For Your Eyes Only (2 page)

The Flemings were certainly wealthy and well connected. On the eve of Ian's birth, they represented the epitome of the Edwardian moneyed class, though the money was new – barely two generations old – a fact that may explain Ian's eternal preoccupation with the stuff. His grandfather, Robert, born in a Dundee slum, had made a vast fortune through American railroads and other shrewd investments, with which he had built a forty-four-room Gothic mansion in
Oxfordshire, and instant respectability. The Flemings were tweedy, hearty, thrifty and vigorous, dedicated to outdoor pursuits and blood sports. Besides money and social cachet, Robert Fleming bequeathed to his sons, including the eldest, Valentine (Ian's father), a taste for hard work, a certain Presbyterian rigidity, and a family motto that emphasised action over reflection: ‘Let the deed
shaw
[show].'

Ian Fleming's parents might have stepped straight from a sepia photograph illustrating the twilight of the Edwardian era in all its doomed romance. Val Fleming was a rising star in the Conservative Party, a friend of Winston Churchill and a pillar of the landed squirearchy. A pure product of Eton and Oxford, he was handsome, gentle, intelligent and seemingly marked for success. His wife, Eve Ste Croix Rose, was equally beautiful, but bohemian, socially ambitious, wilful and artistic, with a domineering personality.

Ian, their second son, was born, on 28 May 1908, into a world of great privilege and great expectations. The first eight years of his life were idyllic, his main hurdle being how to make an impression beneath the shadow of his elder brother Peter, who was, in almost every respect, the sort of ideal child every parent longs for, and younger brothers traditionally detest. Peter was precocious, effortlessly brilliant and, if you happened to be a brother a year younger, a focus of rapt hero-worship and a permanent reminder of inadequacy. Two more brothers followed, Richard and Michael. A friend described the self-confident Fleming sons as an intimidating,
charmed unit of ‘strong, handsome, black-haired, blue-eyed boys'. There were the traditional nannies, and the traditionally brutal prep school, Durnford, an institution near Swanage which epitomised the strange British faith in bad food, plenty of Latin and beating from an early age. ‘My coff has grown to whoping coff now,' Ian wrote to his mother stoically, at the age of seven. ‘Please dont tell Mister Pellatt [the headmaster] cause just this morning he said that nun of us had coffs. I am afraid I do not like school very much.' In fact the regime seems to have made Ian no more miserable or ill than anyone else. The headmaster's wife read to the pupils from contemporary classics of boys' adventure: John Buchan's Richard Hannay stories, Fu Man Chu,
The Prisoner of Zenda
and later Bulldog Drummond, tales of strange and evil foreigners, stiff upper lips, and knock-out upper-cuts. This was the sort of story Fleming loved and, many years later, would write in an updated form.

But long before that, Fleming would find a real-life action hero tragically close to home. In 1914, Valentine Fleming had headed to the Western Front as an officer with the Oxfordshire Hussars. His moving letters to a friend and fellow officer, Winston Churchill, describing the pitted and charred landscape of the battlefront, suggest that the literary skills of both Peter and Ian were at least partly inherited. In May 1917, after a war of distinguished gallantry, Major Valentine Fleming, DSO, was killed in the trenches by shellfire.

The Fleming boys idolised their father (nicknamed ‘Mokie', on account of his ‘Smokey' pipe), and after his death he became an unattainable symbol of chivalry and moral goodness. In their nightly prayers, the boys would entreat the Almighty to ‘Make me more like Mokie.' The desire to emulate this military father-hero would run through the lives of every Fleming son, but perhaps most notably in Ian, and his fictional counterpart. It does not do to over-psychoanalyse James Bond, but perhaps this tragedy offers some clue to 007's fatherless reverence for ‘M', to the way that every villain lectures Bond as if speaking to a wayward little boy, and to the exaggerated respect Fleming showed towards older men for the rest of his life. Churchill himself wrote an obituary of Val Fleming, mourning the death of this bright hope with such a ‘lovable and charming personality', and a signed, framed copy of the eulogy was kept by Ian Fleming as a treasure throughout his life. ‘He was a man of thoughtful and tolerant opinions, which were not the less strongly or clearly held because they were not loudly or frequently asserted.'

