by Adam Sisman
David was reunited with Ann over a meal at Verrey’s, a smart restaurant in Regent Street dating back to Victorian times. She knew as soon as she saw him that she had been right to return. When she told him that she had received a proposal of marriage during her stay in America, and claimed to have fallen in love with a young American army officer, David seemed energised. He was in an emotional state, disturbed by ‘the corruption, misuse, perversion or prostitution of real love’ that he had witnessed in his family. In the attic at Tunmers he had discovered Jean’s diaries, which revealed not only Ronnie’s repeated infidelities but also his occasional violence towards her. Belatedly he understood why she always wore long sleeves, even in warm weather. He took to sleeping on a camp bed in front of his stepmother’s door, to protect her when Ronnie came home late after drinking heavily. For David, Ann’s upright principles contrasted with the moral chaos of home. ‘I have always longed to find for myself among the complications and borders of our own rotten society the simple, true, unaffected love we deserve,’ David wrote to her soon after term began.4 Ann rejected his suggestion that they should become secretly engaged.
There was havoc at home, as Ronnie struggled to stay solvent and Jean threatened to divorce him. In the good times the cars with their personalised number plates had been ostentatiously displayed; now the only remaining car would often be hidden in the trees behind the house to prevent it from being seized by creditors, as had happened twenty years before, and the house lights switched off, to conceal the fact that Ronnie was at home. In November Jean’s mother lent Ronnie £5,000 to keep him afloat; she had raised the money by a charge on her family business.
‘I feel this really is the end so far as Tony and I are concerned,’ David told Ann. ‘There have been so many false climaxes, so many bits of cheap sensation and washing of dirty linen that nothing can depress me now except a false compromise based on the need for money and protection.’5
Towards Ann herself David blew hot and cold. Early in the new year, after she had spent Christmas with his family, he broke with her, but within a fortnight he was expressing feelings of sadness and guilt, and a couple of days later he sent her a letter by express delivery. ‘Darling, I have made a mistake,’ he wrote. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, how wrong I have been in rationalising us into a kind of unwitting divorce.’ His relationship with Ann offered security, a refuge from his crazy, unstable home life. Within a couple of months he was writing as if it was a given that they were to be married as soon as he was settled. ‘Darling, when I write my first book,* I shall plonk on the fly-leaf in pompous capitals – “TO ANN, WHO UNDERSTANDS” – and mean it.’6
The supply of money from Ronnie dwindled and then ceased altogether, leaving David in a difficult position. ‘For the past two terms I have been rather short of funds pending the transfer of a banker’s draft from my grandmother’s solicitor,’ he wrote to the college bursar early in the 1954 Hilary term. He acknowledged that neither the term’s college ‘battels’ (the college accounts for board and provisions), nor the £10 outstanding from the previous term, had been paid. ‘My father is however attending to the matter and has told me that £250 will be forthcoming before the end of this term.’ He enclosed a cheque for £35 in partial settlement of his debts.7 But Ronnie was in a tight corner; on 10 March 1954, another petition for bankruptcy was served on him. Counsel had been asked to advise and guide the liquidator on the transactions of one of his companies, Reliance Properties Limited, and had advised that ‘the whole conduct of this company’s affairs strikes me as being flagrantly fraudulent’. In his submission to the Official Receiver, Ronnie claimed that the value of the properties owned by the companies in which he had an interest totalled £1.7 million, mortgaged to the level of £1.4 million, leaving a balance of £300,000, of which £190,000 was owed to him personally. The Official Receiver took a sceptical view of these figures. Notes in the Receiver’s file estimated Ronnie’s tangible assets at less than £200. ‘The surplus from securities (£1400 or so) is very doubtful of realisation. So also are the many book debts (totalling £180,000 or so) due to him from his many companies, some of which are already in liquidation.’ But, as the Receiver acknowledged, ‘the case is enormously complicated’. Ronnie had admitted to being a director of about sixty limited companies with such names as Bedrock Investments, Universal Trading Corporation and Ground Rent Holdings, and had declared an interest in a further thirty-nine, ‘for the most part involved in the acquisition, disposal and holding of real property’. A receiving order was served against him on 28 May, citing the Commissioners of the Inland Revenue as his principal creditors, with claims totalling £61,889 18s 2d. The value of Ronnie’s assets had been reassessed at £129 12s 0d.8 He tried in various ways to delay proceedings, but he was only postponing the inevitable.
