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Resolved to make his sons independent overachievers, Ronnie sent them off to schools 30 miles apart. The separation was insupportable; many Sundays the boys bicycled halfway to share food that Tony had scrounged. The Dickensian experience did little to erode David's spirit. When his father entered him in Sherborne boys' school, scene of the musical film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, David conformed to the image of all-round student for a couple of years, then refused to return. "I went to my housemaster," says Cornwell, "and he said, 'Well, this is the moment of choice; you choose between God and the Devil.' "
It was a hell of a decision. Furious, Ronnie exiled the stubborn boy of 16 to the University of Bern. There David's gift for mimicry and his cassette-recorder ear made him a quick study of foreign tongues. Within a year he had delved into German letters and discovered new modes of expression and thought. "You might say," he claims, "that I rather belatedly developed a second soul."
After his Swiss sojourn, Cornwell joined the army intelligence corps. His fluency won him an assignment in Vienna where he added human dimension to his fresh literary perceptions. "I spent a great deal of time with extraordinary victims of half a dozen wars," he remembers with the air of an old warden. "Estonians, for example, who had been imprisoned by the Germans, fought for the Germans, been imprisoned by the Russians, imprisoned again by the Americans." He met R.A.F. officers who had bombed Berlin in 1945 and returned for the airlift of 1948-49. The ironies altered his life. "It was," he says, "like reading the right book at the right time. I saw the right things at the right time."
But writing was still far from his mind. Ronnie had plans to make the Cornwell boys experts on the law he had so often flouted. "David and I used to joke about our careers," says Tony. "We were allowed to be anything we wanted, so long as it was a barrister or a solicitor." Tony's filial severance came when he finished reading law at Cambridge. The day after he was called to the bar he left England for the New World and a new career. More impressionable, David opted for Oxford and the life of a don. "My father longed to make of me a respectable guy," says Cornwell. "The attraction which institutions had for me was an extension of his own longing. In those years I was always looking for somebody who didn't exist. In fact, I'm not by nature in the least respectable."
Nevertheless, the honourable schoolboy did all that was expected of him. He won a first in modern languages, married Ann Sharp, daughter of a much-decorated R.A.F. air marshal, taught at Eton, then joined the Foreign Service, "always seeking the brand names, the Good Housekeeping certificate of professions." From 1961 to 1963, Cornwell served as Second Secretary in the British embassy in Bonn; for two years after that he was a consul in Hamburg. "Again," he says, "I was plunged into an institutional life; again I felt completely alienated from it."