Here is an excerpt from a classic article written by David Cornwell (aka John le Carré) for The New Yorker, published in the Februart 2, 2002, issue. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information please click here.

Credit:  Photograph by Ralph Crane / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

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I have seen the house often. Cheerful aunts have bellowed its name at me as we skim by: “That’s the place, David!” (In real life my first name is David.) “They should turn it into a national museum!” But the house I prefer is a different one, built in my imagination. It’s red brick and clattery and due for demolition, with broken windows, a “For Sale” sign, and an old bath in the garden. It stands in a plot of weed and builders’ junk, with a bit of stained glass in the smashed front door—a place for kids to hide in, rather than be born. But born there I was, or so my imagination insists, and what’s more I was born in the attic, among a stack of brown boxes that my father always carted round with him when he was on the run. When I made my first clandestine inspection of those boxes, sometime around the outbreak of the Second World War, they contained only personal stuff: his Masonic regalia, the barrister’s wig and gown with which he proposed to astonish a waiting world as soon as he had got round to studying law, top-secret plans for selling fleets of airships to the Aga Khan. But once war broke out, the brown boxes offered more substantial fare: black-market Mars bars, Benzedrine inhalers for shooting stimulant up your nose, and, after D Day, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens.

My father always had a penchant for weird commodities provided they were rationed or not available, like plastic orange-peelers that broke after the first orange. Two decades later, when Germany was still divided and I was still a British diplomat living on the banks of the river Rhine in Bonn, he appeared unannounced in my gateway, perched inside a steel coracle with wheels attached. It was an amphibious motorcar, he explained. He had acquired the British patent from its manufacturers in Berlin, and it was about to make our fortunes. He had driven it down the interzonal corridor under the gaze of East German frontier guards, and now he proposed to launch it, with my help, into the Rhine, which happened to be swollen at the time, and very fast flowing. I dissuaded him despite my children’s enthusiasm and gave him lunch instead. Refreshed, he set off in great excitement for Ostend and England. How far he got I don’t know; for the car was not spoken of again. I assume that somewhere along the journey creditors caught up with him and removed it. But that didn’t stop him from returning to Berlin, which like other war-torn cities exercised an energetic attraction over him. A couple of years later he popped up there again, announcing himself this time as my “professional adviser,” in which capacity he graciously accepted a V.I.P. tour of West Berlin’s largest film studio, and a great deal of the studio’s hospitality, and no doubt a starlet or two, and listened to a lot of earnest talk about tax breaks and subsidies available to foreign filmmakers, all in the noble cause of finding the best place to make the movie of his son’s recent novel, “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.” It goes without saying that neither his son nor Paramount Pictures, who owned the film rights, had the least idea of what he was up to.

There’s no electricity in the house of my birth, and no heating, so the light comes from the gas lamps on Constitution Hill, which give the attic a creamy glow. My mother lies on a camp bed, pitifully doing her best, whatever her best may entail—I was not conversant with the niceties of childbirth when I first pictured this scene. My father, Ronnie Cornwell, is champing in the doorway in a snappy gent’s double-breasted and the brown-and-white brogues he played golf in, keeping an eye to the street while, in pounding cadences, he urges my mother to greater efforts: “God in Heaven, Wiggly, why can’t you get a move on for once? It’s a damned shame is what it is, and no two ways about it. There’s poor old Humphries catching his death out there and all you do is shilly-shally”

Though my mother’s first name was Olive, my father called her Wiggly, rain or shine. Later, when technically I grew up, I, too, gave women silly nicknames in order to make them less formidable. My father’s voice when I was young was still Dorset, with heavy “r”s and long “a”s. But the self-laundering was in progress and by the time I was an adolescent he was almost—but never quite—well spoken. Englishmen, as we know, are branded on the tongue, and in those days the brand really meant something. Being well spoken could gain you a military commission, bank credit, respectful treatment from policemen, and a job in the City of London. And it’s one of the ironies of Ronnie’s mercurial life that, by realizing his ambition of sending my brother and me to posh schools, he placed himself socially below us by the cruel standards of the time. Tony and I were whisked effortlessly through the class sound barrier, while Ronnie remained an upstart. Not that he ever exactly paid for our education—or not in full, so far as I can make out—but he fixed it, which in Ronnie’s eyes was what counted, particularly in the war years. One school, after a taste of his ways, bravely demanded its fees up front. It received them at Ronnie’s leisure in deferred black-market dried fruit—figs, bananas, prunes—and a case of unobtainable gin for the staff.

Yet he remained, which was his genius, to all outward appearances a most respectable man. Respect, not money, was what he cared for above everything. Every day he had to have his magic recognized. His judgment of other people depended entirely on how much they respected him. At the humble level of life, it’s true, there is a Ronnie prototype in every second street in London, in every county town. He’s the back-slapping, two-fisted tearaway naughty boy with a touch of the blarney; who throws champagne parties for people who aren’t used to being given champagne, opens his garden to the local Baptists for their fête though he never sets foot inside their church, is honorary president of the boys’ football team and the men’s cricket team and presents them with silver cups for their championships. Until one day it turns out he hasn’t paid the milkman for a year, or the local garage, or the newspaper shop, or the wine shop, or the shop that sold him the silver cups, and maybe he goes bankrupt or goes to jail, and his wife takes the children to live with her mother, and soon she divorces him because she discovers—and her mother knew it all along—that he’s been screwing every girl in the neighborhood and has kids he hasn’t mentioned. And when our naughty boy comes out or gets himself temporarily straight, he lives small for a while and does good works and takes pleasure in simple things, till the sap rises again and he’s back to his old games.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British and Irish author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A “sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer”, he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service .Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.