homosexual. Perhaps Green was unaware of this aspect of his nature at the time. To David, he was still the bachelor priest who had loved and been rejected by the assistant matron at Sherborne.20
As her labour drew near, Ann went to stay in a nursing home near her mother in Somerset. On 7 March 1957 she gave birth to a boy, whom they named Simon Anthony Vivian. ‘Now we’ve both got a double first!’ David exulted on hearing the news. While she was lying in, he attended a drinks party at Weston’s Yard, part of the complex of College buildings. One of Birley’s failings was an inability to draw an end to any social occasion. The party dragged on, and many of those present became tipsy. David had taken against one of the masters, the punctilious Julian Lambart, a man steeped in Eton, depicted by colleagues as ‘an amazing relic’ who had been pompous from an early age. When at last the party broke up, David stood outside swaying, shouting up at the windows, ‘Lambart: come out and fight!’ The Marslands took him back to their flat in the Vice-Provost’s Lodge and fed him. Looking around the walls, David remarked that they did not have enough pictures, and lurched up from the table. Outside the flat was a corridor hung with pictures; he lifted them off the walls and returned with his arms full. Next morning he cut himself badly shaving.
The experience of fatherhood upset David’s equilibrium. His difficult relations with his own father may have exacerbated his unease: he would come to feel that he had betrayed Ronnie by ostracising him. Whatever the cause, David became deeply depressed. Throughout his adult life he would suffer periodic ‘black dogs’, which would begin as a migraine and develop into a mood of hopelessness approaching despair, with thoughts of suicide and spasms of needless aggression. Looking back at this period, he has said that he felt ‘absolutely no conviction’, about either his marriage or his work. Though he could not persuade himself to believe in God, David contemplated going into the Church. In retrospect he would interpret this as a ‘spiritual cover story’, to provide a possible escape route from his marriage.
David was also considering a possibility that he might teach in a Borstal, a detention centre for delinquent boys – the very antithesis of Eton. In a letter to Ann he revealed ‘feelings of insufficiency and waste’. During the summer vacation, while Ann went to her mother’s house to present their infant son to ‘masses of cooing female relatives’, David returned to the Franciscan community at Cerne Abbas that he had first visited as a schoolboy at Sherborne, for a week’s retreat.21 During his stay he observed the ‘Day hours’, beginning with Matins at 5.45 a.m., followed by Holy Communion at 6.20, breakfast at 7.30, Terce at 8.15, and so on, becoming accustomed to the scent of incense. David was asked to refrain from joining the others in plainsong because he had such a poor singing voice. Speech too was forbidden, except at weekends when one was free to talk outdoors between Sext and Compline (1.15 and 9.00 p.m.). He was however free to talk at any time to Denis Marsh, the Father Guardian, with whom he spent an afternoon in earnest communion.* ‘There is no solution but prayer,’ Marsh advised.
‘I am seeing a lot of the Father Guardian,’ David wrote to Ann the next day. ‘I like it here v. much and I know that it has done me so much good in so many ways.’ He had been passing the time doing lino-cuts and three-colour lino blocks. At the weekend he took a stroll in the mist with one of the friars, Father Gregory. ‘He made it sound logical that one should pray for faith while having none,’ David told Ann.
