James Bond: The Authorised Biography E-Book

John Pearson

• Herausgeber: Ian Fleming Publications
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: James Bond 007
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 549

Beschreibung

In this landmark volume, Agent 007 recounts the story of his life, revealing breathtaking adventures only hinted at in Ian Fleming's iconic stories and showing a side of himself never before seen. The resulting book is one of the most extraordinary works of our times – the authorised life of a myth, the o cial biography of the one and only James Bond.

Leseprobe

James Bond:The Authorised Biography

James Bond: The Authorised Biography

JOHN PEARSON

For Lydia Pearson

Contents

Foreword: A Licence to Write

1: This is Commander Bond

2: Boyhood of a Spy

3: Les Sensations Fortes

4: Luminous Reader

5: Eve of War Games

6: Bond’s War

7: Scandal

8: 007 is Born

9: Casino

10: Vendetta

The Man and the Myth

11: Superbond

12: Bond Cocu

13: The Soft Life

14: The Truth about M

15: The Bastard’s Gone

Foreword: A Licence to Write

My father published this book 50 years ago today. I am fiercely proud of it. It is a page turner and reads well. At its heart there are three people: James Bond, Ian Fleming and John Pearson. All three have distinct voices.

Let me start with the relationship between Fleming and my father. Fleming had been my father’s boss on the Atticus column of the Sunday Times from the mid-50s. It all started with a phone call in late 1954. “The name is Fleming. Ian Fleming. You won’t have heard of me. A mutual friend tells me you might be looking for a job.” Instantly my father diagnosed the voice. Clipped, commanding and faintly bored. The consonants those of a navy officer with an overlay of Eton. Three days later the two met in Kemsley House in Gray’s Inn Road. The deal was sealed with “the warm dry handclasp” given by Fleming to Bond.

Despite the difference of age, a friendship formed. “I’ve never known anyone who gave so little of himself away. He was a man without shadows. The black homburg. The tightly furled umbrella” wrote my father. Fleming gave him licence to write about whatever struck him. The result was a column that achieved a cult following. Fleming’s approach also allowed my father to publish six books during his time on the Sunday Times. Fleming wrote the foreword to the first of these which was a ghost-written account of airborne drugs, smuggling and crime called Airline Detective. “I really do honestly think that it is the most competently ghosted bit of writing I have ever read” Fleming wrote in August 1961.

My father’s first brush with Bond was in reading Live and Let Die which had been published earlier in 1954. When my father told Fleming how much he had enjoyed it, Fleming shot back “My dear fellow. Let us not exaggerate”. Fleming would pretend to be bored writing the Bond books, describing them as “caviar for the public”. Fleming’s death in August 1964 changed everything. Leonard Russell, the Sunday Times editor, told my father to finish off a book he was writing on Donald Campbell and his land speed record. He was assigned at the age of 34 to write Fleming’s biography with cooperation from all. The publication of my father’s biography of Fleming in 1966 brought his journalistic career to a close.

The relationship between Bond and Fleming has been much discussed. To many, Bond was Fleming’s alter ego. What can we say about the relationship between Bond and Pearson? The interviews in this biography of James Bond are set in Bermuda as a series of conversations between Bond and Pearson. They are full of humour and humanity. Here Bond corrects Fleming on points of detail and Pearson provides a backstory for Bond that Fleming never thought to explain. As such it is now seen by Bond fans as a key piece in the Bond canon. Mix in “The Notes” which are transcripts of my father’s interviews for the biography of Ian Fleming and out come living people, including a sketch of M in later life – the redoubtable Admiral Godfrey. He also reveals Fleming’s close friend Ivar Bryce (my father calls him Brinton in this book) and many others.

Where do the names in this book come from? Evenings around the dinner table with my father were often moments to talk about the characters he was inventing. Many of them were based around family friends. The wonderfully camp Richard de Combray becomes the armaments king who finances Marthe de Brandt, Bond’s first passion. Frau Nisberg, Bond’s landlady in Geneva, was based on our friend Ariane Nisberg. Prizeman – the porter at Blades – was named after our landlord John Prizeman. Birkin, the rugged head of Station F. in Helsinki, is based on David Birkin who was a neighbour, friend and father of the late Jane Birkin – as an aside, David was a genuine war hero.

We also set my father the challenge of including family members. Bond’s housekeeper May is suddenly revealed to be my grandmother who sniffed when she disapproved. This was a signal that my father watched for just as Bond does with May. Another curiosity was the inclusion of Kissy, the mother to Bond’s son, who marries “a Japanese from Shell”. My maternal grandfather worked for Shell for many years and my father found him dull but reliable.

What about the places? My father and Bond spent time at King’s College School Wimbledon (as did I for a stint no longer than Bond’s!). New York clearly bewitched Fleming, Bond and my father to the extent that all three ate oyster stew in Grand Central station. Paris was very similar. Bond and my father were keen on Les Andelys, a magical town on the upper Seine. Kent mattered to my father, to Bond and to Fleming. All three loved St Margaret’s Bay. As a family we froze on beaches nearby. We had a cottage near Sandwich where Fleming played so much golf.

When it came to lifestyle there were also similarities. The Italian cars that my father loved when he lived in Rome in the mid-60s find their way into Bond’s life. Bond equips his bachelor flat in London with Minton crockery which my father collected. Knowing where to eat in every part of the world was a passion for Bond, Fleming and Pearson.

My father enjoyed writing this book and his family enjoyed letting our imaginations run over it. His final secret joke was to give Bond his own birthday: 5 October. It is nearly two years since my father’s death and nearly 60 since Ian Fleming’s, but this book ensures that the triangular relationship between Fleming, Bond and my father lives on.

Mark Pearson, 5 October 2023

1

This is Commander Bond

I like to think that the plane was Urquhart’s idea of a joke. He was the only one of them to have a sense of humour (he must have found it inconvenient at times in that grey morgue of a building up by Regent’s Park where they all still work) and since he booked my tickets when he made arrangements for my trip he would have known about the plane. It left Kennedy at 4 p.m. for Bermuda. What Urquhart failed to tell me was that it was a honeymooners’ special, crammed with newly-weds on packaged honeymoons in the sun.

