The Sixth Man: The Extraordinary Life of Paddy Costello

a life-enhancing writer

—

ROBERT NYE IN THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR (USA)

Auckland. Cambridge. Moscow. Paris. New Zealand’s most brilliant linguist and ablest foreign envoy. The man who alerted the West to Soviet possession of the atom bomb. The first Allied diplomat to enter and report on the Nazi death camps at the end of the war. General Freyberg’s favourite Intelligence officer.

Paddy Costello was a scholar, a soldier, a diplomat, a maverick, an exemplary father, a lover of good wine. But was he also a spy?

Paddy Costello, the subject of this long-awaited biography, appears in James McNeish’s previous work, Dance of the Peacocks:

I think it’s the best book published in New Zealand in the last twenty years.

—

IAN CROSS IN THE DOMINION POST

"I came to Dance of the Peacocks with high expectations, but they were far exceeded by the book itself. It held me like a good novel, being beautifully structured and written; moved me more than most novels; and has haunted me since."

—

JON STALLWORTHY, WOLFSON COLLEGE, OXFORD

"Dance of the Peacocks is the work where all of McNeish’s gifts come together."

—

LAWRENCE JONES IN THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES

THE SIXTH MAN

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE

OF PADDY COSTELLO

to

John Bright-Holmes

in gratitude

Loved your five Peacocks. But when are you going to write about the sixth man, Paddy Costello?

— Letter to author, following publication of Dance of the Peacocks

I think Costello was pursued by British Intelligence because there was an assumption that it might be an extension of the Philby ring of five

— Sir George Laking, Secretary of Foreign Affairs (NZ) 1967–72

THE SIXTH MAN

Paddy Costello was a Second World War intelligence officer, a New Zealand diplomat, a linguist, teacher and scholar, a Renaissance man in the breadth and depth of his interests, and — according to his enemies — a Soviet agent during the Cold War. This long overdue biography sets the record straight. It convincingly shows that the slim evidence for the traitor charge was invented, exaggerated and misinterpreted. In fact, when Costello was a diplomat in Moscow the major secret he revealed was to the West: the Soviets had the atomic bomb.

It is now clear that Costello was punished for his pre-war Communist views, which he had trumpeted from the rooftops, and later vilified for being right in his analysis of communism, a victim of the McCarthy period.

This is an important book about a fascinating man who held fast to his beliefs and his humanity at a difficult time in history.

Phillip Knightley, author of The Second Oldest Profession:

Spies and Spying in the 20th Century

The book draws primarily on letters and diaries, and on interviews conducted over a period of several years. Official documents including declassified New Zealand and American Intelligence files have also been used. The author wishes to thank the late Michael King for a number of British security documents, the so-called Batterbee File, sent to me shortly before he died, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade for help dating back to 1999 and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service for an informal briefing, following the release of a quantity of declassified material in 2003. A further consignment of forty-one NZSIS documents which arrived in 2007 as this book was going to press has helped to clear up a mystery which has frustrated writers and historians in two hemispheres for forty years.

Conversations where not taken from documents are based on reported speech.

Warm acknowledgement is made to Christopher Costello, Paddy Costello’s executor, and his siblings Mick, Katie and Nicholas Costello and Josephine Proctor (née Costello) — and also to Doris Bornstein (née Lerner) and Jack Lerner, Bil Costello’s surviving sister and brother — for their unstinting help and generous hospitality. They belong to a richly connected family scattered to Australia and New Zealand, with roots in Ireland and perhaps the sixteenth-century Spanish Armada on one side and, through marriage, the Jewish Pale of Settlement in southern Russia on the other. Their trust and openness to enquiry have made a long labour seem short; and their sometimes critical comments on the text have come without hint of censorship. Without their help and access to the family archives, no book would have been possible.

I owe thanks above all to my wife, Helen, researcher, photographic editor and critic, who has helped more than anyone to disinter Paddy Costello and rescue him from his detractors.

Full acknowledgements appear at the back.

An award by Creative New Zealand enabling me to concentrate on this project and a travel grant by the New Zealand History Research Trust Fund, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, are warmly acknowledged.