‘Darling, I’m not suddenly getting religion, nor will I turn monk and leave you in the snow,’ David assured her. ‘I just feel, perhaps for the first time, that I am near to finding a way of life and a real faith.’ As his stay at the friary drew to an end, David tried to summarise what it had meant to him. ‘I have already reached a state of mind hard to express – a kind of spiritual purposefulness, not necessarily enthusiastic, not necessarily even Christian – though predominantly so.’22
On his way to the friary David had stopped for a night in Sherborne, where he had called on a retired schoolmaster and his wife, ‘still obsessively mourning their elder son who was killed in the war’. In a letter to Ann he described this visit as ‘spooky’. Afterwards, before going to bed, he had met an old schoolfriend called Palethorpe (a name which he would use in more than one of his books) for a drink in the Half Moon, a pub facing the Abbey. In the street the next morning he had ‘bumped into’ the head of the modern languages department at Sherborne, who was ‘awfully keen that I should come and teach there, but the offer didn’t attract me much’.23
Bankruptcy had not prevented Ronnie from operating in much the same way as he always had done. Around this time he encountered Colin Clark, younger son of the art historian Kenneth Clark, who had inherited a comfortable sum on reaching his majority. Clark would only belatedly appreciate that there were plenty of people ready to relieve him of this burden:
The first of many people I found in my life who was willing to do me this service was called Ronnie Cornwell. Ronnie was the best con man ever. I had never seen anyone who looked so trustworthy in my life. He was your favourite uncle, your family doctor, Bob Boothby and Father Christmas all rolled into one. He was stout and beaming with white hair and bushy white eyebrows. He wore a black jacket and a waistcoat, and striped trousers like a faithful old family retainer, or Lord Reith. Ronnie knew how to fix anything – tickets for the Cup Final, a box at Ascot, dinner at the most exclusive restaurant in town. He had an attractive wife who hardly spoke but who obviously worshipped him. His accountant was perpetually on call to substantiate his claims to wealth and inside knowledge …
In the face of this blast of confidence, flattery and bluff, I was as helpless as a baby. Ronnie invited me to Royal Ascot and gave me a few good dinners. Then he showed me a piece of derelict property, which he did not own, promised to double my money in three months, and took the lot. What was difficult to comprehend about Ronnie was that everything was fake. His office, his car, his chauffeur, his ‘regular’ box at Ascot, were all just hired for the occasion, and never paid for. His wife was not his wife,* and his accountant was just an accomplice.24
David tried to avoid any contact with his father, now reconciled with Jean and living with her in a modest house in Henley-on-Thames. Nor did he have anything to do with his mother, who around this time emigrated to Canada with John Hill and their two infant daughters. After the death of David’s grandmother Bessie in November, Ronnie wanted him to attend the funeral. Jean too put pressure on him to come, which David resisted. ‘I was very fond of the old lady etc., but feel that I can honour her at a distance,’ he told Vivian Green. He agreed to write Ronnie a comforting letter. ‘I feel rather like the man in “Lucky Jim” with all those different faces, and can’t otherwise whip up any enthusiasm, remorse, affection or anything for him anywhere.’25
One evening towards the end of the year the Cornwells returned late to Wheatbutts to find a familiar figure standing on the doorstep, holding a set of car keys in his hand. This was George Ellard, one of Ronnie’s stalwarts. Parked in the drive was a brand-new Ford Popular, bearing the number plate RC 4.
‘What’s this?’ David asked suspiciously.
‘Oil, dear boy, on troubled waters,’ replied Ellard.
It turned out that this was a present from Ronnie, who was due to sail to New York on the Queen Mary in two days’ time.
David would have very much liked to have had a car, but he knew that if the Ford had been paid for at all, it could have been only with money owed to other people. When he examined the accompanying papers he discovered that it had been bought on hire purchase, in the name of Ro
nnie’s secretary. The next morning he drove the car back to the garage in Wales that had supplied it, and left it there.
In New York Ronnie checked into the Plaza Hotel, announcing that he was in town to sell Bethlehem Steel, America’s largest shipbuilder and second largest steel producer. He was given the fourth floor Frank Lloyd Wright Suite at the building’s north-east corner, overlooking Central Park and Fifth Avenue. ‘It’s a nice pub, I must say, and they’re treating me very well,’ he remarked to his elder son, when they met for lunch a day or so later. ‘You know, it’s an amazing thing, Tony, my suite is not just a suite, it’s half a floor of the whole hotel.’ Then he asked, ‘Who is this fellow Frank Lloyd Wright?’
Tony was by then married, with an infant son, living in the Bronx and working in Manhattan as an advertising copywriter. Ronnie asked for a loan of $500, to be repaid after a few days; and Tony naïvely agreed, though this was all the money he had saved. Within days Ronnie had inveigled himself into an ambitious scheme to build a large conference centre in the Bahamas.