There is something curiously unsettling about mating young Americans en masse. I had already had a two-hour wait at Kennedy from London, this on an icy January Saturday with the authentic New York sleet gusting against the windows of the transit lounge. Now for a further three hours I had to share this nuptial flight on mercifully false pretences. The roses, the Californian champagne were not for me.

‘Welcome aboard – this is the sunshine special, folks. For all of you just setting out together on life’s greatest adventure, the congratulations of your captain, crew and Pan Am, the world’s most experienced airline.’

Polite laughter. Some cheery fellow clapped. And in my lonely gangway seat I started worrying about my adventure.

Where did old Urquhart’s sense of humour stop?

Between me and the window sat a nice young couple, suitably absorbed in one another. She was in pink, he in dark grey. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was disturbing, almost as if in disapproval of my so-called mission.

Dinner was served – a four-course plastic airline meal, a triumph of space-age packaging – and, as I munched my Chicken Maryland, crunched on my lonely Krispee Krackers, my angst became acute.

Strangely enough, until this moment I had not bothered over my arrival in Bermuda. Urquhart had said I would be taken care of. ‘It’s all laid on. Everything’s arranged, and, from what I gather, they do one rather well.’ In London, words like these had sounded reassuring. One nodded and said ‘quite’. Now one began to wonder.

I had a drink, and then another and, as the big, warm aircraft thundered its way towards the tropics, tried going over in my mind the succession of events that had brought me there.

They had begun almost two years ago, after I published my ‘official’ life of Ian Fleming. It was an unusual book in the sheer spate of correspondence I received – from ballistic-minded Japanese, French teenage Bondphiles, crime-crazy Swedes and postgraduate Americans writing their theses on the modern thriller. I did my best to answer them. But there was just one letter which I had found it difficult to deal with. It was from Vienna from a woman signing herself Maria Künzler.

It was a long, slightly gushing letter written in purple ink and it described a prewar winter spent in the ski-resort of Kitzbühel with Ian Fleming. In my book I had dismissed this period of Fleming’s life somewhat briefly. Fleming had been to Kitzbühel several times, first in the 1920s when he stayed there with some people called Forbes-Dennis. (Mrs Forbes-Dennis was, incidentally, the novelist, Phyllis Bottome.) Theoretically Fleming had been learning German, though in practice he had spent most of his time enjoying the mountains and the local girls. From the letter it seemed as if Miss Künzler had been one of them. Certainly her information about Fleming seemed authentic and she described certain friends from Kitzbühel I had interviewed for my book. This made a paragraph towards the end of her letter all the more baffling.

‘So you can understand,’ she wrote, ‘the excitement we all felt when the good-looking young James Bond appeared at Kitzbühel. He had been in Ian’s house at Eton, although of course he was much younger than Ian. Even in those days, James was engaged in some sort of undercover work, and Ian, who liked ragging people, used to make fun of him and tried getting information out of him. James would get very cross.’

When I read this I decided, not unnaturally, that Miss Künzler was slightly mad – or, if not mad, then in that happy state where she could muddle fact and fiction. I thanked her for her letter, and merely wrote that her anecdote about James Bond had caused me some surprise.

Here I should make it plain that when I wrote the Life of Ian Fleming, I never doubted for a moment that James Bond was Ian Fleming, a Mitty-figure Fleming had constructed from his daydreams and his childhood memories. I had known Fleming personally for several years – the very years in fact when he was writing the early James Bond books – and I had picked out countless resemblances between the James Bond of the books and the Ian Fleming I worked with on the Sunday Times. Fleming had even endowed his hero with certain of his own very personal trademarks – the clothes, the eating habits, even the appearance – so much so that whenever I pictured James Bond it was always Fleming’s face (and not Sean Connery’s) I saw.

True, there had been certain facts which failed to tally with the Bond-is-Fleming thesis. Fleming, for one, denied it – strongly. In a way he had to, but it is a fact that the more methodically you read the Bond books, the more you start to notice details which refer to James Bond’s life outside the books – details about his family, glimpses of his life at school and tantalising references to his early secret-service career and love-life. Over the thirteen James Bond books the sheer weight of all these ‘outside’ references is surprising, especially as they seem to be remarkably consistent. It was this that originally gave rise to rumours that Fleming, whilst including something of himself in James Bond’s character, had based his hero on a real-life agent he had encountered during his time with British Naval Intelligence in the war.

One theory was that the ‘real’ James Bond had been a captain of the Royal Marine Commandos whose deeds and personality inspired Fleming. Another held that Fleming had carefully studied the career of the British double agent, James Morton, whose body was discovered in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo in 1962. There were other rumours too. None of them seemed to hold much water, certainly not enough to make me change my mind about the Fleming-Bond relationship. Then the second letter came from the mysterious Miss Künzler in Vienna.

It arrived some three months after I had written to her, apologised for the delay and said that she had not been well. (From what I could work out, she would now have been in her mid-sixties.) It was a much shorter letter than the earlier one. The florid writing was a little shaky, but everything she wrote was to the point. She said that there was not much she could add to her earlier account of young James Bond. That Kitzbühel holiday had been in 1938, and she had never seen James Bond again, although she was naturally amused at the world-wide success of Ian’s books about him. After the way that Ian had behaved it was funny, was it not? She added that Bond had written her several letters after the holiday. She might have them somewhere. When she could summon up the energy she would look for them and let me have them. Also she thought there were some photographs. In the meantime, surely there must be people who had known James Bond at Eton. Why not contact them?

I replied immediately, begging her to send the letters. There was no reply.