Halfway through his second year at Oxford, David was beginning to doubt whether he could afford to continue. To make ends meet he had repeatedly borrowed money from Robin Cooke, but Cooke could help only to a limited extent. David discussed his predicament with Sir James Barnes, and with Vivian Green, now senior tutor at Lincoln, to whom he would increasingly turn for help and advice. A new possibility had arisen, now that his MI5 handler, George Leggett, had departed for Australia, where he would undertake an extensive debriefing of the KGB defector Vladimir Petrov. Dick Thistlethwaite, Head of Operations at MI5, was talking about ‘taking him all the way through’, meaning that David would masquerade as a secret Communist intellectual and become a double agent while pursuing a conventional career as a journalist, probably as a foreign correspondent. David was sent to see Denis Hamilton, then editorial director of the Kemsley Press, the newspaper group that included the Sunday Times as well as several tabloid and regional newspapers. Hamilton, a war hero known as ‘the brigadier’ by his staff, had strong intelligence connections, and expressed willingness in principle to employ David should he be forced to leave Oxford prematurely. Ann was indoctrinated by Thistlethwaite; as an air vice-marshal’s daughter she was deemed suitable as a potential wife, and signed the Official Secrets Act.
A letter arrived from the Westminster Bank informing David that Ronnie’s cheque for the term’s fees had bounced. Since his account was overdrawn by eightpence, the letter continued, none of his own cheques would be honoured, including his payment for the term’s battels. David feared that he might have to leave Oxford immediately.
Help came from an unexpected source. One of his contemporaries at Oxford, Reginald Bosanquet (later an ITN newsreader), had everything that David did not: a private income, a sports car and a seemingly continuous stream of beautiful girlfriends. He and David liked each other – but, as David has subsequently said, there is only so much time you can spend with someone who lives the life you dream of and can afford it, while you cannot. Bosanquet ‘drifted into my room one day, probably with a hangover, shoved an envelope at me and drifted out’. The envelope contained a cheque made out to David from Bosanquet’s trustees, and a letter explaining that David should pay it back at his convenience, only when he was able. The letter further explained Reggie’s wish that David should correspond directly with the trustees on all matters relating to the loan, since he did not hold with mixing money and friendship. David accepted the loan gratefully.9
Disenchanted with his father, David had begun to question everything that he had been told since early childhood. His German education had encouraged a determination to find solutions to all his problems, a sense of absolutism – what Germans call Drang nach dem Absoluten, the drive towards the absolute. He told Ann that he needed to get at the truth, so that he could sort things out with Ronnie once and for all. As part of this process he wanted to see his mother, for the first time since he was a little boy; but first he had to find her. Without telling Ronnie, he sent a letter to her brother, Alec Glassey,* whose terse reply provided an address on the outskirts of Woodbridge, near the east coast. David wrote to his mother, who responded by inviting him down to Suffolk for the week
end. Nervous about this encounter, he asked Ann to accompany him; they met at Liverpool Street station and spent the night together at the Great Eastern Hotel, where they became lovers for the first time. The next morning they took the train down to Woodbridge. Olive was waiting for them on the station platform; Ann’s first impression was of a tall, middle-aged woman (she was forty-eight), recognisably like Tony.
Waiting outside in a blue-and-cream Jaguar was John Hill, a little man with a big moustache whom David addressed as ‘sir’. He drove them to their small, suburban bungalow, where they were introduced to two little girls, his half-sisters, of whose existence David had been completely unaware. Conversation was polite but awkward. David noticed that his mother was very well spoken, talking in perfect paragraphs, albeit pompously formulated.
There was no room for them in the house, so they slept in a local hotel. Later Olive took them to see a friend of hers who lived on a boat, a woman of masculine appearance whom David surmised to be a lesbian, and who gave them home-made advocaat to drink. On a nearby beach Olive turned cartwheels on the sands like a frisky schoolgirl. All weekend Ann had the impression that she was trying very hard. During a tête-à-tête Ann asked her why she had left the boys with a man whom she knew to be evil. Olive answered that she thought that Ronnie could give them more advantages.