                                                                   — J. McN.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Sixth Man

Illustrations

Author’s Foreword

Prologue

Part One

HOME & AWAY (1912–1940)

Auckland

Cambridge

Letters 1933

Walking to Olympia

Love in a Bookshop

Letters 1936

Spain

Exeter & the Fyrth Case

Part Two

GOING TO WAR (1940–1944)

Letters 1940–1941

Prelude to a Battle

Battle of Tempe

Escape to Crete

A Meeting in Cairo

The General’s Caravan

Letters 1941

A Fifth Wheel

Letters 1942–1944

Part Three

TO RUSSIA & BACK (1944–1950)

The General’s Telegram

The First Hardship Post

My Old Man of the Sea

Poland 1945

Letter from Stockholm

Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!

Incubus

The Paris Peace Conference

Letters 1945–1947

Tilting at Windmills

Doppelgänger

The Retreat from Moscow

Letters 1949–1950

Part Four

A DIPLOMAT IN PARIS (1950–1954)

McIntosh’s Folly

A Very Unfortunate Incident

The Unforgiving Mind

The Passport Affair

Sicilian Vespers

Letters 1950–1955

It Was All Very British

Part Five

FULL CIRCLE IN MANCHESTER (1955–1964)

A Soviet Satellite Going By

A Black Eye in Oxford

Dinner with the Freybergs

Time’s Thief

Postscript

Appendices

Notes & Sources

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Glossary

Index

Plates

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

Illustrations

SECTION 1 (Auckland and Cambridge)

1. Christopher and Mary Costello, wedding, Melbourne (Woods family collection)

2. The Three Lamps, Ponsonby, 1920s (© Graham Stewart)

3. Paddy Costello at 15, with his Auckland family (Terry Bishop)

4. Costello’s favourite sister, Kath, and mother (Terry Bishop)

5. Hunger marchers, Jarrow to London, c. 1933

6. Great Gate, Trinity College, Cambridge (© Helen McNeish)

7. All Saint’s Passage, Cambridge, where Maclaurin had his bookshop (© Helen McNeish)

8. Griff Maclaurin, A Question of Principle, TV2 1976 (© TVNZ)

9. John Cornford

10. Geoffrey Cox in Madrid, 1936 (Alexander Turnbull Library, © Photo News)

11. Paddy and Bil Costello, Exeter, 1937 (Josephine Proctor)

SECTION 2 (Greece and North Africa)

12. German tanks crossing the Pinios River during the battle of Tempe, May 1941 (Die Wehrmacht, Berlin)

13. General Freyberg during the battle for Crete (Alexander Turnbull Library, © Sir John White)

14. Colonel N.L. Macky, 1941 (Rebecca Macky)

15. Lance-corporal Costello, at sea, 1941 (Josephine Proctor)

16. Costello interrogating Italian prisoner, North Africa, 1942 (Alexander Turnbull Library, © Harold Paton)

17. Costello, 1943, Western Desert (private collection)

18. Dan Davin and Geoffrey Cox with General Freyberg, Italy, 1944 (Alexander Turnbull Library, © Sir John White)

19. Letter to Mick Costello, 1942 (Mick Costello)

20. Dan Davin in Palestine, 1943 (private collection)

21. Vale of Tempe from Ambelakia village (© David McGregor)

SECTION 3 (Moscow and Paris)

22. Chistye Prude, Moscow (© James McNeish)

23. Griboyedov statue, Moscow (© James McNeish)

24. Pasternak’s dacha, Peredelkino (© James McNeish)

25. Yvgeny Pasternak with author, Moscow (© Elvina Yerofeeva)

26. Alister McIntosh, c. 1950 (Dr Jim McIntosh, © Leo Rosenthal, New York)

27. Douglas and Ruth Lake (née Macky), Moscow, 1947 (Sarah Lake)

28. Jean McKenzie and Costello, reception in Paris, 1951 (Josephine Proctor)

29. Carl Berendsen, c. 1950 (NZ Ministry Foreign Affairs & Trade)

30. Douglas Zohrab (private collection)

31. New Zealand Legation staff, Moscow, 1946 (Phil & Emilie Costello)

32. Frank Corner with Tom Davin and Richard Collins, upstate New York (© Lyn Corner)

33. New Zealand Legation, Moscow, 1946-1950 (Stuart Prior, © Giraffe Publishing House, Moscow)

34. Peter Kroger’s 1954 letter from Vienna applying for passports at the New Zealand Legation in Paris (NZ Security Intelligence Service)