Fleming would always retain what he called a ‘mysterious affection' for Eton, the elite British public school he attended from 1921. Peter had, of course, preceded him, blazing a trail of athletic and academic success that Ian veered away from with all the energy and wilfulness a second son could muster. Ian was often in trouble, frequently beaten by his sadistic housemaster, and notably deficient in most aspects
of his schoolwork. He also discovered girls, and lost his virginity in a box at the Royalty Kinema, Windsor – an experience that he would echo in
The Spy Who Loved Me
when describing the early love life of his heroine Vivienne Michel. Only on the athletics field did he show any real application, becoming
Victor Ludorum
, or school sports champion. Fleming was so proud of this achievement that he referred to it, wryly, in the revealing jacket blurb for
Casino Royale
: ‘Like his brother Peter – a more famous author – he was sent to Eton, where he was
Victor Ludorum
two years in succession, a distinction only once equalled – presumably by another second son trying to compensate for a brilliant older brother.'

In the premature obituary provided by M in
You Only Live Twice
, we learn that James Bond was expelled from Eton, after a ‘brief and undistinguished' school career following ‘some alleged trouble with one of the boys' maids', and was then sent to Fettes (the Eton equivalent in Scotland). Fleming escaped a similar fate when he was removed from Eton by his mother at the age of seventeen, a term early, sent to a tutorial crammer to prepare for the army entrance exams, and then duly crammed into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the training college for army officers.

By turns truculent and romantic, Fleming was not cut out for the regimented life of a Sandhurst cadet. His tutor, however, predicted that he would probably make a good
soldier, ‘provided always that the Ladies don't ruin him'. It was a prophetic remark. During one of his many forays outside the barracks, Fleming conceived a passion for Peggy Barnard, the attractive daughter of a colonel. On the evening of Sandhurst Sports Day, this blameless girl had agreed to attend an Oxford ball with another man, a date that so irritated Ian that he vowed, if she went ahead with it, to go to London and ‘find myself a tart'. Peggy went to the ball, and Ian went to the Forty-Three Club in Soho, carried out his threat, and came down with a nasty dose of gonorrhoea. Fleming's enraged mother booked him into a nursing home, told the Sandhurst authorities that he was ill, and then pulled him out of the college altogether. In a last-ditch effort to instil some sort of balance in her increasingly wayward son (and if possible prepare him for the Foreign Office exams, her newest ambition for him), ‘Mrs Val', as she was known, dispatched Ian to a finishing school, the Tennerhof, at Kitzbühel in the Austrian Alps.

The Tennerhof was a peculiar establishment, run by an eccentric English couple, Ernan and Phyllis Forbes Dennis, a former diplomat-spy and his novelist wife. Ian learned to ski, and spent much of his time conducting brief liaisons with the local girls. ‘Technique in bed is important,' he wrote in a notebook, with somewhat unattractive languor. ‘It is the scornful coupling that makes the affairs of Austrians and Anglo-Saxons so fragmentary and in the end so distasteful.' Far more important than brushing up his technique in bed
and on the slopes, under the indulgent care of the Forbes Dennises, Fleming would begin to read, voraciously, and start to write, tentatively. Every evening, wild-haired Phyllis Forbes Dennis would spin fantastic stories at the dinner table (having spent the early part of each day in bed writing novels under a pseudonym), and she encouraged her pupils to do likewise. Many years later, Fleming would credit Phyllis with helping to launch his career as a writer, though it would take many more years for that talent to emerge. He wrote several poems and short stories, which were vivid and expressive if rather over-cooked.

In Fleming's memory, Kitzbühel was a ‘golden time', and it was followed by two more years away from England, first in Munich and then Geneva. The young Englishman cut a dashing figure: he drove a smart black two-seater Buick, developed an excellent command of French and German, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. He also became engaged, briefly, to a young Swiss woman named Monique Panchaud de Bottomes, until his mother intervened. In 1931 he took the Foreign Office exams, but did not win a place. Young Fleming had successively failed to live up to expectations at Eton and Sandhurst, and now in his bid to join the Foreign Service.