By then he had moved out of the Plaza and into a beautifully furnished apartment on Third Avenue, where he remained some weeks without paying a cent, before returning to England.
David became restless in his second year at Eton. ‘I wanted terribly to find myself an artistic life,’ he would tell an interviewer many years afterwards. ‘I knew by the time I left Oxford that I had a very robust intellect, and I also knew that I was extremely impatient with most orthodox forms of earning a living, and that I had a restless creativity within me.’26 Among those who came to stay at Wheatbutts was Tony, on a visit from New York, who brought with him the manuscript of a novel he had written for the two of them to read. Ann appraised it as ‘very stream of consciousness’.
The community of Eton beaks and their wives could seem parochial and inward-looking. John Wells, later an actor, writer and satirist, who arrived at the College to teach German soon afterwards, was warned, ‘Don’t be like Cornwell: he has too many friends in London.’27 The feeling was mutual: David complained of the Eton beaks that ‘we’re all too broke, too comfortable, too smug. Bah!’28 He disliked the uncharitable sniping that others either enjoyed or ignored. David had taken against Grizel Hartley, and had come to strongly dislike Oliver Van Oss, whom he saw as bogus. In January 1958 he began writing a novel, a murder mystery set in a fictional public school named Carne that he soon put aside and would not resume until several years later, when it would eventually be published under the title A Murder of Quality. On reading it, Grizel Hartley would recognise herself in the character of Shane Hecht, the snobbish and malicious wife of a housemaster; she was apparently very hurt by the portrayal, which David later regretted.29 Colleagues suspected that she had spoken condescendingly to Ann, but this seems not to have been the case. For the background of the murder victim, the nonconformist Stella Rode, David drew on his childhood ‘in the chapels and tabernacles of coastal Dorset, listening to a far humbler God than he who guided the untroubled conscience of the British ruling class’.30 Her husband Stanley Rode, a grammar school boy striving for acceptance, may have been a satirical self-portrait. Others recognised Oliver Van Oss in the depiction of the villain Terence Fielding, and Julian Lambart in Felix D’Arcy, the ‘self-appointed major-domo of Carne protocol’. D’Arcy’s acknowledgement that he ‘more than once was compelled to address Rode on the subject of his wife’s conduct’ is perhaps significant.31
David seems to have belatedly become aware that he risked a libel action, because he would add a specific disclaimer: ‘There are probably a dozen great schools of whom it will be confidently asserted that Carne is their deliberate image. But he who looks among their common rooms for the D’Arcys, Fieldings and Hechts will search in vain.’
When Gerald Peacocke visited him at Wheatbutts, David indicated that he was thinking of moving on. He talked a lot about becoming a writer, though he feared that there was no immediate prospect of earning a living that way. The education department of The Bodley Head, the publishers who had commissioned him to do a book jacket, asked if he would compile a German reader, to be aimed at O-level examination students. David offered them a short story, about a pavement artist who one afternoon produced a masterpiece in pastels on the paving stones in Trafalgar Square, outside the National Gallery: and then the rain came, and washed it away.* In retrospect David saw this as a nice metaphor for his frustrated talent, lying on the ground unregarded by the hurrying passers-by. The Bodley Head declined to publish David’s first venture into fiction.32
Though he seems not to have undertaken any duties for MI5 while he was teaching, he had kept in touch with his former colleagues and taken the odd lunch from Dick Thistlethwaite. Now he wrote to Thistlethwaite to say that he wanted to ‘come inside’. Looking back on his decision to join MI5 from the perspective of almost half a century, David would say that it was like entering the priesthood, ‘as if all my life had been preparing me for this moment’.33 He was, he said, searching for moral certitudes that had so far eluded him – although, as he subsequently realised, ‘I had come to the wrong address.’34 At other times he admitted to baser motives. ‘I relished the notion of appearing to be someone dull, while all the time I was someone terribly exciting,’ he wrote in 1986. The lure of secrecy was that it provided ‘a means of outgunning people we would otherwise be scared of; of feeling superior to life rather than engaging in it; as a place of escape, attracting not the strong in search of danger, but us timid fellows, who couldn’t cope with reality for one calendar day without the structures of conspiracy to get us by’.35 All this was written in retrospect, and reflects a cynicism about his own motives that he is unlikely to have felt at the time.
