My father would occupy a house and default, then move to another one. He had an amazing, Micawber-like talent for messing up his business adventures." When le Carré was still a child, his father was convicted of fraud and sentenced to his first prison term. Shortly afterward le Carré's mother, the former Olive Glassy, left her husband and moved in with one of his business associates. Cornwell later divorced her and remarried twice, and le Carré did not see his mother again until he was twenty years of age. He and his brother, Tony, spent some time with relatives who refused to discuss either parent, and le Carré later claimed that his earliest experience of espionage was his attempt to piece together, from the little that he and his brother managed to overhear, some explanation for his mother's desertion and his father's frequent absences. He concluded at one point that his father must be a spy, called away to perform dangerous missions for the good of his country.
As a result of his family's frequent moves le Carré never settled into one school or felt at home with one group of friends.
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