I wrote several times – still without success. Finally I decided to take Miss Künzler’s advice and check the Eton records for a boy called Bond. Fleming had entered Eton in the autumn term of 1921. Apart from saying that James Bond was younger than Ian Fleming, Miss Künzler had been vague about his age. (Supposing, of course, that an Etonian called Bond had really been at Kitzbühel in 1938.) I checked through the whole of the 1920s. There were several Bonds, but none of them called James and none of them in Fleming’s old house. Clearly Miss Künzler was wrong, but out of curiosity I checked on through the early thirties. And here I did find something. There actually was a James Bond who was recorded having entered Slater’s House in the autumn term of 1933. According to the Eton list he stayed just over two years; his name had disappeared from the spring list of 1936.

So much for the records, which neither proved nor disproved what Miss Künzler said. An old Etonian called James Bond certainly existed, but he seemed too young to have known Fleming. It was unlikely that anyone of this age could have been caught up in the secret-service world by 1937.

I tried to find out more about this young James Bond, but drew a blank. A puzzled secretary in the school office said there appeared to be no file on him – nor had they any records of his family, nor of what happened to him. She suggested contacting the Old Etonian Society. I did, but again without success. All they could offer were the names of some of Bond’s contemporaries who might have kept in touch with him.

I wrote to eighteen of them. Six replied, saying that they remembered him. The consensus seemed to be that this James Bond had been an indifferent scholar, but physically strong, dark-haired and rather wild. One of the letters said he was a moody boy. None of them mentioned that he had any particular friends, but no one had bullied him. There was no definite information about his home life or his relatives. The nearest to this was a passage which occurred in one of the letters:

I’ve an idea [my correspondent wrote] that there must have been some sort of trouble in the family. I have no details. It was a long time ago and boys are notoriously insensitive to such things. But I have a clear impression of him as a boy who had suffered some sort of loss. He was the type of brooding, self-possessed boy who stands apart from his fellows. I never did hear what became of him.

Nor, it appeared, had anybody else.

This was distinctly tantalising for, as close readers of the Bond books will recall, these few extremely inconclusive facts find an uncanny echo in the obituary of James Bond, supposedly penned by M himself, which Fleming published at the end of You Only Live Twice. According to this source, James Bond’s career at Eton had been ‘brief and undistinguished’.

There was no reference in any of the letters to the reason M gave for James Bond’s departure – ‘some alleged trouble with one of the boys’ maids’. But there were two other interesting parallels. According to M both of Bond’s parents were killed in an Alpine climbing accident when he was eleven and the boy was subsequently described as being athletic but ‘inclined to be solitary by nature’.

None of this proved that the mysterious James Bond who had entered Eton in 1933 was Fleming’s hero. As any libel lawyer knows, coincidences of exactly this sort are a hazard every author faces. Just the same, it was all very strange.

My next step was clear. Bond’s obituary goes on to say that, after Eton, the young reprobate was sent to his father’s old school, Fettes. Accordingly I wrote to the school secretary asking if he could tell me anything about a boy called Bond who may have entered the school some time in 1936. But before I could receive a reply, another letter came which altered everything. Inside a large brown envelope bearing a Vienna postmark was a short official note from an Austrian lawyer. He had the sad task of informing me that his client, Fraulein Künzler of 27, Friedrichsplatz had died, not unexpectedly, in her sleep some three weeks earlier. He had the honour now of settling her small estate. Among her papers he had found a note saying that a certain photograph was to be sent to me. In accordance with the dead woman’s wishes he had pleasure in enclosing it. Would I be so kind as to acknowledge?

The photograph proved to be a sepia enlargement of a snapshot showing a group of hikers against a background of high mountains. One of the hikers was a girl, plump, blonde, extremely pretty. On one side of her, unmistakable with his long, prematurely melancholy Scottish face, stood Ian Fleming. On the other was a burly, very handsome, dark-haired boy apparently in his late teens. The trio seemed extremely serious. I turned the photo over. On the back there was a note in purple ink.

This is the only picture I could find. There seem to be no letters, but this is James and Ian out in Kitzbühel in 1938. The girl with them is me, but somehow I don’t think you’d recognise me now.

So much for poor Miss Künzler.

The photograph, of course, changed everything. If the young tough really was James Bond – and why should the defunct Miss Künzler lie? – something extremely odd had happened. The whole idea of Fleming and the James Bond saga needed to be revised. Who was this James Bond Fleming had evidently known? What had happened to him since 1938? How far had Ian Fleming used him as a model for his books? The reality of Bond opened up a range of fascinating speculation.

I had not heard from Fettes, and there was still precious little evidence – a photograph, an entry in the Eton Register, a handful of coincidences – enough to pose the mystery rather than solve it. But there were certain clear lines now which I could pursue and did – but not for long. I had barely started contacting several of Fleming’s friends from the Kitzbühel days when I was rung up by a man called Hopkins.

Once a policeman, always a policeman – there was no mistaking Mr Hopkins’s voice. He understood from certain sources that I was making certain inquiries. He would like very much to see me. Perhaps we could have lunch together? Somewhat incongruously he suggested next day at the National Liberal Club in Whitehall Place.

Mr Hopkins was an unusual Liberal: a big, bald man with outsize eyebrows, he was waiting for me by the bust of Gladstone in the foyer. Something about him seemed to make old Gladstone look a little shifty. I felt the same. We had a table by the window in the big brown dining-room. Brown was the dominating colour – brown Windsor soup, brown walls and furniture. Mr Hopkins, as I noticed now, was wearing a somewhat hairy, dark brown suit. When the soup came he started talking, his sentences interspersed with noisy spoonfuls of brown Windsor soup.

‘This is all off the record, as you’ll understand. I’m from the Ministry of Defence. We know about your current inquiries. It is my duty to inform you they must stop.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they are not in the national interest.’

‘Who says they’re not?’

‘You must take it from me they’re not.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because if you don’t, we’ll have the Official Secrets Act down on you just so fast that you won’t know what’s hit you.’

So much for Mr Hopkins. After brown Windsor we had cottage pie, apparently the staple food of Liberals – nutritious doubtless, but no great stimulus to conversation. I tried getting Mr Hopkins to reveal at least something of his sources. He had been at the game too long for this. When we parted he said, ‘Remember what I said. We wouldn’t like any unpleasantness.’

‘Tell that to Mr Gladstone,’ I replied.

