The Pigeon Tunnel (32 page)

I keep few letters, and most of Ronnie's to me were so awful I destroyed them almost before I read them: begging letters from America, India, Singapore and Indonesia; hortatory letters forgiving me my trespasses and urging me to love him, pray for him, make the best use of the advantages he had lavished on me, and send him money; bullying demands that I repay the cost of my education; and doom-laden prognostications of his imminent death. I don't regret having thrown them away; sometimes I wish I could throw away the memory of them, too. Occasionally, despite my best efforts, a shred of his inextinguishable past turns up to tease me: a page of one of his typed letters on flimsy airmail paper, for instance, advising me of some crazy scheme he wants me to ‘bring to the Attention of your Advisors with a View to Early Investment'. Or an old business adversary of Ronnie writes to me, always tenderly, always grateful to have known him, even if the experience proved costly.

Some years back, dickering on the brink of an autobiography and frustrated by the poverty of collateral information, I hired a pair of detectives, one thin, one fat, both recommended by a rugged London solicitor, and both good eaters. Go out into the world, I said to
them airily. Be my guests. Find the living witnesses and the written record and bring me a factual account of myself and my family and my father and I will reward you. I'm a liar, I explained. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.

So what I'll do is this, I said. I'll let my imaginative memory rip on the left-hand page, and I'll put your factual record on the right-hand page, unchanged and unadorned. And in that way my readers will see for themselves to what extent an old writer's memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it's never enough for them. I directed them to Ronnie's dates and names and places and suggested they dig out the court records. I imagined them hunting down vital sources while there were still a few around, former secretaries, prison officers and policemen. I told them to do the same with my school record, my army record, and, since I had several times been the subject of official security checks, the assessments of my trustworthiness by the services we used to regard as secret. I urged them to stop at nothing in their search for me. I told them about my father's scams, domestic and foreign, everything I could remember: how he attempted to con the prime ministers of Singapore and Malaysia into a dubious football-pools operation and came within a whisker of bringing it off. But it was the same whisker that always let him down.

I told them about his little ‘extra families' and mistress-mothers, keepers of the flame, who, in his own words to me, were always there to cook him a sausage if he dropped by. I gave them the names of a couple of the women I knew about, and an address or two, and the names of the children – whose is anybody's guess. I told them about Ronnie's war service, which consisted of using every trick in the book not to do any, including standing in parliamentary by-elections under such rousing banners as ‘Independent Progressive', which obliged the army to release him to exercise his democratic rights.
And how, even while he was being trained, he kept a couple of courtiers and a secretary or two on hand, billeted in local hotels, so that he could pursue his legitimate business of war profiteer and trader in shortages. In the immediate post-war years, it is my conviction, Ronnie improved upon his army record by awarding himself the alias of Colonel Cornhill, by which name he was well known in the shadier corners of the West End. When my half-sister Charlotte was playing in a film about the notorious gangland family in east London called
The Krays
, she consulted the eldest brother, Charlie, in order to collect material for the part. Over a nice cup of tea, Charlie Kray dug out the family photo album, and there was Ronnie with an arm round the two younger brothers.

I told them about the night I checked into the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen and was at once invited to visit the manager. I assumed my fame had gone ahead of me. It hadn't, but Ronnie's had. He was wanted by the Danish police. And there they were, two of them, upright like schoolboys in correction chairs against one wall. Ronnie, they said, had entered Copenhagen illegally from the United States with the assistance of a couple of Scandinavian pilots whom he had fleeced at poker in a New York dive. Instead of cash, he had suggested they give him a free ride to Denmark, which they duly did, spiriting him through customs and immigration when they landed. Did I by any chance, the Danish policemen enquired, happen to know where they could find my father? I didn't. And, thank God, I really didn't. I'd last heard of Ronnie a year earlier, when he had tiptoed out of Britain in order to escape a creditor, or arrest, or the mob, or all three.

So there was another lead for my detectives, I told them: let's find out what Ronnie was running away from in Britain, and why he had to get out of America the hard way, too. I told them about Ronnie's racehorses, which he kept going even when he was an undischarged bankrupt: horses in Newmarket, in Ireland and at Maisons-Laffitte, outside Paris. I gave them the names of trainers and jockeys and told them how Lester Piggott had ridden for him while Lester was still an
apprentice; and how Gordon Richards had advised him on his buying. And how I had once come upon young Lester in the back of a horse trailer, lounging in the straw in Ronnie's silks, reading a boys' comic before the race. Ronnie's racehorses were named after his beloved children: Dato, God help us, for David and Tony; Tummy Tunmers, which combined the name of his house with his affection for his own stomach; Prince Rupert – the only horse that showed any form – after my half-brother, Rupert; and Rose Sang, in arch reference to my half-sister Charlotte's red hair. And how in my late teens I used to go to race meetings in Ronnie's stead after he had been warned off the course for not paying his gambling debts. And how when Prince Rupert to everyone's amazement took a place in – was it the Cesarewitch? – I returned to London on the same train as the bookies Ronnie hadn't paid, lugging a briefcase stuffed with banknotes from bets I'd placed for him around the course.

