THE FATHER WHO BEAT ME TILL I BLED
He’s the Sharpe author whose books are loved by millions. But what no one knew about Bernard Cornwell was his utterly horrific treatment by the Christian zealots who adopted him as a boy. Until now...
BERNARD Cornwell is sitting outside his London hotel in autumn sunshine smoking a cigar. These days, most smokers indulge their habit furtively in huddled groups around back doorways. Not Bernard. He puffs away with such voluptuous and evident enjoyment you’d be forgiven for thinking he was being paid to advertise tobacco. He enjoys a drink, is a vehement atheist, swears affably and often, and is both a passionate and erudite chronicler of military history. He has written 50 novels and sold 20 million books worldwide, making him the most prolific and successful historical novelist working today.
His most famous creation is Richard Sharpe, swashbuckling rifleman from the Napoleonic Wars and hero of 24 books. Created by Bernard in 1980 and given fresh impetus in the Nineties TV series featuring Sean Bean, Sharpe is still going strong.
Battle scenes — both invented and real — are Bernard’s stock in trade: his novels bristle with them, and his non-fiction account of the Battle of Waterloo has been praised for its vivid and scholarly insights.
So here we have a synopsis of the man: a joyous and unashamed hedonist with a ready laugh who — although he didn’t serve in the military himself because of his myopia — is a walking encyclopaedia of all things martial.
What’s especially fascinating, however, is how all his characteristics make so much sense when you discover the extraordinary story of Bernard’s upbringing, which he tells in full for the first time today.
The product of a wartime liaison between a pretty East End sergeant in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and an upper-middle class Canadian airman — both of whom were 21 when he was conceived in a boarding house in Poole, Dorset — he was adopted when he was two weeks old by Joe and Marjorie Wiggins and raised in a grimly religious household in Essex.
The Wigginses belonged to an aptly named extreme Christian fundamentalist sect called the Peculiar People, which outlawed everything Bernard has come to embrace and admire today.
‘The list of prohibitions was endless,’ he exclaims. ‘Alcohol, tobacco, cosmetics, TV and cinema, for a start. Military service was also prohibited — they were pacifists — although Joe was very harsh. He was a man drunk on God, and the Bible said: “Beat your children,” which he did, very brutally, with a 4ft cane.
HE’D lose his temper: poor darling should never have adopted me. Once I was beaten for reading a novel — Treasure Island — although I’m sure I’d done something really irritating as well,’ he shrugs off the violence with flippancy.
‘The last time he beat me, I was 14. There was blood everywhere.
‘I don’t look back on him with dislike, but with pity. He was a good man trapped in a life-denying religion. My adoptive mother hated me. She was a very bitter woman and her biggest regret, I think, was not being able to have children of her own.
‘When I was seven she said, “I wish we’d never adopted you,” and I rather wished it as well. But that household was all I’d ever known and it was difficult to know what the alternatives were because I’d no experience of them.’
The revelation came when he was in his early 20s, however, and had just graduated in theology from London University.
‘I remember waking up one morning and thinking: “There’s no God. It’s all a fraud” and feeling intensely happy. It probably took me far too long to realise it but it was a moment of epiphany: everything that troubles your conscience is rubbish.
‘ The Peculiars’ prohibitions became my wish-list: wine, women and song. I didn’t take wholesale to a life of sin, but there was a lot of catching up to do — and on the whole I have. I’m 72 now and I’ve never been tempted to think: “There is a God”.’
Instead, the joyously atheistic Bernard, who is fond of saying he has had the same wife, agent and publisher for the past 36 years, lives happily with wife Judy, 74, an Episcopalian, vegetarian, nonsmoking, pacifist yoga teacher at their homes in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Charleston, Carolina.
They met in their 30s when Bernard was working in Northern Ireland as head of current affairs for the BBC. Both were recently divorced — Bernard had married for a first time in 1968, but the union only lasted five years.
At the height of the Troubles, in 1979, Judy was one of a group of American travel agents who had gone to Ulster, bizarrely, to discover the tourism potential of Belfast, and Bernard had decided to make a documentary about the visit.
‘She stepped out of a lift and it was lust at first sight. I thought: “I’m going to marry her.” It was insane. It has to be chemistry, doesn’t it?