It was all most unsatisfactory. If there were really any reason for keeping quiet about James Bond, I felt I had a right to know. I certainly deserved an explanation and from someone with a little more finesse than Mr Hopkins. A few days later I received it. This was where Urquhart comes upon the scene. Another invitation out to lunch – this time to Kettners. I said I wouldn’t come unless he promised no more threats at lunchtime. The voice at the other end of the telephone sounded pained.

‘Threats? No, really – how unfortunate. Simply an intelligent discussion. There are some slightly sensitive areas. The time has come to talk . . .’

‘Exactly.’

Urquhart was very, very thin and managed to combine baldness with quite startlingly thick black hair along his wrists and hands. As with the statues of Giacometti he seemed to have been squeezed down to the stick-thin shadow of his soul. Happily his expense account, unlike his colleague’s, stretched to a bottle of respectable Chianti.

From the beginning I attempted a bold front, and had produced the photograph of Bond and Fleming before we had finished our lasagne.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘Oh, very interesting. What a good-looking chap he was in those days. Still is, of course. That’s half his trouble.’

‘You mean he’s alive? James Bond’s alive?’

‘Of course. My dear chap. Why else d’you think we’re here?’

‘But all this nonsense from your Mr Hopkins – the Official Secrets Act. He almost threatened me with gaol.’

‘Alas, poor Hopkins. He’s had a dreadful lot of trouble with this dreadful lot. He has a hernia too. And an anaemic wife. Some men are born to suffer.’

Urquhart smiled, exposing over-large false teeth.

‘No, Bond’s an interesting fellow. He’s had a dreadful press of course and then the films – he’s not at all like that in real life. You’d like him. Perhaps you ought to meet him. He enjoyed your book, you know – your Life of Ian. Made him laugh, although, between the two of us, his sense of humour’s not his strongest point. No, we were all extremely grateful for your book. Hopkins was certain that you’d smelled a rat, but I told him not to worry.’

‘But where is Bond and what’s he doing?’

Urquhart giggled.

‘Steady. We mustn’t rush our fences. What do you think of this Chianti? Brolio, not Broglio as Ian would insist on spelling it. But then he wasn’t really very good on wines. All that balls he used to write about champagne when the dear old chap couldn’t tell Bollinger from bath water.’

For the remainder of the lunch we chatted about Fleming. Urquhart had worked with him during the war, and, like everyone who knew him, was fascinated by the contradictions of the man. Urquhart used them to avoid further discussion of James Bond. Indeed, as we were leaving, he simply said, ‘We’ll be in touch – you have my word for that. But I’d be grateful if you’d stop your investigations into James Bond. They’d cause a lot of trouble if they reached the papers – the very thought of it would do for Hopkins’s hernia.’

Somewhat lamely I agreed, and walked away from Kettners thinking that, between them, Hopkins and Urquhart had managed a deft piece of hushing up. Provided I kept quiet I expected to hear nothing more from them. But I was wrong. A few weeks later Urquhart rang again, asking me to see him in his office.

It was the first time I had entered the Headquarters building up by Regent’s Park which formed the basis for Fleming’s ‘Universal Export’ block. I was expecting something altogether grander, although presumably all secret services adopt a certain camouflaging seediness. This was a place of Kafkaesque oppressiveness – grey corridors, grey offices, grey people. There was a pair of ancient milk-bottles outside Urquhart’s door. Urquhart himself seemed full of bounce. He offered me a mentholated cigarette, then lit one for himself and choked alarmingly. The room began to smell of smouldering disinfectant, and it was hard to tell where Urquhart ended and the smoke began.

‘This business of James Bond,’ he said. ‘You must forgive my seeming so mysterious the other day. I really don’t enjoy that sort of thing. But I’ve been contacting the powers that be, and we’ve a little proposition that might interest you.’

He paused, tapping a false tooth with a cheap blue biro.

‘I’ll be quite honest with you. For some time now we’ve been increasingly concerned about the Bond affair. You are by no means the first outsider to have stumbled on it. Just recently we’ve had some nasty scares. There have been several journalists. They have not all been quite so, shall we say, cooperative as you. It’s been sheer murder for poor Hopkins. The trouble is that when the story breaks – and of course it will, these things always come out in the end – it will be damn bad for the Service. Seem like another gaffe, another Philby business, only worse. Can’t you just see those headlines?’

Urquhart rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.

‘From our point of view it would make far more sense to have the whole thing told responsibly.’

‘Meaning suitably censored.’

‘No, no, no, no. Don’t bring these obscene words in unnecessarily. This is a story we’re all proud of. I might almost say that it is one of the most startling and original coups in our sort of work. Without exploring it completely it would be hard to understand just how remarkable it is.’

I had not suspected quite such eloquence in Urquhart. I asked him to be more explicit.

‘Certainly. Forgive me. I thought you were with me. I am suggesting that you write the full life story of James Bond. If you agree, I’ll see that you have full cooperation from the department. You can see his colleagues. And, of course, I’ll make arrangements for you to meet Bond in person.’

As I learnt later, there was more to Urquhart’s plans than he let on. He was a complex man, and the years he had spent in undercover work made him as secretive as any of his colleagues. What he failed to tell me was the truth about James Bond. I had to piece the facts together from chance remarks I heard during the next few weeks. It appeared that Bond himself was facing something of a crisis. Everyone was very guarded over the details of his trouble. No ailing film-star could have had more reverent discretion from his studio than Bond from his colleagues at Headquarters. But it seemed clear that he had been suffering from some complicated ailment during the previous year which had kept him entirely from active service. The symptoms made it sound like the sort of mental and physical collapse that overworked executives succumb to in their middle years. Certainly the previous September Bond had spent over a month in King Edward VII Hospital for Officers at Beaumont Street under an assumed name (no one would tell me what it was). He seems to have been treated for a form of acute hepatitis and was now convalescent. But, as so often happens with this uncomfortable disease, he still had to take things very easy. This was apparently something of a problem. The doctors had insisted that if Bond were to avoid a fresh relapse he simply had to have total physical and mental rest from active service and the London winter. James Bond apparently thought otherwise.