35. Morris and Lona Cohen, alias Peter and Helen Kroger (Neville Spearman, London)

36. Photocopies of the New Zealand passports which enabled the Krogers to enter Britain and pass naval secrets to Moscow (Scotland Yard Crime Museum)

SECTION 4 (Growing Family)

37. Costello in Moscow, love to Katinka (Josephine Proctor)

38. Mick Costello with uncles and Lerner grandparents, 1943 (Katie Costello)

39. Paddy and Bil Costello in the south of France, 1938 (Katie Costello)

40-41. Bil with Mick, Exeter (Costello family archive)

42. Bil with Mick and Josie, Exeter (1936-40)

43. Family portrait, Moscow, 1948 (Josephine Proctor)

44. Josie and Katie, Paris, 1953 (Josephine Proctor)

45. Outside the house in Manchester, 1958 (Josephine Proctor)

46. Josie and her father, TB sanatorium, Pyrenees, 1954 (Josephine Proctor)

47. Abba Lerner in America (private collection)

48. Anna Davin and Doris Bornstein, London East End, 2005 (© Helen McNeish)

49. Mick Costello in 1999 (© James McNeish)

SECTION 5 (Last days)

50-51. Paddy and Bil, 1950s (Costello family archives)

52. Costello with Dan and Winnie Davin, Aran Islands, July 1963, shortly before he died (Delia Davin)

53. Paddy Costello, Aran Islands, 1963

MAP

Page 88, Greece, Battle of Tempe, May 1941

Page 192, cartoon of Costello from the New Hungary newspaper, Budapest, published during the 1946 Paris Peace Conference

Page 205, Costello’s Russian diplomatic pass

Page 238, the New Zealand Legation, Paris

Page 311, this little sketch is from a series of drawings made by Costello when he visited the classical site of Paestum in southern Italy after taking leave of Davin at Cassino in February 1944

Photographic Editor, HELEN McNEISH

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for illustrations used in this book. Proper acknowledgement will be made in future editions in the event of any omissions that occurred at the time of going to press

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

IT BEGAN WITH Costello being depicted a falsifier of passports. With time the stories grew wilder. As General Freyberg’s Intelligence officer in the war, he had passed on the ULTRA secret; as a seducer of women, he had brought converts to the Stalinist cause; in Moscow he was a disinformation agent, in Paris a tool to bring Czechoslovakia into the Soviet orbit, in England he instigated the Portland naval scandal which helped to bring down the Macmillan government.

The myth-making process was driven principally by three men: the British journalist and conspiracy theorist Chapman Pincher, the Cambridge spy and practised liar Anthony Blunt and, more recently, the Cambridge contemporary historian Professor Christopher Andrew. According to Chapman Pincher who laid the first charge in 1981, Costello was fingered by Blunt as a Cambridge-recruited mole.

In my previous book, Dance of the Peacocks, Paddy Costello appears as a secondary figure. When I first heard his name more than twenty years ago, I knew nothing of the spying allegations: I was attracted, through Costello’s friend Dan Davin at Oxford University Press, to an enigmatic New Zealander of infectious joie de vivre who seemed to me one of the last of the great amateur diplomatists of the Cold War. If Davin was to be believed, Costello had rendered invaluable service not just to his country but to the free world. Brilliantly intuitive and analytical, as his reporting of the Russian bomb showed, he was more acutely aware of developments in the Soviet Union than his British or American counterparts in Cold-War Moscow.

The peculiar fact according to documents now available is that the only verifiable charges of actual informing — the Russian possession of the atom bomb being one such case — have to do with Costello passing information not to the East but to the West. Costello is the antipodean counterpart to the American China hands Owen Lattimore and Jack Service, vilified during the McCarthy years for being correct in their analyses of the communist march in history.

Today more than forty years after his death in England Professor Costello’s posthumous reputation, mired in myth and innuendo, has him placed firmly in the world literature of espionage as a traitor.

In 1999 Christopher Andrew published his book The Mitrokhin Archive which appeared to confirm, for the first time from Russian archival sources, that Paddy Costello had worked for the Soviets. He was, Professor Andrew wrote, a valuable agent of the KGB’s Paris residency in the 1950s.

