Ronnie Cornwell This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. The Observer | Magazine | A sting in the tale

   observer.guardian.co.uk/magazi - [Cached]

   Published on: 12/7/2003   Last Visited: 12/7/2003

   From the slopes of St Moritz to the tables of Monte Carlo, Ronnie Cornwell was as gregarious as he was generous.
   ...
   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?
   ...
   Tony and I were whisked effortlessly through the class sound barrier, while Ronnie remained an upstart.
   ...
   While our standard naughty boy is blowing the last of the housekeeping on the 3.30 at Newmarket, Ronnie is relaxing serenely at the big table in Monte Carlo with a complimentary brandy and ginger in front of him, me, aged 17 and pretending to be older, on one side of him, and King Farouk's equerry, aged 50-plus, on the other. The equerry is well known at this table. He is polished, grey-haired, innocuous and very tired, and he has a white telephone at his elbow, compliments of the casino management. It links him directly to his Egyptian king, whom we imagine in one of his palaces, surrounded by astrologers. The white phone rings, the equerry wearily takes his hands from his chin, raises the receiver, listens with his long eyelids lowered, and in a trance transfers another chunk of the wealth of Egypt to red, or black, or whatever number is considered propitious by the zodiacal wizards of Alexandria or Cairo.
   
   For some while now Ronnie has been observing this, smiling a sanctimonious little smile to himself that says, 'If that's the way you want it, old son, that's the way it's got to be.' And gradually he starts to raise his own bids around the table. Purposefully. A great strategist disposes of his troops. Tens become twenties. Twenties become fifties. And as he splashes out the last of his chips and to my alarm beckons imperiously for more, I realise he is not playing a hunch, or playing the house, or playing the numbers. He is playing King Farouk. If Farouk favours black, Ronnie goes for red. If Farouk backs odd, Ronnie raises him on even. We are talking hundreds by now (these days thousands). And what Ronnie is telling His Egyptian Majesty - as a term's worth, then a year's worth of my school fees vanish into the croupier's maw - is that Ronnie's line to the Almighty is a great deal more efficacious than some tinpot Arab potentate's. Ronnie is blessed, whereas Farouk doesn't rate a bean in God's great plan - not even when Ronnie sinks gracefully to the seabed with his flag flying.
   
   In the soft blue twilight of Monte Carlo before dawn, we saunter side by side along the esplanade to a 24-hour jeweller's shop to pawn his platinum cigarette case - Bucherer? Boucheron? I'm warm. 'Win it all back tomorrow with interest, right, old son?' Ronnie assures me in the foyer of the H¿tel de Paris, where he has mercifully prepaid our room bill. 'Showed that chap Farouk a thing or two. Lost twice as much as I did. Three times.' And though it may never have happened, it equally well might be that a few days later, having exchanged visiting cards with the equerry, Ronnie would be on the phone to Cairo introducing himself as the chap who played a bit of arm's-length roulette with His Majesty the other night, and by an odd coincidence Ronnie was visiting the Middle East next week, and was there any chance the King was free for a drink because, if so, Ronnie would make it his business to be free, too... And if it didn't work that time it would work some other time in some other country, because Ronnie was a living advertisement for his own truism that, provided you've got a clean shirt and ask nicely, God will always give you a fair crack of the whip.
   
   So I am born. Of my mother, Olive. Obediently, with the haste Ronnie has demanded of her.
   ...
   It was Ronnie who did the hugging, never Olive. She was the mother who had no smell, whereas Ronnie smelled of fine cigars, and pear-droppy hair oil from Taylor of Bond Street, Court Hairdresser, and when you put your nose into the fleecy cloth of one of Mr Berman's tailored suits you seemed to smell his women there as well. Yet when, at the age of 21, I advanced on Olive down No 1 platform at Ipswich railway station for our great reunion after 16 hugless years, I couldn't work out for the life of me where to grab hold of her. She was as tall as I remembered her, but all elbow and no huggable contours.
   ...
   Still clutching Olive's gloved hand, I wave at Ronnie high up in the wall and Ronnie waves the way he always waved: leaning back and with the upper body dead still while one prophetic arm commands the skies above his head. 'Daddy, Daddy!' I yell.
   ...
   Yet Ronnie at the prime of his life did serious time - three or four years. He was still serving one sentence when they slapped some more charges on him and gave him a second. The bits of prison time he did in later life - Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Zurich - were weeks or months at most.
   