He was insisting forcefully that he was cured and was already clamouring to return to active service. People appeared to sympathise with his anxieties, but the Director of Medical Services had called in Sir James Molony – the neurologist and an old friend and ally of James Bond in the past – to back him up. After seeing Bond, Sir James had raised quite a furore in the Directorate. For once they really had to use a little sympathy and imagination for one of their own people. Something concrete had to be done for Bond, something to take his mind off his troubles, and keep him occupied and happy while he recuperated. According to Sir James, Bond had been complaining that ‘with liver trouble it’s not the disease that kills you: it’s the bloody boredom.’

Surprisingly, it was M, rarely the most understanding of mortals where human weakness is concerned, who had come up with at least a partial solution.

One of the few men M respected in the whole secret-service world was Sir William Stephenson, the so-called ‘Quiet Canadian’ who had been the outstandingly successful head of British Intelligence in New York through the war. For several years now this lively millionaire had been living in semi-retirement on the top floor of a luxury hotel in Bermuda. Both Bond and Ian Fleming knew him well. Why not, suggested M, have Bond sent out to stay with him? They would enjoy each other’s company and Bond could swim, shoot and sail to his heart’s content. Sir James approved the idea of Bermuda. The climate was ideal but, as he said, the last thing Bond required was a vacation. He’d had too much vacation as it was. His mind needed to be occupied as well.

It was here that Head of Records (a distinguished Oxford don and former agent who acts as the historian of the different branches of the Secret Service) put up the idea of getting Bond to write his memoirs. For him it was a perfect opportunity to get the authentic version of the career of the most famous British operator of the century. But it was M who pointed out that Bond was the last man to expect to write his story. It had always been hard enough to get the simplest report from him after an assignment. It seems that at this point Urquhart had brought up my name as a solution to the problem. Why not send me out to Bermuda once Bond had settled in? Together we could work on his biography. Bond would have something definite to do. Head of Records would get his information. And he and Hopkins would at last be well rid of the nightmare of an unauthorised account of the whole extraordinary James Bond affair reaching the newspapers.

‘You mean,’ growled M, ‘that you’d let this writer fellow publish the whole thing?’

‘If he doesn’t,’ Urquhart apparently replied, ‘someone else is bound to before long. Besides, that whole business between you and Fleming and 007 is going to rank as one of the classic pieces of deception in our sort of work. The opposition know the truth by now. It’s time a little credit was given publicly where it is due.’

According to Urquhart, M was susceptible to flattery. Most old men are. Somewhat reluctantly he finally agreed to back my mission.

Back in London, all this had seemed quite logical and clear. If Urquhart told me Bond was alive and well and living on some distant island, I believed him. Now, with the first lights of Bermuda gleaming below us in the darkness, I wasn’t quite so sure. The air-brakes grumbled down, the undercarriage thudded into place; Hamilton lay straight ahead.

The night air was warm and scented. Stepping down from the aircraft was like the beginning of a dream. There were palm trees beside the airport building, hibiscus and azaleas in bloom. For the first time I began envying the honeymooners. I trailed behind them, feeling conspicuous and lonely. Urquhart and London seemed a long way off. Urquhart had told me I would be met at the airport. I hadn’t thought to ask him how. Stupidly I hadn’t even an address.

In immigration I produced my passport. The official looked at me suspiciously, then signalled to somebody behind him. A good-looking coloured girl came across to me, smiled, said she hoped I’d had a lovely trip and would I come this way? Outside the airport concourse a large black chauffeur was just finishing putting my luggage aboard a large gold-coloured Cadillac. He saluted lazily, opened the rear door for me, then drove us effortlessly along a road beside the sea. I tried making conversation, without much success. I asked where we were going.

‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon be there.’

We purred across a causeway. There was a glimpse of palm trees, lights that glittered from the sea. Then we drove through high gates, along a gravelled drive, and there before us, floodlit and gleaming like that party scene from High Society, stood the hotel – old-style colonial, pink walls, white louvered shutters, pillars by the door. The pool was lit up too. People were swimming, others sitting on the terrace. A doorman in top-hat and wasp-coloured waistcoat took my distinctly meagre luggage to the lift.

Urquhart had said, ‘they do one rather well.’ They did. Bath already run, drinks waiting on the table, a discreet manservant to ask if I had eaten or would like something from the restaurant. I told him ‘no’, but poured myself a good slug of Glen Grant on ice. I felt I needed it.

‘Sir William asked me, sir, to kindly welcome you and tell you to treat this place as your own home. When you are ready, sir, say in half an hour, please ring for me and I will take you to Sir William.’

I bathed luxuriously, changed into the lightweight suit purchased three days before from Aquascutum on Urquhart’s expense account and, after more Glen Grant, I rang the bell. The manservant appeared at once, led me along a corridor, and then unlocked a door which led into a private lift. Before starting it the man picked up a telephone inside the lift.

‘Augustus here, sir. Bringing your guest up now.’

I heard a faint reply from the telephone. The lift ascended, slowly.

At the top there was a slight delay, as the doors evidently opened by remote control from the other side. When they did I walked straight into an enormous room, most of it in shadow.

On three sides long, plate-glass windows looked out on the dark night sea. Along the fourth side there were chairs, a radio transmitter, two green-shaded lamps. By their slightly eerie light I could make out only one man at first – elderly, grey-haired with a determined, weather-beaten face.

‘I’m Stephenson,’ he said. ‘London have been telling me about you. Glad you could come. This is Commander Bond.’

2

Boyhood of a Spy

So this was Bond, this figure in the shadows. Until this moment I had taken it for granted that I knew him, as one does with any familiar character in what one thought was fiction. I had been picturing him as some sort of superman. The reality was different. There was something guarded and withdrawn about him. I felt that I was seeing an intriguing, unfamiliar face half-hidden by an image I could not forget.

