A Perfect Spy

Or there was the time when I was swanning around Chicago, helping to promote “British Week,” and an urgent telegram arrived from our British Ambassador to Indonesia, one Gilchrist, enquiring of the Consul General, one Haley, whether I would be willing to fork out a few thousand dollars to get my father out of gaol in Djakarta, where he had been arrested for currency offences after being chucked out of Singapore.

Or the other time when, not long before his death, Ronnie rang me collect from Zurich district gaol to tell me in a choked voice, “I can’t do any more prison, son.” Mercifully, my late literary agent Rainer Heumann was on hand in Zurich at the time, and with the aid of his chequebook had Ronnie sprung within hours. The problem? Hotelschwindel; defrauding a hotel, which in Switzerland is practically a hanging offence. “But that was years ago, son! That wasn’t now.” Ronnie in his last years was a bit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He hadn’t cottoned on to the way communications had speeded up since he pulled his first trick. And Swiss police records would be immaculate, I once again reasoned; on the Swiss thing, my investigators would be home free.

Except they weren’t, and wouldn’t be. In my impatience, I had credited them with powers they simply didn’t possess, nor could they. Ronnie was as unscalable to them as he had been to me. Time had worked for him; the cost of going after him would be astronomic, and even when we got there — wherever there was — we were unlikely to find the riches I dreamed of. It was the same with his army record.

Though he was of eligible age and physically fit, Ronnie had contrived to dance his way through the 1939 — 45 war almost without the inconvenience of being conscripted at all. Several times, it was true, he had been summoned to begin his basic military training with the Royal Corps of Signals in Bradford, but each time he had managed to frustrate the army’s plans for him. At first, he pleaded the hardships of a single parent. He had a case, for my mother had wisely removed herself from our lives without leaving a forwarding address. But that didn’t mean Ronnie himself suffered any hardship. To the contrary, my mother was abundantly and frequently replaced, and if hardship ever loomed on Ronnie’s horizon, my brother and I were packed off to friends or holiday schools until the spectre passed. And when pleas of hardship ceased to soften the army’s heart, Ronnie ingeniously put his name forward as a candidate in a parliamentary by-election, thereby obliging them to release him so that he could exercise his democratic right. And having failed to be elected as the Independent Progressive candidate for Chelmsford — unsurprisingly, since he did not campaign — he returned to Bradford with his suitcase to begin his basic training all over again, because that’s how armies work.

All the same, the lure of the Mother of Parliaments had stayed with him, and in 1950 he stood for real — this time in a General Election — as Liberal candidate for Great Yarmouth. You will find a fictionalised account of his campaign in this book, but the reality was slightly different. The Conservative agent, frightened that Ronnie would split the vote, learned about his chequered past and faced him with it: stand down or we’ll expose you. Ronnie didn’t stand down and the Tories exposed him. But he still split the vote.

In his last years, Ronnie had a single obsession. It was directed at a piece of land outside London, in a designated “green belt” area where builders were forbidden to intrude. Nevertheless, by means we can only guess at, Ronnie obtained the local council’s planning permission for his piece of green belt, and on the strength of it he negotiated a mammoth deal with one of the country’s largest construction companies, entitling them to build God knows how many houses on what would otherwise have been common land. The promised sum was huge, and I’m sure Ronnie ran up corresponding debts in anticipation of it, for his policy was to spend today what you hope to earn tomorrow.