Perhaps in self-justification, or perhaps because she believed that Ronnie had poisoned her sons’ minds against her, Olive divulged some distressing details about her former husband. She told David of Ronnie’s prison sentences, of the confidence tricks he’d played, of the money he had charmed out of her family. Some of this David either knew or suspected already, but some of it – such as her account of sharing a bed with Ronnie and Mabel George – was shockingly new. Perhaps most upsetting of all was her admission that his father had infected her with syphilis while she was pregnant with him, and that as a result he had been born with pus dripping out of his eyes. Afterwards David would have medical tests to ensure that he was free of infection. Olive spoke freely about Ronnie’s sexual appetites, and presented her son with a tattered copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis as a guide. David asked whether prison had changed his father. ‘Changed, dear? In prison? Not a bit of it! You were totally unchanged. You’d lost weight, of course, well you would. Prison food isn’t meant to be nice.’ David noted that she used ‘you’ to mean ‘he’, identifying him with his father. She described Ronnie’s ‘silly habit’ after his release of waiting humbly in front of a closed door, with bowed head, until someone opened it for him.
Back at Tunmers David confronted Ronnie with his Olive’s disclosures, as he subsequently related in a letter to Vivian Green. ‘After an awful lot of ducking and emotional side-tracking he said “so what?” ’ Though sickened by what he had learned about his father, David was reluctant to break with him altogether, which would necessitate leaving Oxford without a degree; but he told Ronnie that in future he wanted to be independent of him. ‘He was terribly upset, and said that the irony of his life was that everything he had done for us (my brother & myself) had separated us further from him, that just at the very moment in his life when he most needed my companionship he should be denied it, etc. etc.’
A series of ‘awful scenes’ ensued. Typically Ronnie had resorted to moral blackmail, threatening that if David decided to leave home, he would sell up and divorce Jean. David felt responsible, knowing how difficult it would be for his stepmother to provide for herself and the children alone. However inadequate a husband and father Ronnie might be, he was better than nothing. They agreed a compromise: Ronnie would continue to pay David’s allowance, but with no obligation for him to live at home. ‘The thing that staggered him really was my apparent disinterest in the ultimate promise of plenty …’10
David escaped from Tunmers to spend a few days as a guest of Nigel Althaus and his family in their sixteenth-century rectory. On his return David found Ronnie tearful, rolling over and over in his bed and screaming, ‘David’s left me, David’s left me,’ again and again. ‘Daddy has tried to make me recant everything I’ve said,’ David wrote to Ann, then on holiday in Majorca with her mother and sister. ‘I’m very tired of this awful business and his filthy habits. But I’m afraid that only the people who have lived with him know what a bastard he is.’11
Aside from his financial problems, Ronnie was facing prosecution for an offence committed some six or seven years earlier, of borrowing Swiss francs from an unauthorised dealer. He travelled to Switzerland over Easter, in a vain attempt to stave off conviction and the accompanying fine. Reluctantly David provided Kaspar von Almen’s name as a possible source of legal advice.
Now very hard up, David gratefully accepted a commission from his skiing friend Dick Edmonds to paint a mural on a large area of wall in the main concourse of Clements, the department store owned by the Edmonds family. David painted a pageant of happy Watford shoppers trooping gaily through Clements’s portals and emerging from them even happier. The mural survived a year or so, until Dick’s father paid a rare visit to the store and summarily ordered it removed, on the grounds that it insulted the customers by making them look like a bunch of leering peasants.12
At the end of the working day, David would climb into Edmonds’s roadster and together they would explore the open Hertfordshire landscape, coasting through still unspoilt country lanes. The village of Sarratt particularly impressed David, with its pretty village green, cosy redbrick cottages, half-hidden mansions and exquisitely beautiful twelfth-century church. It seemed to him some kind of secret haven, ‘a forgotten piece of real England, just round the corner from subtopia’. He imagined himself living there, ‘at the edge of the real world but safe from it’. Twenty years later, when he came to select a birthplace for his secret England, he chose Sarratt: he called his training school the ‘Nursery’, and he located it on the fringes of Sarratt, ‘where I had once longed to live’.13
After two months with her mother and sister in Majorca, Ann returned to England and took a job in London working on the Sunday Companion, a Christian newspaper. Readers perplexed with scriptural difficulties or social problems were encouraged to write to the editor for guidance. (David would depict a very similar publication in his novel A Murder of Quality.) Ann, who earned £7 a week, loved her job and the independence that came with it. For the time being she shared a bedsit with a girlfriend, who set her cap at Dick Edmonds, unsuccessfully as it turned out. The fact that she and David were to be married once he left University was now public; the Imp congratulated him on their engagement. The plan was that she would continue working afterwards.