It was a strong face, certainly – the eyes pale-grey and very cold, the mouth wide and hard; he didn’t smile. In some ways I was reminded of Fleming’s own description of the man. The famous scar ran down the left cheek like a fault in the terrain between the jaw-line and the corner of the eye. The dark hair, grey-streaked now, still fell in the authentic comma over the forehead. But there was something the descriptions of James Bond had not prepared me for – the air of tension which surrounded him. He had the look of someone who had suffered and who was wary of the pain’s return. Even Sir William seemed to be treating him with care as he introduced us. We shook hands.

‘The authentic warm, dry handshake,’ I said, but Bond didn’t laugh. Levity was clearly out of place. There was an awkward silence, then Bond lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘that I’m going to be much help to you. This seems a half-arsed sort of project.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there’s not a great deal I can tell you. Quite frankly, I’d like to hang on to the few shreds of private life that Ian left me.’

Sir William tactfully remarked that he was sure that his private life was the last thing I was interested in; before I could object, he had brought the subject round to Fleming. Bond softened up a little then. I asked him how well he had known him.

‘Extremely well – if it was ever possible to know him.’

‘And you didn’t object when he started writing about you in the books?’

‘Did I, Bill?’

The old man chuckled, as if the whole question of the books were something of a private joke between them.

‘That’s something,’ said Sir William, ‘that’s going to take a little explanation.’

‘And has M given his authority for me to tell the whole grisly story?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Incredible,’ said Bond. ‘Well, if he says so, I’ve no objections. Quite the reverse in fact. I’ll be relieved to have the truth recorded over that little episode. Rather too many people still seem to think that I agreed to Ian’s efforts out of vanity. If they only knew the trouble those damned books have caused me.’

‘Come now,’ said Sir William. ‘They were a masterstroke at the time. And they undoubtedly did save your life. It isn’t fair to start complaining because they got a little out of hand.’

Bond sniffed and looked annoyed.

‘What are your plans?’ I asked.

‘You mean, what is my future?’ Bond shrugged his shoulders. ‘Good question. Only wish I knew the answer. Officially I’m now too old for active service, but I don’t know. How old’s too old? Abel was fifty-five when he came up for trial – three years older than I am now. I suppose it all depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Chiefly upon the little man in Harley Street, Sir James Molony. You remember him. Ian writes about him somewhere. Official head-shrinker to the Secret Service – and a great man in his way. My future’s in his hands. He’s due here shortly. If he decides I’m fit for duty, I’m back to London like a flash.’

He dropped his voice, and stared out at the dark ocean. The lighthouse on Lighthouse Hill flashed and subsided.

‘It’s not a question primarily of age,’ he said. ‘The little that you lose in stamina you make up in cunning. What really matters is something deeper; whether your courage lasts.’ He turned impatiently and faced me.

‘As for this present business, I’d like to get it over and done with quickly. What can I tell him, Bill?’

‘Virtually the lot. He has total security clearance.’

‘Headquarters will be checking what he writes?’

‘Naturally.’

‘That makes it easier. When shall we start?’

‘Tomorrow morning if it suits you.’

‘And where do you want me to begin?’

‘At the beginning.’

Bond was a punctual man. (As he told me later, punctuality was one of the prosaic qualities essential for an undercover agent, although in his case it also seemed to match his character.) Next morning, at 9.30 precisely, my telephone rang.

‘If you’re ready we might as well begin this ghastly chore.’ The telephone served to exaggerate the curiously lethargic drawl to the Commander’s voice. I had been finishing my breakfast and hoping for a second piece of toast. Bond however made it plain that he was anxious to begin.

‘Where would you like to work?’ I asked. I was curious to see where he was living, but he said quickly, ‘Oh, I’ll come down to you. More peaceful in your place.’

Two minutes later there was an authoritative rap on the door. James Bond entered.

Somehow he looked completely different from the night before – no sign now of tension or of that wariness he had shown then. He was fit, bright-eyed, positively breezy. He was wearing espadrilles, old denim trousers and a much faded dark blue T-shirt which showed off the width of shoulder and the solidity of chest. There was no hint of a paunch or thickening hips. But he seemed curiously unreal this morning in a way he hadn’t previously; almost as if he felt it necessary to act a role I was expecting. (Another thing I was to learn about him was the extent to which he really was an actor manqué.)

He talked about his early-morning swim. Swimming, he said, was the one sport he still enjoyed.

‘And golf?’ I asked.

Golf, he replied, was much too serious a matter to be called a sport. He added that he really hadn’t played much recently. As he was talking, he loped around the room, looking for somewhere that suited him to sit. Finally he settled on a bamboo chair on the balcony from where he had a fine view across the harbour. He breathed deeply, stretched himself, and stared at the horizon.

‘Now,’ he drawled, ‘what can I tell you?’

‘Something that Fleming never mentioned is where you were born.’

Bond swung round immediately.

‘Why ask me that?’

‘You said begin at the beginning.’

Bond smiled, somewhat ruefully, and paused before replying.

‘I suppose you have to know. The truth is that I’m a native of the Ruhr. I was born in a town called Wattenscheid – that’s near Essen – on Armistice Day, 11 November 1920. I have not, I hasten to add, a drop of German blood in my veins – as far as one can ever be certain of such things. As Fleming says somewhere, my father was a Highland Scot, my mother Swiss.’

‘So how come the Ruhr?’

‘My father, Andrew Bond, was, as Fleming rightly says, an engineer who worked for Metro-Vickers. In 1920, though, he was attached to the Allied Military Government with the rank of brigadier. He was responsible for helping to dismantle the empire of our old friends Alfred Krupp and Sons – unfortunately he was not allowed to perform this most valuable task as well as he might have. He had this house at Wattenscheid – I don’t remember it of course, but I did see it just after this last war – big, ugly, rambling place. My mother always said she hated it. Apparently she had to have me there because of a rail strike. She was all set to have me back in England, but it was suddenly impossible to leave. By the time the strike was settled I had arrived. The damage, as they say, was done.’

‘But was it damage? Has it ever caused you any trouble?’

