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Graham Greene once observed that a writer's capital is his childhood. On the cliffs of his Penzance retreat, the reclusive David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, assayed that capital in a series of rare interviews with TIME Correspondent Dean Fischer. "From early on," the writer confesses, "I have been something of a spy." The espionage began when David was five. His father Ronnie left school at 14 and hungered ever after for social prominence. A financial-page Barnum, Ronnie made and lost several fortunes in post-Depression England. "He was like Gatsby," says his second son. "He lived in a contradictory world. There was always credit, but we never had cash, not a penny. My father would occupy a house and default, then move to another one. He had an amazing, Micawber-like talent for messing up his business adventures."
Like Micawber, he ended in the dock. Shortly after Ronnie's first jail sentence for fraud, David's mother Olive permanently abandoned the family to live with one of her husband's business associates. David was not to see her again until his 21st year. Deprived of one parent permanently and another frequently, the boy became crucially dependent on his older brother Tony, his senior by only two years. "I helped to bring him up,'" says Tony Cornwell, now creative director of a Manhattan advertising agency. "But I had no parental skills. All I could do was protect him from the school bullies and pretend to play games and study while we listened for revelations in the talk of relatives." The code was difficult to crack. A mention of Olive to his grandfather, a nonconformist lay minister, elicited stern silence. His grandmother responded with "Shhh!" Ronnie's absences were unexplained; Pater was simply "away." "I wondered if my father was some great spy who went off and did nationally vital things," says David. "I soon became tremendously wary of promises. Promises like 'I'll come down and take you out from school on Sunday,' and then I would walk down to the end of the drive and wait, and my father wouldn't appear, and rather than go back and lose face I would just walk around and miss lunch and come back and pretend at 5 o'clock that I'd had a great day. Duplicity was inescapably bred in me."
The deceit was resumed at home. "Ronnie could charm the birds out of the trees," recalls Tony. "And he charmed dozens. Some of them became girl friends or mistresses or one of his three wives. I remember one lady in whom he was interested; David and I looked her over and decided she was quite unsuitable as candidate for wife and mother. Naturally, he brought her home to live." Preternaturally, he continued his fraudulent and sometimes profitable speculations.