Back in Oxford for the Trinity term, David reflected on ‘the strange life we shall live’. He warned Ann that they would be ‘very unhappy now and again’. Their love, he told her,
will have to see us through many storms. It will be exposed to a life you may grow to resent, for I know it, but you do not. A life where the borderline between fairness and treachery is so narrow that you will fear for your own integrity …
I shall always appear to you a sort of watery Hamlet in some ways – my complete objectivity in all kinds of decisions has made a nasty impression on you, clouded the mouse brow on more than one occasion. It’s my way, but I’ll try to change it for you. It’s not unnatural in someone who has been as intensely concerned in himself for so long.14
By early June it was obvious that David would not be able to continue at Oxford without further financial help from outside his family. Vivian Green discussed his case with the new Rector; Oakeshott appealed to the Chief Education Officer for Buckinghamshire, who happened to be a friend of his. ‘He is an intelligent and cultured man who should do very well in whatever career he adopts,’ wrote Oakeshott. ‘We think it probable that he would have won an open award in German had he stayed at his public school to the end of the course instead of going to a Swiss university.’ He gave his opinion that it would be ‘a real tragedy if, through his father’s financial failure, he were forced
to leave at the end of this year’. In a follow-up letter, Oakeshott estimated that ‘Cornwell … ought to get a good Second; he might do something better though one knows only too well what the effect of family disturbances such as this can be on a young man’s progress. He is, however, one of those who immediately catch the eye about this College, and his reputation in some of the University Societies stands, I find, very high indeed.’ The Rector judged that ‘he is the sort of man who might perhaps even make the very severe grade for the Foreign Service’. The Chief Education Officer asked to be put in contact with the young man’s father, though he could not promise to help.15
David dreaded the scandal that Ronnie’s impending collapse would bring. To escape the inevitable publicity Green suggested that they take a walking holiday together in the Swiss Alps, and lent the impecunious undergraduate money for the fare. The pair travelled there by couchette, a journey made memorable by their female fellow passengers, members of the Oxford Group for Moral Rearmament, who spent a restless night searching for the loo. Leaving the train at Sion, they backpacked from valley to valley.16 Green told David that his path to God was through Nature; his intense response to the mountain scenery was obvious in his rapt expression as they walked together. He opened the younger man’s eyes to the glory of landscape, which David today he considers his greatest consolation.
Though Green had known the Alps since childhood, David had never heard anyone mangle Swiss names in the way that he did, so that not even the inhabitants of a place would recognise it from his pronunciation.17 In one remote hamlet they met a shepherd who innocently enquired whether they knew Winston Churchill and asked them to confirm the rumour that the war had ended. Crossing a high pass, they noticed a bearded man waving a red flag, which Green advised David to ignore. Moments later they dropped flat on their faces, as a blast shattered the silence of the mountain and boulders flew through the air above their heads. Green picked up his spectacles, cleaned off the mud and perched them comically on the tip of his nose. ‘For a moment,’ he said, ‘I was tempted to invoke very different gods to the one my cloth professes.’ They discovered that the explosion had been detonated by miners building a hydroelectric dam; Green was outraged by this desecration of the unspoilt valley. In the leisurely surroundings of a comfortable hotel, the walkers plotted ‘The Bears’, a children’s story, to be written by the older man and illustrated by the younger, which would tell of the determined opposition of Alpine bears to the scheme of an exploitative capitalist to construct a dam and flood the valley where they live. With the help of other animals, the bears were able to foil his plan, by melting a glacier which destroys the workmen’s huts and carries away their tools.