After meeting the author in Cambridge, however — we had an extended and entirely amicable discussion — I was unconvinced. Professor Andrew readily admitted that beyond a codename and a brief reference found in Vasili Mitrokhin’s notes, he knew nothing more about Costello. After further checking I decided that through no fault or design of his own, he too had become part of the myth-making process.

The most successful spy is the one not caught and, since it is impossible to prove a negative, there will always be a residue of doubt about Costello. Meanwhile we are left with little more than unsubstantiated claims and reports. In press interviews on the publication of his book Professor Andrew named Costello as the man who transformed the agent Kroger into a Hero of the Russian Federation and one of the KGB’s top ten.

Fighting words. But if the following narrative is true, they may need to be rewritten.

[April 2007]

PROLOGUE

A MAN CALLED Walter Tongue made the first sighting. Captain Tongue was an amateur soldier in charge of a citizens’ rifle company who had been ordered to kill Germans. In professional life he was a funeral director.

Tongue’s company had been paid, the men had had tea and were standing to, lounging about the pits with their rifles waiting for the dark. It was not yet dusk. Down on the plain a light mist was forming. It had rained in the morning, drizzle and mist; then the sun appeared. In the afternoon Tongue had noticed some winking lights on the plain, as if reflected from the windshields of moving vehicles. Firing had broken out from the Colonel’s Headquarters further along the ridge beneath Platamon castle. Then it stopped. Nothing.

Walter Tongue ran to an observation post at the top of his village. The village he was defending faced Mount Olympus. It was high up, almost in the snowline. Then a runner appeared, a tall gangling man in glasses. Costello. They reached the top together.

What is it, sir? Costello said.

Lance-Corporal Costello wore an infantry badge on his forage cap, although he was in fact a signalman. He belonged to Headquarters.

See for yourself. Tongue handed him the binoculars. Costello shook his head and gave them back. He was short-sighted and mildly astigmatic. I think they’re tanks, Tongue said. Tanks, he repeated, and gave a sharp laugh, as if he didn’t believe it himself.

Costello wiped his glasses and squinted down at the plain. All he could see was a blur of objects drawn up in lines like old-time horse floats. They filled the centre of the plain.

Tanks?

Twenty at least, Tongue said.

Fifteen. He began to count. Twenty … twenty-five.

Costello felt his diaphragm constrict, and cupped his hands tight. His fingertips were wet against the palms. He opened his hands and cupped them again. It was something he did responding to pressure.

Thirty-five. Forty. Forty-two … Tongue was still counting.

Costello was thinking of his wife and two children, who were in England. He had joined up the previous summer. He was a new recruit.

Fifty, Tongue said.

Unbidden, two lines from Housman came into Costello’s mind.

He to the hill of his undoing

Pursued his road.

Poetry was something else Costello did. Poetry he found was of great help in some situations, if one suffered from a lively imagination.

The war, when he got up that morning, had seemed far off. They had come from England via Egypt and landed in Greece in time for Easter. Yesterday, Easter Sunday, the Colonel had ordered a church parade. Costello had stood in the fine frosty air with his battalion, thinking how clever of the Colonel to get them posted here, to a part of Greece he had read about as a schoolboy — to Thessaly, in sight of Mount Olympus. Thessaly in the spring. In the ravines violets bloomed, wild strawberries and broom and pink daisies with black centres, and tiny blue hyacinths. In the villages where Costello had gone among the peasants, haggling to buy mules to transport their guns, quince and cherry were in blossom, and lovely mauve flowers, he wrote to his wife, which the peasants call kuchiparies.

Eighty.

Tongue went on counting. When he reached a hundred, Lance-Corporal Costello descended from the village and returned to battalion Headquarters. It was an hour’s walk to the opposing mountainside crowned by a castle where the Colonel had his dugout. Although a mere lance-jack corporal, Costello spoke fluent Greek; as such he enjoyed the Colonel’s confidence. He entered the dugout on the side of Castle Hill and knew at once that the situation was deteriorating. The Colonel was saying to the adjutant, Anyway, I’ve signalled only fifty. Tongue counted a hundred tanks, he said, but I told him not to go on. No one would believe us anyway. So officially, he turned to Costello, officially, there are only fifty tanks in front of us.

