John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Within a month, however, David would tell Vivian Green that he was planning to return to Oxford ‘if at all possible’.32

  David and Ann were married at noon on Saturday 27 November 1954, at St Luke’s Church, Redcliffe Square, in South Kensington. The bride was given away by her uncle; David’s half-sister Charlotte was bridesmaid and Ann’s sister ‘Winkie’* maid of honour. There was a reception afterwards at the Onslow Court Hotel, Queen’s Gate. To keep the cost down Alison had provided white wine – but just before the toasts a waiter entered bearing a tray of champagne glasses, followed by a beaming Ronnie, dressed in a morning suit. ‘Have this one on me,’ he advised Alison, completely unrepentant at his intrusion into a reception to which he had not been invited. At any rate this is how David recalls the day: but in that case it is difficult to explain Ronnie’s presence, with Jean on his arm, in the wedding photographs taken outside the church. Indeed there is a photograph of Ronnie inside the church, benevolently looking on as the bride signs the register.

  Afterwards David thanked Green for conducting the service. ‘Ann and I both felt most strongly that we had become part of a triple, not a dual, union,’ he wrote. ‘From the moment you began, it seemed as if only we three were in the church – Ann, myself and you as God’s minister, and what we fully expected to be a gruelling and frightening affair assumed a very different character.’33

  Alison had arranged for the newlyweds to stay that first night at the Avon Gorge Hotel in Clifton, where the manager, a friend of hers, had given them a special rate. Their bedroom balcony offered a prospect of Brunel’s famous suspension bridge. They dined that evening in a private room, on turtle soup, caviar, sole, duck and Poire belle Hélène. The next day, after a lunch of smoked salmon, they took a taxi to Pilton. David was due to resume teaching at Edgarley the next morning.

  * His second book, A Murder of Quality, was dedicated to Ann.

  * Later he would find that Tony had done exactly the same.

  * £1.25 in decimal currency.

  * The original Commanding Officer of the RAF’s 617 Squadron, the famous ‘Dambusters’. He had died on active service in 1944, at the age of twenty-six.

  † Dick Thistlethwaite of MI5.

  * Always known as such, though her real name was Angela Wincombe, so named because she was born on the day her father was promoted to wing commander.

  8

  Poor but happy

  Edgarley Hall was a comparatively new school when David arrived there in the autumn of 1954, founded only nine years before in order to accommodate increasing numbers of younger pupils arriving at Millfield. Indeed Millfield itself was less than twenty years old. Both had been founded by R. J. O. (‘Jack’) Meyer, whose nickname ‘Boss’ was an indication of his dominance. He was a keen sportsman, who had played first-class cricket. After leaving Cambridge in 1926 he had worked as a cotton broker in India and had once played for the Indian national side against a touring MCC team. He had returned from India in 1935 accompanied by seven Indian boys, six of them princes, entrusted to him for their education; he had founded Millfield to provide this, and would remain in charge for thirty-five years, becoming known as ‘Britain’s most progressive headmaster’. Meyer boasted that ‘any subject you care to name we teach from 7 to 27’. Millfield grew steadily, gaining a reputation for sporting excellence, and for success in educating pupils with ‘word-blindness’ (dyslexia). In those days dyslexic children were regarded as ‘backward’. To Meyer’s fury, the boys at Edgarley produced a subversive magazine emblazoned with the motto: ‘We’re here because we’re not all there’.

  Stories proliferated about Meyer’s eccentricity. He gambled on the horses with the school’s money, and paid occasional visits to London casinos where he would wager large sums, often losing the lot.* (David told Ann that the bursar, a Brigadier Mackie, was ‘absolutely hand-in-glove’ with the headmaster.) Meyer was convinced that the Communist Party was systematically seeking out super-intelligent children in order to indoctrinate the leaders of the future; and that Mensa, the IQ society, was under Communist control. David was startled to learn that Meyer had written to the cellist Edmund Kurtz to complain that his son’s behaviour was ‘typical of the worst kind of Jew’. In later life David would characterise Millfield as ‘a brilliant educational innovation, a shameless racket, a haven for millionaire misfits and a charitable madhouse run by a neo-fascist visionary who was also an enlightened liberal’.1