Though a strong patriot, David was certainly no Empire loyalist or hardline anti-Communist. ‘I was vaguely left-wing but too polite to let it show,’ he wrote in the piece cited above. In general his politics were moderately progressive. Dining with an acquaintance at the Colony Club one evening David said that he thought ‘apartheid stank’, whereupon his companion ‘blew his top’ – ‘no one was helping his poor mother, so why should anyone help the bloody niggers?’36
It was agreed that David would leave Eton at the end of the 1958 Lent half. Somehow word got round the boys that ‘Corns is going to be a spy.’
David made contact with John Shakespeare, to ask if he might be interested in taking over from him. He explained that he was ‘not very happy’ teaching at Eton, though he insisted that it was a ‘wonderful job’. He invited Shakespeare down to stay at Wheatbutts, and took him to meet Van Oss. Shakespeare sat in on one of David’s French classes and formed the view that his friend was a very good teacher. He was sufficiently tempted to return for a lunch with Birley, which resulted in his being offered the job, though he decided instead to accept an offer to enter the Diplomatic Service.
Writing to Ann while she was away staying with her mother in Somerset, David confided that ‘I feel funny about returning to my old firm – rather relieved, as one might be returning to a crotchety wife after prolonged absence.’ In another letter he asked Ann to tell her mother to be more discreet: ‘she must get used to saying I’m doing something dull’.37
The Cornwell brothers cling to a maid, David (left) clutching a half-eaten apple.
David’s father, Ronald Cornwell, sharply dressed as always.
David’s mother, Olive.
Four generations of the Cornwell family, mid-1930s.
The Cornwell brothers in school uniform.
David (far right) is the only dwarf without a beard in a junior school production of Snow White.
David (left) was a few weeks short of his seventh birthday when he and his brother posed for this studio photograph. He found the picture almost half a century later, while clearing out his mother’s cottage after her death, and concluded that his father had sent it to her, after forging the inscription.
‘I will be your mother.’ David’s older brother Tony took care of him after Oli
ve abandoned them.
Westcott House, Sherborne School, 1947–8. David stands with arms folded in the back row, third from right; to his left is his friend Robin Cooke. David’s housemaster R. S. Thompson is seated with an infant on his lap.
In his mid-teens David fled boarding-school for Berne, where he wandered the cobbled streets, imagining himself as Young Werther.
David in his National Service khakis, late 1940s.
At a dance with his girlfriend Ann, wearing his ceremonial ‘Number 1’ uniform.
David and Ann in the Alps. He is wearing his Downhill Only Club pullover.
The young couple in St Moritz with David’s father and his stepmother Jean. Ann was suspicious of Ronnie from the outset.
‘The best con man ever.’ Ronnie at the races, apparently prosperous.
‘Is it true that your father keeps racehorses?’ asked David’s housemaster, exasperated at the non-payment of school fees.
Ronnie throws a party at his house ‘Tunmers’ for the touring Australian cricket team, 1948. David and Tony stand on the left of the picture, next to Ronnie, with their half-brother Rupert in front; the great batsman Don Bradman stands next to their stepmother, Jean, holding aloft their half-sister Charlotte.
Ronnie and Jean with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson in his Harlem nightclub.
Laughing all the way to the bank. Ronnie, David, Jean and Tony, c. 1950.
The committee of the Albany Club Sports Society celebrates after presenting a cheque for £8,000 to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as patron of the National Playing Fields Association, 1949. Ronnie can be seen in the background, apparently trying to elbow his way alongside the husband of the future Queen.