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"His father didn't admit until he [le Carré] was an adult that he'd served a jail term, and his mother left late at night without saying goodbye," said Sisman. As a boy, le Carré told school friends his father had been a spy. Sisman explained: "He was of a generation, during the war, that what your dad did was terribly crucial. Ronnie was that most despised person, a war profiteer, rather than away at the front fighting in the army." "He was sent to Sherborne, the Dorset public school, but ran away when he was 17. And here the truth and the fiction of his life start to collide - he claimed he'd been recruited by MI5 to spy on student groups in Bern, Switzerland.
Troubled spirit: John le Carré Credit: Hulton Archive John le Carré spent most of his childhood pining for his mother and much of his adult life wishing his father would disappear. In later life he stated frankly that the absence of one parent and the overbearing presence of the other were the key to understanding his life and his fiction. It is Ronnie and Olive Cornwell we have to thank for giving their son David the gifts and temperament that would transform him into John le Carré, the outstanding spy novelist of the 20th Century. His intertwined careers as an intelligence officer and as a writer seem, in retrospect, inevitable, given the events of his youth.
Key dates in the life of John le Carre: - October 19, 1931: Born David Cornwell in the southern English coastal town of Poole in Dorset. - 1936: Olive Cornwell flees the family home, leaving the young le Carre to be raised by his father Ronnie, a tyrant and conman who was jailed twice for fraud. - 1948 to 1956: Studies French and German in Bern in Switzerland, where he begins his espionage career, before moving to Oxford. - 1954: Marries Alison Sharp, with whom he has three sons before their divorce in 1971. - 1958: Starts working for MI5, British Security Service, and writes "Call for the Dead", his first novel.
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