  Edgarley was located on a separate site from Millfield, in a large house of Georgian origins but much altered since. When David was teaching there Edgarley took only boys, while Millfield was co-educational. Most of the other masters at the school were middle-aged or elderly, and included two veterans of the First World War who had been awarded the Military Cross; George Wollen was still teaching there in his eighties. One of the few younger members of staff was the mathematics master Dick Champion, who had been at Edgarley only a year. He and David became friendly; in later years he would recall that David had been so poor that he had to borrow some tennis shoes in order to play. There were more young masters at Millfield, among them Robert Bolt, later a successful playwright and screenwriter, whose wife Jo was the art teacher at Edgarley.

  ‘I’m teaching 14 periods of Latin, 3 French & 2 German a week,’ David wrote to Vivian Green soon after he arrived. ‘I’ve forgotten all my Latin but will pick it up slowly as we go along. The boys here are awfully stupid, except one …’2

  Among David’s duties was to teach boxing, ironically enough since he had hated it at Sherborne and had given it up early. When he intervened to break up a fight, he received a punch from a tall Egyptian boy.

  Despite his obvious lack of interest in organised games, David was a popular member of staff, reckoned by Champion to be ‘very good with the boys’. One former pupil, John Warmington, remembers German lessons in which ‘Mr Cornwell’ told them about the 1944 plot against Hitler, and detailed how the Lord’s Prayer was worded in a Wehrmacht paybook. He seemed to know a great deal about the German army and about British monitoring of German radio broadcasts, which led the boys to suspect that he had been involved in intelligence in some way.

  The boys liked David, and he seems to have cared for them. He was offended when the mother of one of his pupils complained that her son was not more disciplined. ‘When I send a horse to be broken, I expect him to come back broken,’ she told him. ‘I expect the same of my children.’

  As he had done at Maresfield, David put on plays at Edgarley. One of these featured a wicked Uncle Jasper, who rowed his boat to an island to seduce a hapless girl; another (or possibly the same one) featured the lighthouse keeper’s daughter Nellie, whose duty was to keep the light shining in the absence of her father. The actors’ make-up was done by ‘Mrs Cornwell’, much admired by the boys, who relished the story of an occasion when her husband brought her into the school library. The joint headmaster, H. L. ‘Charlie’ Higgins, flustered by the presence of such an attractive young woman, hid himself behind a newspaper for several minutes, until the director of studies pointed out to him that he was holding it upside down.

  On his first night as duty master, David was sitting in front of a large Victorian fireplace waiting for the boys to be put to bed when a prefect came to him and said, ‘Excuse me, Sir, —— is trying to commit suicide.’ A boy believed to have ‘mental problems’ had climbed over the banisters in the stairwell overlooking the front hall, and was threatening to throw himself off. While David hurried to the scene, another pupil seized him around the middle and dragged him to safety. David shot up the stairs and scooped him up. Afterwards, when they were alone, David asked the would-be suicide, ‘What made you want to do a thing like that?’ The boy, a small, fat child, explained that he could not stand the pace – ‘I can’t make my bed quickly enough, I can’t eat breakfast quickly enough, I’m always late for class’ – and that the others teased him about such deplorable failings.3 David drew on the memory of this unhappy schoolboy for
his portrait of Bill Roach, whose narrative frames the action of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. ‘I remember how deeply he got under my skin,’ he would write, ‘perhaps because I could not help thinking of him as myself, when I was fifteen years younger.’4

  Ann’s mother Alison and sister Winkie came to Cumhill Farm for Christmas 1954, together with her grandmother. In the early years of their marriage David was very affectionate towards Alison, treating her much as though she were his own mother, and addressing her as ‘Dearest Mamma’ or ‘Alison darling’. She gave him the gold watch that she had presented to her husband as a wedding gift, retrieved when they had separated. But David was not sentimental about such matters: keen to raise money in any way possible, he sold the watch, together with the cufflinks Ronnie had given him on his twenty-first birthday.