At the age of twenty-one, Fleming was handsome in a somewhat vulpine way. A broken nose (acquired in a collision on the Eton football field with Henry Douglas-Home, brother of the future Prime Minister) added to his rakish
allure. Here, then, was a man of athletic good looks and Scottish ancestry, dangerous to women, cultured and charming, with a taste for fast cars, expensive things and foreign adventures. His time at Eton had been an unmitigated failure, but he could ski beautifully, speak German fluently, and seduce effortlessly. Ernan Forbes Dennis said of his young pupil: ‘He has excellent taste . . . and a desire both for truth and knowledge. He is virile and ambitious, generous and kind-hearted.' There was also something solitary and reserved about his character, a central hardness. All these things could be said of the young Fleming; in time, they would also be true of James Bond.

Mrs Val stepped in once more. Ian, she decreed, would become a journalist. Strings were pulled, and in October 1931 he took paid employment for the first time at Reuters news agency. This would prove a crucial formative experience. ‘I learned to write fast, and above all, be accurate,' he recalled. ‘In Reuters if you weren't accurate you were fired, and that was the end of that.' Accuracy, speed and facts – the more colourful the better – these were the three key elements of a technique that would come to fruition with the Bond books. In addition, journalism would introduce Fleming to the wider world of international politics and foreign travel, the background for what was to come. In his first year in the job, Fleming covered the Alpine motor trials, an assignment that confirmed a growing fascination with fast cars, motor-racing and the associated high life, plus a Stalinist
show trial of six British engineers accused of spying. Fleming's first taste of Moscow – gloomy, oppressive, granite-faced Communism – would inform his later images of Russian strength and menace. He loved it. With the chutzpah of youth, he formally requested an interview with Stalin; he was not surprised to be turned down, but was entirely astonished to received a note apparently signed by Stalin himself, explaining that he was simply too busy. The writer William Plomer, who met Fleming at this time, described him as ‘like a mettlesome young horse' with ‘a promise of something dashing and daring'. He seemed, thought Plomer, to ‘smell some battle from afar'.

Having found a job he was good at, and enjoyed, Fleming promptly abandoned journalism for an exceptionally boring job in the City. The decision was perhaps less peculiar than it first seems. Robert Fleming had died, leaving nothing to his grandsons, whom he expected to be provided for by their father's estate. The nature of Val's will, however, meant that they would not inherit anything unless or until their mother remarried, or died. Such wills were not uncommon at the time, but it had a profound and unintended effect on Val's sons. The Fleming boys had been born to a world of money; the only problem was that they did not have very much of it. Ian Fleming, not for the last time in his life, decided to choose the more lucrative option and joined the merchant bank Cull & Co.

Fleming was not a good banker and soon shifted to
stockbroking, to which he was even less suited. Indeed, one friend described him as ‘the world's worst stockbroker'. His plan was simply to ‘make a packet and then get out' – an ambition often stated by financial folk that seldom comes to pass, and even more rarely produces satisfaction. Fleming spent money as fast as he made it, on golf, cards, books (he would become an avid bibliophile) and women: young women from the cocktail party circuit, including a ‘rather spiffing' nightclub dancer (or ‘bubble girl') called Storm, but also older women – these older women were often intelligent, with strong personalities, and by no means naive poppets or stereotypical Bond Girls; they also tended to be married, usually to people Fleming knew. Whereas Bond goes to bed with a particular type (and shape) of woman, Fleming was more catholic and perhaps less choosy in his tastes. As one girlfriend remarked, ‘For Ian, women were like fishcakes. Mind you he was very fond of fishcakes, but he never pretended there was any mystique about eating them.' Bond dines on caviar and the finest fillet steak, and then sleeps with the most beautiful women; Fleming, sexually speaking, ‘ate fishcakes', lots of them. He was not quite a cad, but he was certainly a lothario, a ladies' man, yet one who preferred the easy, undemanding company of fellow clubmen. He bought a former Baptist chapel in Ebury Street, Belgravia, where the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley had lived, and painted the inside suit-grey. Fleming's distinctive interior decor no doubt reinforced the seductive, melancholy image
that many women found irresistible, but it also reflected an innate sense of style and a fascination with colour and composition (perhaps inherited from his fashionable mother) that would find expression in his writing: room interiors are often meticulously described in the books. In upper-class party circles he was known as ‘Glamour Boy', and there is no evidence he ever objected to the nickname. ‘London has got its claws into me,' he told Ernan Forbes Dennis. But Fleming also got his claws into London, living a life in the capital's clubs and fleshpots of unalloyed pleasure that was expensive, pleasant, louche and intellectually unchallenging.