‘We had a week together but we didn’t sleep together. When she went back to the States, I wrote to her and she always says she fell in love with me because of the letters, which she still has. Every one of them.’
Judy already had three children and Bernard moved to the U.S. to marry her. His failure to get a Green Card work permit was the spur he needed to take up writing.
‘I said airily to Judy: “Don’t worry. I’m going to write a book,” which I did.’
Sharpe’s Evil was the first of a prodigiously successful series and the start of an extraordinary literary career.
He is both hugely informed and admiring of the military, about which he writes with such passion and authority, and deplores recent attempts by law firms to bring prosecutions against British soldiers who have killed insurgents in the course of duty.
‘Soldiers have more than enough problems without having to face them from lawyers on their own side. You can’t fight with prosecutors looking over your shoulder. We need to get the lawyers off the battlefield. Until they have been on the frontline under enemy fire, they shouldn’t make judgments,’ he says.
He is a man of firm and uncompromising views. On the subject of his loveless childhood, he is equally robust: there is little introspection and no tortured self- analysis, perhaps because his life since has been so happy, successful and richly fulfilled.
He was one of five children — three boys and two girls — adopted by the Wigginses and he harbours no resentment towards his birthmother, Dorothy Cornwell, for giving him away. (He did discover as a boy that he was adopted).
‘She was a very bright, workingclass girl in the WAAF and she’d been told she was officer material. She’d got herself a career, then she’d become pregnant accidentally. It was 1943. My father William was back in Canada when I was born in February the following year.
‘Dorothy’s local vicar sent him a letter saying she was having a baby; that he was the father, but he didn’t respond.
‘She’d wanted to keep me, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. I cannot rid myself of the image of Dorothy, on the bed in a maternity home for single girls, me in a crib, and the Wigginses standing looking at us.
‘Joe Wiggins probably wanted to preach the gospel to her. His wife, Marjorie, filled with bitterness because she couldn’t have her own children, must have stared at my pretty young mother and despised her. The adoption,’ he says with laconic understatement, ‘was not successful.’
One tenet of the Peculiars’ sect was that it only used medicine as a last resort, preferring to ‘give God a chance to cure first’, as Bernard recalls.
AS AN older child, he remembers the elders of the church gathering round his bed and praying –— without success — when he was ill, before the family doctor was called. The same doctor was, he suspects, the reason that beatings by his adoptive father ended abruptly with a last brutal lashing in Bernard’s early teens. He cannot remember why he was thrashed: a poor school report, perhaps. ‘I was a lazy little bu**er,’ he says.
However, he recalls: ‘After the last beating, there was so much blood, Joe called the doctor. I suspect the doctor had a word with my father. There were no more beatings.’
Was Joe a sadist? ‘No, he was a good man,’ says Bernard mildly. ‘He was just trying to beat God into me.’
He reserves the full force of his antipathy for the emotionally cruel adoptive mother Marjorie. While he kept in touch with Joe Wiggins until his death, he cut off links in adulthood with her.
When he was seven, he was sent to prep school and then to boarding school. (The Wiggins were affluent and owned a prospering construction company.)
At Monkton Combe, Somerset, the relatively relaxed religious ethos offered a reprieve from the grim godliness of home. ‘The school was a haven of common sense,’ he says now.
He knew from early childhood that he was adopted, but when riffling through papers in a safe at the Wigginses’ home, he found details of his
birth parents. Scrupulously he copied down their names and the scant information about his origins, and stored it away for future reference. ‘ I wasn’t that interested in finding my parents but I kept the information because ... well, you never knew, ’ he says. Actually, it was not until he was in his late 50s — 15 years ago — that he decided, on a whim, to trace his birth father, William Oughtred. During a book tour of Canada, he mentioned in a radio interview that his real father — he broadcast his name — lived in British Columbia and that he’d like to meet him. Two days later, in Toronto, a relative of his father produced William’s address. ‘I wrote him a letter, sent him a book (Sharpe’s Trafalgar), and said: “I don’t want anything from you.” A week later, there was a phone- call from Oughtred’s eldest legitimate son. A slightly prickly conversation followed.