They were not as it happened tanks, but scout cars and troop carriers. The tanks arrived the next day.

Costello’s diary reads:

13 April Easter Sunday

14 April afternoon. Our guns open on enemy patrol

15 April first enemy shell at first light. Shelling all day.

16 April Withdrawal to Tempe

The fight for the castle, a fine example of Crusader architecture looming above Headquarters (and Costello’s lean-to) had begun at nightfall on the 15th. After the tank and infantry attacks, dive-bombers came over. Costello’s account to his wife begins, Shells are flying so low over my lean-to that the leaves come fluttering down with each shot. I am only a hundred feet from battalion HQ. Shortly afterwards his account breaks off. The Colonel’s diary describes the day’s activities as most unpleasant. The Colonel’s last message, sent shortly after 10 a.m. on the 16th, reads: Closing down. Getting out.

So they ran. Officially it was called a fighting withdrawal. They ran nevertheless.

All over Greece at this moment men were retreating and running, pouring south, overwhelmed by superior numbers as the Germans came down from the north. Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen, Australians, New Zealanders, 55,000 of them. The Greek army had collapsed, the prime minister committed suicide. The quixotic adventure intended to save Greece — the Allies had come in time for Easter and barely stayed for the Greek Good Friday — was over before it began. Miraculously most of the 55,000 were evacuated by the Royal Navy.

Chief among those not evacuated by the Navy were the Colonel and his seven hundred men making up the 21st Auckland Battalion. When the German commander, Balck, signalled that his tanks had captured the castle on Platamon Hill, the Colonel and his seven hundred retreated like everyone else. But they did not go far. A few miles down the railway track they came to a pass. The name of this pass was Tempe. Here the Colonel was ordered to stand and engage the enemy, if necessary to extinction.

The Colonel was facing at the time three German divisions, half an army. Like Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans facing the Persian army further south at Thermopylae in 480 BC, he was instructed to hold the enemy at all costs to enable the main force to escape. To make quite sure that the Colonel understood these instructions, all his transport was taken away. So in the Vale of Tempe began an unequal battle — and a feat of arms, we are told, unsurpassed by any British unit in Greece. The Battle of Tempe however will not enter the history books, although, strange to say, Costello will.

History does not always favour the brave and when a gallant Colonel and his men are left unsung it is quite unfair for a lance-jack corporal with no claim to heroism to be awarded, if not a mention, the only footnote in despatches. All this by way of saying that in AD 1941 (18 April, Greek Good Friday) Costello finally found his war. He had been waiting for it since 1936.

PART ONE

HOME & AWAY

1912–1940

AUCKLAND

An original mind without job description

HIS CONFIRMATION NAME was Julius, after Julius Caesar. The significance of this would not be apparent for a further year or two, when Costello wrote a cautionary tale entitled A Routed Army. The tale was about Xerxes. Xerxes, son of Darius, was the Persian king who invaded Greece in the year 480 BC. The story was in the form of an essay which appeared in the Auckland Grammar School Chronicle for 1927, and it described the outcome of a battle where initially the Greek defenders, confronting a superior force — the most powerful army the world had ever seen — grew downcast, and retreated.

This retreat occurred at the pass of Tempe — the same place Costello’s battalion would be called on to defend in Greece against the invading Germans in 1941. Of course Costello, who was only fifteen when he wrote the essay, could not have foreseen this.

What is interesting about the essay is that the author displays a command of language and historical imagery beyond his years. Hunger, it is said, is the best cook. This is an author hungry for expression, or self-expression. In this fifteen-year-old’s account of Xerxes the Immortal, and the fate that awaited him, we are meeting a mind already versed in and in tune with the Ancient World.

