The Father of All Secrets | Sam Adler-Bell

This prophecy struck at the heart of twenty-year-old David's torments. His father, Ronnie, was a seductive West Country conman and thief who frequently prevailed upon his sensitive, artistic son to collaborate in his deceits. His mother, Olive, had disappeared from the home when David was five (in flight from Ronnie's infidelity and violence). Ronnie sent his sons off to posh preparatory and public schools in the hopes of turning them into English gents; ideally, barristers. But for David, boarding school was an escape into another form of captivity. At Sherborne, Ronnie's licentious rule was replaced by another, no less oppressive, sovereignty: this one didactic, high Anglican, and enforced by blows from the prefect's cane.

To the extent these ministrations left an impression, they only increased David's anguish. The felonious fog of his homelife ever intruded upon the greener pastures of his potential salvation. Ronnie, perennially in debt, rarely paid tuition except in promises, fibs, and in-kind goods of dubious provenance-dried figs, bananas, and cases of "unobtainable gin." And on holiday, David and his older brother, Tony, were once again conscripted into Ronnie's latest scams. "At school, David was being trained to run an empire," Cornwell's biographer Adam Sisman wrote in 2015, "at home, he was helping diddle widows out of their pensions." The conflict between these two irreconcilable lives nearly drove him mad.