‘Being officially a native Kraut? Oh certainly. Government departments can be very wary of such things on your records. At one time it looked like dishing my chances for the Royal Navy. Also, I think it’s always made me very touchy about our friends, the Germans. Shall we say I don’t care for them. Fairly illogical reaction. Probably all stems from this accident of birth. But I still don’t like them.’

Once Bond had settled the question of his birth, he seemed to relax. He suggested that we order coffee, which he drank strong and black – always a good sign with him as readers of Fleming’s books will remember. For the rest of that morning we went over the basic facts about the Bonds. Fleming, who used to get very bored with families, had been predictably brisk over James Bond’s ancestry. Apart from some hypothetical dialogue in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service suggesting that James Bond might be descended from the Bonds who gave their name to Bond Street – dismissed by Bond himself as ‘sheerest eyewash’ – all that he disclosed were the bare facts of his hero’s parentage. The father, Andrew Bond, had come from Glencoe in Argyll whilst the mother, Monique, was a Delacroix from the Swiss canton of Vaud.

I was surprised to see that James Bond was evidently proud of his Scottishness, talking nostalgically about the stone house in the Highlands which was still the centre of the family. He said the only roots he felt were there. ‘I always feel myself emotionally a Scot. I don’t feel too comfortable in England. When I die I’ve asked that my ashes be scattered in Glencoe.’

He talked a lot about the early Bonds, tough, warlike people who followed the MacDonalds and had lived in Glencoe for generations. Three Bonds, all brothers, were slaughtered in Glencoe during the massacre of 1692. Later Bonds preserved their sturdy independence; during the eighteenth century they had prospered, whilst by the nineteenth they had produced a missionary, several distinguished doctors, and an advocate. But, as with many Highland families, the Bonds clung to their identity as Scots. They had avoided being softened up like Lowlanders. They still regarded Glencoe as their home. The men remained big-boned and wild. One of them, James Bond’s great-grandfather and his namesake, won a V.C. with the Highland Infantry before Sebastopol. His sword still hangs in the house in Glencoe. Other male Bonds were less impressive. One of them, Great-Uncle Huw, drank himself determinedly to death in his mid-thirties. Great-Uncle Ian was sent down from university for shooting his law books one night with a .45 revolver. The present head of the family, Bond’s Uncle Gregor Bond is a dour, drunken old gentleman of eighty-two.

According to James Bond, the men in his family all tend to be melancholies. Through this side of the family he evidently inherited his shut-in, brooding quality. There is a lot of granite in James Bond. He also got the family determination and toughness mixed with a solid dose of Calvinism. The Bonds, as true Scotsmen, believed in guilt, great care with money and the need for every man to prove himself.

Bond’s father, Andrew, was a true Bond. Extremely gifted, he appears as something of a paragon during his boyhood – prize scholar and captain of games at Fettes, he went on to Aberdeen to study engineering with considerable success. In his early twenties when the war began, he joined the Royal Engineers, survived the Somme, and was seconded to Ian Hay’s staff at Gallipoli. Here he lost an arm but gained a D.S.O. and also a lifelong admiration for the Turks. When the war ended, he was an acting brigadier and joined the Allied Military Government to supervise the dismantling of the Ruhr, a task which must have suited this puritanical young engineer.

But the real passion in his life was mountains. Climbing suited his strenuous nature, and late in 1918 the handsome young ex-brigadier spent his first peacetime leave climbing the mountains he had dreamed of – in the Swiss Alps. He was trying to forget the horror of the war, but he did more than that. He found a wife.

Whatever else they were, the Bonds were great romantics, and Andrew’s marriage was in character. Just as Garibaldi saw the woman that he married for the first time through a telescope, so Andrew Bond caught his first glimpse of his future wife half-way up a mountain. She was suspended at the tail-end of a rope of mountaineers ascending the spectacular peak, the Aiguilles Rouges, above Geneva. Climbing conditions were appalling. From below, Andrew Bond admired the tenacity of the climbers. When, later, he went to congratulate them, only to find that the final climber was young, female and extremely pretty, his fate was sealed. So was hers. Nothing deterred him – neither the fact that she was barely nineteen, nor that her family opposed the match, nor that she was already officially engaged to a Zurich banker three times her age. The same spirit that had inspired old James Bond against the Russians at Sebastopol urged on his grandson for the girl he loved.

The Delacroixs were rich and obstinate and somewhat staid. Their reaction to their daughter’s one-armed suitor was predictable. Had Andrew Bond possessed a modicum of tact he might still have won them round. Tact was, alas, one of his several deficiencies. After a stormy interview with the man he wished to make his father-in-law, he delivered a brief ultimatum, had it rejected, and stormed out of the big white house, slamming the ornate front doors behind him. Two days later, he and Monique eloped.

The elopement was to cause years of bitterness which helped sour much of James Bond’s childhood. Monique was instantly disowned and cut off without the proverbial Swiss franc. Andrew, in return, would never let the name Delacroix be spoken in his presence. From now on he did his climbing in the Pyrenees. The prompt birth of a son and heir, James’s elder brother Henry, nine months to the day after the wedding, made little difference. The Bonds and Delacroixs were not on speaking terms.

This was a pity, especially for Monique. Pretty, high-spirited and frivolous, she clearly found the early days of marriage far from easy. Apart from the baby and their mutual love of mountains, she and her formidable husband had little in common, and, as she was soon pregnant again, mountain-climbing hardly seemed advisable. The elopement had been the great adventure of her life. Once it was done she started missing Switzerland, the nice big house in Vaud and the warm, reassuring flow of funds from Papa Delacroix. She would have probably done better with her sexagenarian from Zurich.

As always in such cases, one wonders how two human beings can have been so painfully mistaken over one another. How could Andrew Bond possibly have been the sort of husband she required? He was profoundly serious and solitary, a dedicated engineer and something of a puritan. Worse still, he had no money. His old employers, Metro-Vickers, were prepared to have him back. There was a job for him in Birmingham. Monique, for the first, but not the last time, kicked. Andrew gave in; to keep his young wife happy, he accepted his secondment to the Allied High Command in Germany. James Bond was born the autumn after they arrived.