Bernard recalls: ‘I said: “I’d love to meet you all,” and we did.
‘Judy and I flew to Vancouver with Antonia, my daughter from my first marriage.
Despite all the years that has passed, their meeting was a real success.
‘William, my father, was in his 80s then. I even looked like him. I was vastly amused.
‘He took me aside and tried to begin an explanation of the events that led to my birth. I don’t think he was proud of what happened.
‘He said it was a one-night stand. I said: “What was my mother like? Was she pretty?” And he said: “You wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t been.”’
‘I found I had two half-brothers and a half- sister, and I liked them. There was the unexpected shock of recognition. I’d found my real home.
‘They welcomed us generously and instantly. We were family, and I remember Judy saying: “If you don’t want this family, i do.” Of the whole experience, he says: ‘ It was more moving than I expected. A pleasure. I liked these people who snorted when they laughed, as I did; who had the same gait.’
Bernard’s father had built up a successful family business selling vending machines. His first wife Ruth had died and he’d remarried. He’d told no one about his illegitimate son — the skeleton in his cupboard. But, now, there were no recriminations.
Bernard and his father continued to meet until the latter’s death in 2011.
Then, a year later, Bernard was also reunited with his birthmother, Dorothy; fortuitously as this was only a few years before she, too, died.
He discovered she lived in a flat in Basingstoke, Hampshire. ‘And what struck me was that it was absolutely crammed with historical novels. She had a passion for them,’ says Bernard.
‘She told me: “I knew who you were from your first book.” Although I’d been re-named Wiggins, I’d changed my name back to Dorothy’s maiden name, Cornwell — not out of lingering affection for the mother I’d never known, just because it’s far nicer than Wiggins.
WHEN she saw the first book in 1980, she seized it, looked on the back of the dust jacket and saw my photo, and thought, as she told me: “There was your father.”’
Dorothy, it emerged, had kept the secret of her illegitimate son, but had resolved to leave him a letter with her will.
Three years after Bernard was adopted, she went on to marry a London Underground engineer and moved from the East End to Canvey Island, Essex, just five miles from where her first- born was living as Bernard Wiggins.
She had three more sons and was widowed in 1974. ‘ She was funny, smart and tough. She became clerk to a barristers’ chambers,’ says Bernard. She never remarried. I asked her: “Did you think of me?” and she said: “Of course. All the time.”
‘And when I said William [his father] had told me I’d been conceived on a one-night-stand she said: “The b*****d! We were together seven months.”
‘She said he’d looked like a young Orson Welles. She’d remembered his wandering hands, and how she’d stopped them by stubbing her cigarette out on them. But one night she didn’t and the result was me. She recalled the room where I was conceived, with pink elephants on the wallpaper.
‘I think she was quite badly treated by my father, who lost touch when he went back to Canada. But poor dears, they didn’t stand a chance — so young, the war — and on balance I’m very grateful for that encounter between them.’ He smiles.
‘But I’m sure poor Dorothy would have been better off if she hadn’t become pregnant with me.
‘She remembered the Wigginses standing at her bedside in the maternity home. “I knew they weren’t cuddly,” she said, and how right she was.’
There is a neat coda to Bernard’s story of reunion with his birth parents.
His paternal ancestors provided the inspiration for his latest novel.
The Canadian Oughtreds, his father’s family tree revealed, could trace their descendants back to the Ughtreds, Saxon noblemen who lived at Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland, for centuries before the Norman Conquest.
The Flame Bearer — Bernard’s tenth novel in his The Last Kingdom series, which is to be televised for BBC2 in spring next year — tells the story of Ughtred of Bamburgh and his quest to recapture the castle stolen from him by a traitorous uncle.
Stranger perhaps than his link with this Saxon past, is the affinity he had felt with Northumberland and Bamburgh Castle long before he had an inkling of its family associations.
‘I’d been on holiday several times there and even bought a painting of Bamburgh Castle. Can there be a genetic attraction to a place?’ he ponders.
‘It’s a strange idea, yet I’d fallen in love with the area over which, it later emerged, many generations of my ancestors had ruled as kings and earls.’
tHe FlaMe Bearer by Bernard Cornwell is published by HarperCollins at £20.