  On 14 October 1954 Ronnie had submitted himself for cross-examination in the bankruptcy court, a hearing that had to be adjourned when time ran out, and that continued in several subsequent sessions through into the summer of 1955. In all he answered more than 1,500 questions. As the lawyer acting on behalf of the trustees remarked, ‘the estate is exceptionally complicated, the debts very large and the assets extremely difficult to identify. Mr Cornwell is the only person who really has any knowledge of the intimate working of the companies.’ The case was very widely reported in the national evening papers, and also in the local papers in Skipton and Dudley, the locations of the two building societies from which Ronnie’s property companies had borrowed the capital to fund most of their purchases. Ronnie repeatedly denied that he controlled these companies, under tough and prolonged cross-examination. (‘I put it to you that this company is another of your creatures, is it not?’; ‘You are not being frank with the Court, Mr Cornwell?’; ‘Who is “we”? Kindly use “I” if you mean one human being’; ‘Is this another case of Mr Cornwell the person and Mr Cornwell behaving as a company, doing things with one another …?’) He also denied that the directors of these companies had been no more than his nominees, acting under his direction. (‘You have been the guiding spirit, the general of this particular army, have you not?’) Ronnie seemed to enjoy the jousting, though his demeanour was respectful throughout. The court was forced to admit that he had given his evidence ‘with commendable clarity’.

  The newlyweds kept Ronnie at a distance, even as he showered them with gifts, including forty-five shillings’ worth of nylon stockings by Christian Dior. David learned from Jean that he was again becoming violent, and later that he had left her altogether. Just before the end of term he telephoned David at Edgarley, explaining that he was speaking from a callbox only a few miles away. He asked if he could join them at Pilton for Christmas, but David said no.

  Around this time Ronnie went down to Poole to visit his mother, now eighty and very frail. The arrival of the Prodigal Son was enough to make a front-page story in the local newspaper. ‘A man with a mission walked into my office today,’ began the editor:

  His name: Ronald Thomas Archibald Cornwell, former Poole Grammar school boy, son of a Poole alderman. His mission: to clear himself from the stigma of bankruptcy.

  And it was the same ebullient, confident Ronald Cornwell whom I knew 20 years ago – plumper, perhaps, and grey, but still the same cheery personality.

  Yes, despite his rise to great heights in the real estate world, Ronald Cornwell has never forgotten his mother. ‘And she still regards me as her boy,’ he says.

  The article was illustrated with a photograph of a smiling Ronnie. ‘I’m determined to fight my way back,’ the editor quoted him as saying.5

  Some time later the Official Receiver’s office received a clipping of this article from an anonymous source. ‘THE SMILE OF THE MAN WHO WINS AGAIN AND AGAIN’ was scrawled in blue ink across Ronnie’s photograph. ‘A FEW CROCODILE’S TEARS TO CLEAR WAY FOR NEXT EXPLOIT’.

  Sharing a house with the farmer and his wife soon became irksome for the newlyweds. When an elderly villager came to the door and asked if they would like to rent an end-of-terrace cottage near by, they seized the opportunity, especially as the rent was considerably less, at seven shillings* a week. The 500-year-old cottage was small and basic; there was electricity and running water, but no drainage, so that dirty water had to be carried outside and poured down the drain by the front door. A path led from the back door behind the neighbouring cottage to a privy with two wooden seats; every couple of days David would collect the sewage and bury it in the back garden. Downstairs was a sitting room with a kitchen range, while the kitchen itself was equipped with a small electric cooker. The sink drained into a bucket. They washed in a long tin bath, which they used perhaps twice a week, heating water in saucepans on the stove, and then emptying it down the steep slope behind the cottage after use. Upstairs were two tiny bedrooms: the one at the front was just big enough for a bed, a narrow wardrobe and a chest of drawers. The back room doubled as a spare room and as David’s studio, where he painted an oil of Ann of which he was very proud. It also served as the resting-place for a stuffed tiger shot by Ann’s grandfather, which suffered from its proximity to David’s paints.