It should have been an idyllic childhood for two small boys. Their parents doted on them and they had everything – love, comfort, playthings and security. In this defeated country, they were like spoiled young princes. The house at Wattenscheid had its own grounds and was filled with servants, nannies, dogs and horses. Summers were spent along the Baltic coast or down the Rhine, Christmases at Glencoe where all the Bonds would gather and stay for Hogmanay like the old-fashioned tribal clan they were.

This was where James Bond saw his paternal grandfather, old Archie Bond, for the first time. He was terrified of him; and the old man spoke such broad Scots that the child, who already spoke better German than English, could understand little that he said. There were the wicked uncles too, his father’s brothers – whisky-sodden Gregor and wealthy Ian who was such a miser. But the one relative they both adored was their father’s only sister, their Aunt Charmian – sweet, sad Charmian, bride of three weeks, whose husband had died at Passchendaele. She lived in Kent, grew dahlias and believed in God.

James adored his mother; indeed, the more that she despaired of him, the more he loved her. Even today James Bond still keeps her miniature beside him, and regards her as a female paragon. When he describes her he uses words like ‘fresh’, ‘gay’, ‘irresistible’. Neither her affaires, her dottiness, her wild extravagance can dim her memory.

Unhappy marriages often produce devoted children; the Bonds were no exception. The family was held together by its tensions. James loved his father but could not speak to him of anything that mattered, worshipped his mother, but could not forgive her for rejecting him. In years to come a lot of women were to pay the price of this rejection.

Even as a child, James was finding that life had certain compensations. One was his strength; after the age of eight he found that he could always beat his brother in a stand-up fight – and did so frequently. Another was eating; he became known as a greedy child and, for a period, was extremely fat. (As Fleming noted, even in manhood James Bond remains addicted to double portions of whatever he enjoys.) Fighting and eating and long rambles with his dog – these were the consolations of the young James Bond.

Another feature of his boyhood was the continual movement that went on – the Bonds were wanderers. After Monique’s refusal to settle back in Birmingham, Andrew accepted a succession of overseas assignments from Metro-Vickers when his attachment with the Military Government ended. From Germany they moved to Egypt, where Andrew worked as consultant for three years on the Nile dam project above Aswan. By now James was five, and, just as in Germany, he proved himself adaptable in his choice of playmates. Soon he had his private gang of small boys from the neighbourhood, most of them Egyptian. James seemed to find no difficulty communicating with them, or with asserting his leadership. He had always been big for his age. The Bond brothers had an elderly French governess. James could elude her, and for days on end would roam the city with his gang of guttersnipes. Sometimes they played along the river, scampering along the waterfront and living on their wits. At other times they flitted round the market-place, picking up money where they could and playing their games with other gangs.

With Andrew away for days on end, and Monique occupied with a new admirer, nobody appeared to mind what happened to the boy. He must have picked up more than a smattering of Arabic (much, to his regret, entirely forgotten) and with his dark complexion seems to have become almost an Arab boy himself. One of his strangest memories of this period is of waiting with his followers one evening outside a big hotel in Cairo, watching the cars arrive. Suddenly a black and yellow Rolls drew up. Out stepped his mother followed by a fat man with a monocle. James recognised him as an Armenian contractor who had visited the house on business with his father. The man seemed so gross that he couldn’t imagine what his mother was doing in his company. James called out to her, but the smart Mrs Bond failed to recognise the street Arab as her son. Next day, when he asked his mother what she was doing at the hotel, she became furious, insisted she had been at home, and ordered James to his room for insolence.

This was, as Bond says wryly, his first real lesson in the female heart.

Finally, there seems to have been some sort of family crisis – the boys were getting used to them by now – and, on the grounds that Cairo heat was bad for his wife’s health, Andrew Bond was once again transferred – this time to France. For Andrew, the worse his marriage, the better his career, and by now he was becoming one of the Metro-Vickers’ key men in the power stations they were building through the world. Once more he took a big house for his family – this time along the Loire, not far from Chinon – and once more the same old pattern seemed to reassert itself, with all the erratic ups and downs of an unhappy family. Theoretically they were quite rich, but there was never money to go round. Monique was wilder than ever. Servants would come and go.

France suited James. He picked up the language, loved the food and made a lot of unexpected friends – the boatmen on the river, the village drunk, the gendarme and the madame who kept the caf in the village. He also fell in love for the first time – with the butcher’s daughter, a sloe-eyed, well-developed girl of twelve, who deceived him for an older boy who had a bicycle.

James Bond remained in France a year – then his world changed again. In 1931 the Metro-Vickers combine won an unprecedented contract from the Soviet Government to construct a chain of power stations around Moscow as part of Stalin’s policy for the electrification of Russia. Inevitably, Andrew Bond was despatched with the advance party of British engineers. Three months later he sent for his family to join him.

The Metro-Vickers representative in Paris had booked the Bonds a first-class sleeper to themselves, and Bond can still remember the small details of the journey – the rare excitement of eating a meal with his mother in the restaurant car, the white gloves of the waiters, the mineral water and the reading lamp beside his bed. As the train thundered east towards the Polish frontier, he can remember dropping off to sleep to what Fleming called ‘the lullaby creak of the woodwork in the little room’, then waking drowsily to hear the porters calling out the names of German stations in the night. This was Europe, the grey Prussian plain as dawn was breaking, Warsaw by breakfast-time. That evening he watched as the train slowed down and passed the red-and-white striped posts marking the Russian frontier.

James saw his first Russian policeman then – a large silent man in dark blue uniform and red-starred cap who checked their papers. Grey-tuniced porters helped the family aboard the Moscow Express, a magnificent relic from pre-Revolution days. Once more the Bonds had their own compartment – this time with rose-pink shaded lamp and Victorian brass fittings. In the restaurant car, as foreign visitors with roubles, they ate even better than the night before – it was here, incidentally, that Bond formed a life-long love of caviare. All this made the arrival next day at Moscow something of a shock.