I told my detectives about Ronnie's Court, as I had always secretly called it: the motley of genteel ex-prisoners who formed the nucleus of his corporate family – ex-schoolmasters, ex-lawyers, ex-everything. And how one of them, called Reg, took me aside after Ronnie's death and tearfully gave me what he called the bottom line. Reg had done prison for Ronnie, he said. And he wasn't alone in that distinction. So had George-Percival, another courtier. So had Eric and Arthur. All four had taken the rap for Ronnie at one time or another, rather than see the Court robbed of its guiding genius. But that wasn't Reg's point. His point, David – through his tears – was that they were a bunch of bloody idiots who had let Ronnie con them every time. And they still were. And if Ronnie rose from his grave today and asked Reg to do another stretch for him, Reg would do it, the same as George-Percival and Eric and Arthur would. Because where Ronnie was concerned – and Reg was happy to admit this – the whole lot of them were soft in the head.

‘We was all bent, son,' Reg added in a last respectful epitaph to a friend. ‘But your dad was very, very bent indeed.'

I told the detectives how Ronnie had stood as a Liberal
parliamentary candidate for Yarmouth in the general election of 1950, taking the Court with him, Liberals to a man. And how the Conservative candidate's agent met Ronnie by appointment in a private place and, fearful that Ronnie was going to split the vote in Labour's favour, warned him that the Tories would leak his prison record and one or two other tidbits about him if he didn't stand down, which Ronnie, after consulting a plenary session of the Court, of which I was an ex-officio member, refused to do. Was Uncle Alec the Tories' Deep Throat? Had he sent them one of his secret letters exhorting them not to reveal the source? I have always suspected so. In any event, the Tories did exactly as they had threatened. They leaked Ronnie's prison record, and Ronnie as predicted split the vote and Labour won.

Perhaps by way of friendly warning to my detectives, or as a bit of a boast, I impressed upon them the extent of Ronnie's network of connections, and the lines he had to the most unlikely people. In the late forties and early fifties, his golden years, Ronnie could throw parties at his house in Chalfont St Peter which included directors of Arsenal football club, Permanent Under-Secretaries, champion jockeys, film stars, radio stars, snooker kings, ex-lord mayors of London, the entire cast of the Crazy Gang then playing at the Victoria Palace, not to mention a handpicked selection of lovelies from wherever he got them, and the Australian or West Indian Test cricket teams if they were visiting. Don Bradman came, and so did most of the great and good players of the post-war years. To which should be added a choir of leading judges and barristers of the day and a troop of ranking Scotland Yard police officers in off-duty blazers with crests on the pocket.

Ronnie with his early education in police methods could spot a flexible copper a mile off. He knew at a glance what they ate and drank and what made them happy, how far they would bend and where they would snap. It was one of his pleasures to extend police protection to his friends, so that if someone's son, dead drunk, rolled his parents' Riley into a ditch, it was Ronnie who received the first
frantic phone call from the child's mother, Ronnie again who waved his wand and caused the blood tests to be muddled in the police laboratory, to the profuse apologies of the prosecution for wasting Your Worship's valuable time: with the further happy outcome that Ronnie notched up yet another favour to his account in the great Promise Bank where he kept his only assets.

In briefing my detectives I was, of course, beating the air. No detective on earth could have found what I was looking for, and two were no better than one. Ten thousand pounds and several excellent meals later, all they had to offer was a bunch of press clippings about old bankruptcies and the Yarmouth election, and a pile of useless company records. No trial records, no retired jailers, no golden-bullet witnesses or smoking gun. Not a single mention of Ronnie's trial at Winchester Assizes, where by his own account he defended himself brilliantly against a young advocate named Norman Birkett, later Sir Norman, then Lord, who served as a British judge at the Nuremberg trials.

From prison – this much Ronnie told me himself – he had written to Birkett, and, in the sporting spirit dear to both of them, congratulated the great barrister on his performance. And Birkett was flattered to receive such a letter from a poor prisoner who was paying his debt to society, and wrote back. And thus a correspondence developed in which Ronnie pledged his lifelong determination to study for the law. And as soon as he came out of prison he enrolled himself as a student at Gray's Inn. It was on the strength of this heroic act that he bought himself the wig and gown that I still see trailing after him in their cardboard box as he criss-crosses the globe in his search for El Dorado.