Julius Costello was born Desmond Patrick Costello in Auckland in 1912. At eight, we are told, or nine, he discovered for himself Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary. There were a few books belonging to his mother, who had trained as a teacher, in the inner-city tenements where he was growing up in Auckland — first in the grim and gritty Eden Terrace where he was born on the smoky fringe of Newton, then in a small house in the suburb of Ponsonby. The latter comprised a couple of rooms over a shop, which he shared with his brothers and sisters among the sturdy poor of working-class Auckland. But there was no dictionary to engage his imagination to compare with Lemprière. He found it in the local institute library by the Three Lamps, Ponsonby, and soon devoured it, page by page. At fifteen Costello won a junior national scholarship to university but was too young to take it up. He sat for another award, the Lissie Rathbone Scholarship, worth twice as much, won it, and went to ’Varsity. He read Lycias in the original Greek when he was sixteen. At university, encouraged by his professor, he read so voraciously and widely that he began writing Greek and Latin quite naturally. His classics professor, an abstemious cigar-smoking Scotsman named Paterson, taught him Hebrew as well. Costello had already taught himself the Romance languages, according to his brother Phil, and picked up a bit of Gaelic and Yiddish on the side, so it is not surprising to find him described fifty years later in the centennial history of the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Auckland (1983) as probably the most brilliant linguist ever in the department.

Clearly Desmond Patrick Costello was a prodigy of some sort. But what sort? And where was it leading?

It is difficult to get an accurate picture of the young Costello in New Zealand. Except for a declassified security file, there are almost no contemporary records.

Eyes, blue; hair, brown; height, 6ft 2in. A particularly level-headed student. No communistic or similar views …

one reads in his New Zealand SIS (Security Intelligence Service) file. The entry refers to Costello’s undergraduate years at Auckland. But this is contradicted by another entry in the file:

Associated with a group noted for its radical tendencies and communist leanings.

This is confusing, and perhaps misleading, like his reported height. Costello was thin, tall, long-legged as a stork. When he departed for Cambridge he was almost six feet four inches. Yet according to Alex McDonald, another classicist who would precede him to England, at school — on the Auckland Grammar School shooting range — Costello had to be propped up with a pillow before he could see the target.

He was by far the smallest boy in the school. I was Sergeant Major in charge of Musketry and had to direct the whole school through its shooting practice with .22 rifles. We needed to put a pillow behind Paddy’s shoulders.

Evidently he developed physically almost as fast as he did mentally. Yet confusion and uncertainty remain. Until Costello enters Cambridge University in England, we are confronted by a seeming enigma, an original mind lacking in job description. At the University College of Auckland Costello is sociable and witty, but joins no clubs. Alert and athletic but plays no team sport, only tennis. Is not remembered for any debating, artistic or literary pursuits. Indeed in an aviary of literary peacocks — James Bertram, Jack Bennett, John Mulgan, leading lights who will also depart for England — Costello is hardly noticed at all.

Like Costello, these Auckland contemporaries have a feeling for history and language. Also a social conscience. They too are restless and impatient with the furniture of the ordinary world, and just as anxious as he to escape the suffocating conventions and monotony of their New Zealand background. It is a tiny place, the university college where they come to study full time. They congregate under the tower of a fine new arts building, housing languages and classics, in Princes Street. Bertram and Bennett have reserved seats in the library. Picture them, the privileged few, this tiny band of thoroughbreds moving about the half-empty corridors and cafeteria, and still emptier library, in an unreal building of white fresh-cut stone (Bertram writes). They know and write about one another compulsively in the university journals. Yet Costello is not mentioned. Apart from a solitary appearance at the literary club, he might be invisible.

It seems he saw himself getting into print. R.A.K. Mason, a poet and a kind of missionary of the Left who frequented the campus, was giving a talk to the club. Costello went along and met him. Avoid cant, Mason told him. If you want to write, go and talk to the bargees. If Costello took the advice, the university literary magazines gave no sign. They avoided him and he, them. Apparently it was Costello’s only appearance at the literary club.

There were of course social distinctions in Auckland. The average arts student of the thirties was Anglican, middle class and conservative, exhaling an air, if not of sanctity, of comfortable orthodoxy. Anything departing from the norm was suspect. Probably Costello’s Irishness and lack of polish set him apart. James Bertram’s father for example was a church minister, John Mulgan’s a literary editor. Costello’s father was a grocer. Costello’s outsider status, for all that, may be an illusion, more apparent than real.

A family story suggests that the Costellos claimed descent from the black Irish who landed off the coast of Scotland from the wrecked Spanish Armada in 1588. But the story is questionable, unconfirmed except anecdotally and by references in Costello’s New Zealand security file. His birth in New Zealand was the result of an arranged marriage. Costello’s parents were immigrant Irish — his mother from the south, the father from Dublin — who met and married in Melbourne and came to New Zealand on their honeymoon. Here they stayed, for no particular reason that can be discovered, and raised a family. To that extent Desmond, the second born, was an accidental New Zealander.