  The Cornwells grew vegetables and kept chickens. They acquired a dog, a mongrel called Bobby who limped along on three legs after being hit by a car. Among their acquaintances in the neighbourhood was an old baronet, whose ‘very Somerset’ housekeeper kept him under her thumb. They were especially friendly with the Catholic family at Pilton Manor, Colonel and Mrs Phipps and their six daughters. The colonel made them laugh with his account of a cavalry charge in the desert; when the critical moment had come, he had been unable to draw his sword, which had rusted in its scabbard. The Cornwells played hide-and-seek with the Phipps girls in the old manor house; being dotted with priest-holes from the Civil War period, it offered plenty of hiding places. Another retired army officer whom they befriended drove them to a local race-meeting; when he found the course car park full, he rather mysteriously blamed ‘the Jews’.

  David mounted a production of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall for the Pilton Players, the village amateur dramatics group. Both he and Ann took parts: in David’s case, that of the charming psychopath Danny, the character who had so intrigued him as a boy when he had been taken by his aunts to see the play.

  They had no car, but they could get about locally by bus, and if they wanted to go to London or some other far-off place, they could take a train from Shepton Mallet, only three miles distant. Otherwise they hitchhiked, cadging lifts from passing lorries; in the mid-1950s there were still not many cars on the road, particularly in rural Somerset. In their free time the Cornwells would often take bicycle rides through the surrounding lanes; Ann remembered freewheeling at high speed down a steep hill, sending the water flying up high on either side as she sped through a flooded ford. On Sundays they attended church services – though, as David wrote to Vivian Green, the Pilton church was ‘very high’, so that they could not always understand what was happening. In the evenings David knelt beside Ann to say his prayers. ‘We are really terribly happy,’ David wrote to Robin Cooke.6

  Green’s story ‘The Bears’ was shown to a succession of publishers. None wanted it, though Edward Arnold liked the illustrations. Eventually the two co-authors agreed to abandon the project. Meanwhile Ann earned some pin money by writing short stories for the Sunday Companion.

  At Easter-time the Cornwells took a belated honeymoon in Paris. They travelled by train to London and then on to the Gare du Nord, and found a clean but rundown hotel not far from the station. For several days they explored the city on foot, rarely eating out to save money. As they passed a grand hotel on their last evening, a voice rang out, bellowing their names: it was Reggie Bosanquet with his bride Karen, also on honeymoon. Reggie insisted that the Cornwells join them for dinner in a smart restaurant, where the four of them were entertained by Nellie Lutcher, a black cabaret artist, who sang a risqué song involving asparagus.

  Early in May 1955 David asked formal permission from the Rec
tor of Lincoln to return to Oxford later in the year to complete his degree as a married undergraduate.7 For his final year he would drop French and concentrate on German. ‘I had a very kind letter from Mr Oakeshott saying he would welcome us both,’ he informed Vivian Green a few weeks later. His resignation from Edgarley had been ‘very poorly received’; Meyer and Mackie had seemed genuinely upset, which seemed to David ‘really quite funny’, given his antipathy to both. Teaching, he said, ‘has regenerated in me the thing I lacked since I entered this awful business with father – a desire (and I think a renewed capacity) for academic work’.8

  Once again Oakeshott appealed to his friend on Buckinghamshire County Council for financial help. ‘It would be a real injustice if this boy had to give up his course uncompleted,’ he wrote.9 David was awarded an exhibition, which would give him some measure of monetary security for the year ahead. ‘I have rather strong views about Ann working in Oxford,’ David told Vivian Green – ‘would far rather she kept house and helped me by taking shorthand notes and typing them out and so forth.’10

  In July, after he had finished at Edgarley, David took Ann to stay with Vivian Green in Minehead, where the bachelor don lived with his mother in the University vacations. From there they took long walks over Exmoor, and Green preached in the country churches that he loved the best: Selworthy, above Minehead, or the church on North Hill, or Lorna Doone’s church at Oare. Together they walked up from the shore at Porlock to Culbone, where the smallest church in England stands isolated in a woodland combe, below the farmhouse where Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan. After Green’s death in 2005 David could no longer remember a word of his sermons, but he was sure that they had been sensible, erudite, gentle and respectful of his feelings. ‘Sometimes, in my youthful vanity, I supposed they were actually written for my benefit, which must be the definition of a good sermon. And perhaps one or two even were, because Vivian was fully aware that he was my lifeline.’11