   Researching The Honourable Schoolboy in Hong Kong, I came face to face with his ex-jailer at the Jardine Matheson tent at Happy Valley racecourse. 'Mr Cornwell, sir, your father is one of the finest men I ever met. It was a privilege to look after him. I'm retiring soon and when I get back to London he's going to fix me up in business.' Even in prison, Ronnie was fattening his jailer for the pot. I am in Chicago, supporting a lacklustre campaign to sell British goods abroad. The consul general, with whom I am staying, hands me a telegram. It is from our ambassador in Jakarta, telling me that Ronnie is in prison and will I buy him out? I promise to pay whatever needs to be paid. To my alarm, it is only a few hundred. Ronnie must be down on his luck.
   
   From the Bezirksgef¿ngnis in Zurich, where he has been imprisoned for hotel fraud, he telephones me, reversing the charges. 'Son?
   ...
   They speak the way Ronnie spoke when he was young: in light, unconscious Dorset accents that I really like. How did Ronnie take it, that first stretch? How did it affect him? Who was he before prison? Who was he after it? But the aunts are not historians, they're sisters. They love Ronnie, and prefer not to think beyond their love. The scene they remember best was Ronnie shaving on the morning of the day the verdict was to be announced at Winchester Assizes. He had defended himself from the dock the previous day and was certain he would be home free that evening.
   ...
   Why did Olive refer to Ronnie as you? You meaning he, but subconsciously recruiting me to be his surrogate, which by the time of her death was what I had become?
   
   There is an audiotape that Olive made for my brother Tony, all about her life with Ronnie.
   ...
   Certainly Ronnie beat me up, too, but only a few times and not with much conviction. It was the shaping up that was the scary part: the lowering and readying of the shoulders, the resetting of the jaw. And when I was grown up Ronnie tried to sue me, which I suppose is violence in disguise. He had watched a television documentary of my life and decided there was an implicit slander in my failure to mention that I owed everything to him.
   
   Of Ronnie and Olive's courtship and the spectral Uncle Alec
   
   How did Olive and Ronnie first get together?
   
   I asked her this question in my Krafft-Ebing period, not long after that first remembered hug at Ipswich station. 'Through your Uncle Alec, dear,' she replied. She was referring to her estranged brother, her senior by 25 years. Their parents were both long dead, so Uncle Alec, a grandee of Poole, Member of Parliament and fabled local preacher, was her effective father. Like Olive, he was thin and bony and very tall, but also vain, a natty dresser with a great sense of his social importance.
   
   Appointed to present a cup to a local football team, Uncle Alec took Olive along with him, in the manner of one schooling a future princess in the exercise of her public duties. Ronnie was the team's centre forward. Where else could he possibly play? As Uncle Alec moved along the line, shaking hands with each player, Olive trailed behind him, pinning a badge to each proud breast. But when she pinned one to Ronnie's he fell dramatically to his knees, complaining she had pierced him to the heart, which he was clutching with both hands. Uncle Alec, who on all known evidence was a pompous arse, loftily condoned the horseplay, and Ronnie with impressive meekness inquired whether he might call at the great house on Sunday afternoons to pay his respects - not to Olive, naturally, who was socially far above him - but to an Irish housemaid with whom he had struck up an acquaintance. Uncle Alec graciously gave his consent and Ronnie, under cover of wooing the maid, seduced Olive. 'I was so lonely, darling. And you