We lived in Melbourne, his mother Mary said, speaking of her people who had emigrated to Australia where she was born. She added, But we grew up in Ireland.

Mary Costello was a fierce little woman with frizzy hair who sang. She sang and he sang — music was a shared passion. She sang operatic arias in the family shop and bequeathed to the second son, he said, perfect pitch. Can God sing? Desmond is reported to have asked the local Catholic priest. Desmond, or Des — the Paddy would come later — was an altar boy, aged six or seven. Certainly he can, the priest replied. The boy shook his head. No. I mean in tune? Like my ma.

What made all our family sing in tune, Costello would write later, was the fact that my mother could, and did. He wrote this during the war in 1941. By now the voice of a boy soprano had metamorphosed into a lilting Irish tenor with a considerable repertoire; by now, a friend records, Paddy could ad lib or be persuaded to sing from his repertoire in almost any European language. He seems to have acquired this facility, like almost everything else, by a process known only to himself.

Someone has said that at Cambridge Costello was known as the Irish Nightingale, attributing the phrase to Anthony Blunt. This can’t be right, for Blunt and Costello hardly knew each other at Cambridge. Nightingales apart however, mention of Blunt, the future Keeper of the Royal Pictures and Cambridge spy, provides us with a yardstick, perverse as it may seem, helping to pin down an elusive colonial personality. What is unusual about the young Blunt in England, as about the young Costello in New Zealand, is the extent to which their adult interests were already fixed before puberty — two givens or constants which would last a lifetime. In Blunt’s case, modern art and Poussin; in Costello’s, languages and scholarship. We are told by Blunt’s biographer, Miranda Carter, that his school career at Marlborough included eight scholarships. Costello when he left for Trinity College, Cambridge, had picked up nine scholarships. The difference is that although he grew up in the core of working-class Auckland with dense housing all around on the slopes of the Ponsonby Road ridge, squashed into a couple of rooms over a shop with three brothers and two sisters, Costello’s parents apparently didn’t need the subsidy.

At primary school he leap-frogged classes and sat for the coveted Humphrey Rawlings scholarship, open to any child under the age of twelve attending a public school, when he was ten. This propelled him as a Rawlings Scholar to grammar school at eleven, with free tuition, books and an annual £10 maintenance guaranteed for three years. The winner was expected to show that his parents were poor and needy. Certainly the district was styled poor. But Costello’s father was not poor. When he died suddenly in 1923, he left a young widow with six dependants who, though certainly in need, wasn’t poor either. Christopher (the father) died of a perforated ulcer when Desmond was eleven; by then the father had acquired property and moved across the harbour to a bigger shop at Devonport; he added on a butchery with flats above and joined the middle classes. There was probably another grocery shop before the one in Ponsonby. Today eighty years later the shop itself has come down to Costello’s own offspring across the world as a kind of symbol, firing their imaginations in different ways.

Paddy Costello’s son Nicholas, who at the time of writing lives in Beijing, recalls:

I remember that my image of luxury drew on Paddy’s tale of growing up in a shop, and his parents being able to go into the shop and take whatever they wanted, even in the evening. In my imagination it would have been a leg of lamb.

The original shop in Ponsonby, oddly adapted to residential use, is still there. One has an image of the young Costello, moving about from grocer’s shop to grocer’s shop, a crib in one hand, a copy of A.E. Housman in his pocket, coming home from school not to help out behind the counter, as one might expect — unless to give someone the change for a penny that you needed to operate the call phone outside — but to pick up and continue reading the book he had abandoned at breakfast, in order to — to what? To keep on with the game. What game? The game of counting scholarships.

Between the ages of ten and twenty Costello won every scholarship he was entered for, and the mother’s hand — her letters demonstrate the bond and complicity, as do his — seems to have been in every one. Other boys played King o’Seni and rounders, collected bamboo pea-shooters and marbles, and read the Magnet and the Gem; Costello did too; but mostly he played the school piano and the game of collecting scholarships. Scholarship was the Costello Condition.

Certainly young Des inherited his competitive genes from the mother. But it wasn’t only that.

There were sixty children to a class in the Curran Street primary school Costello attended, built on the site of a Chinaman’s garden. But nearby were swimming beaches and — a godsend for a bookworm — a handsome building containing a public library, the Leys Institute. For every down-and-out slumped in pubs like the Gluepot on one corner, there was an itinerant pianist offering bargain-basement music lessons on the other. The vitality compressed into that one square mile of working-class Auckland where Costello spent most of his first ten years generated explosive tensions which were a perfect forcing ground for an Irish romantic.

Costello’s mother was née Woods, Mary Woods. The Woodses, she said to him, were a cut above the ordinary. The Woodses, he would say to her after looking them up in Ireland, are the goodses. Since his mother thought good stories deserved a lot of repetition, Costello got to know more about her side of the family. There is little to be learned about his father, Christopher, except that he was a widower and twice Mary’s age — he was thirty-eight, she barely nineteen — when they married and came to New Zealand. And that he died at fifty-six, leaving her comparatively well off.

In her wedding photograph Mary appears dwarfed by her husband. She is plain-faced, tiny, and unremarkable, except for a mountain of frizzy hair which swallows might nest in. Then one notices the lip. Her upper lip curls down, defiant and insurrectionary. One knows instantly who will rule the household.

In a letter written to her after his first visit to Ireland in 1932 Costello reported on one of the sisters, his Auntie May:

I told you how impressed I was with Auntie May. She is full of high spirits, using a rather purplish vocabulary in which words with a b —— are noticeably frequent. She is in other respects very like yourself: she has the Woods lip, she uses the same turns of expression as yourself and is easily moved to tears.

Probably it is here, in the nakedness of the heart, that Costello most resembles his mother and that her influence will be felt. Mary Woods was another romantic, naive and idealistic for all her no-nonsense exterior. She will teach Des his first revolutionary songs of Ireland although she herself, born in Melbourne, has never been to Ireland. The romantic son of a romantic mother, he is a true Woods. This too is part of the Costello Condition.

The references in Costello’s New Zealand Security file to a student radical, with all that that implies, contrast quaintly with Costello’s role in the famous Queen Street riot of April 1932. This was the moment when university students in Auckland were enrolled as police specials and went out with batons to help quell the raging mob in the name of law and order. The incident was a burning issue; nearly 80,000 were officially out of work in Auckland. But once again Costello does not figure. The incident like the Depression itself seems to have passed him by. On the eve of departing for Cambridge, he doesn’t seem to have taken sides one way or another.

Trevor O’Leary offers a kind of explanation. O’Leary and the gangling Costello travelled across the water together on the daily ferry. The pair met on weekends and walked round the beaches, O’Leary spouting James Joyce, Costello responding with draughts of poetry from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Trevor O’Leary was a tally clerk on the Auckland waterfront. Whenever Costello came to see him, he said, it wasn’t to go down the stokeholds or learn about working conditions, but to meet Irish stevedores who could sing and talk to him in Gaelic. His interest was linguistic and poetic, not political.

It may be misleading to single Costello out as a sport, distinct from his contemporaries who won scholarships to Oxford. Yet there remains the fact of his Irishness, a fundamental divide. Whereas they, making good going Home to England, would head straight for the Oxford colleges where they were enrolled, Costello landing in England would make a beeline for Ireland. It was the first thing he did after his ship docked at Tilbury. Ireland was another constant, saving his soul, just a little, from the anxiety of the expatriate who can never decide where he truly belongs.

Other eventualities lay in wait to test the young Costello. Meantime, having graduated with a double First in Greek and Latin and gained a post-graduate travelling scholarship to Trinity, Cambridge, on a cloudless evening in July 1932 he sailed out of Auckland harbour. New Zealand was receding, almost an abstraction, in some ways a country he had barely known.

CAMBRIDGE

An asylum, in more ways than one

— A.E. Housman

COSTELLO ENTERED TRINITY College, Cambridge, as an exhibitioner in the autumn of 1932. A number of luminaries including the poet A.E. Housman and Wittgenstein the philosopher, besides the future spies, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, were already there. Trinity was the grandest college in Cambridge, a bastion of privilege which had nurtured six Prime Ministers, besides a tradition of racing around the Great Court before the clock had ceased to strike twelve, an undergraduate romp dramatised in the film Chariots