James Bond: The Authorised Biography by John Pearson Read Free Book Online

head’, as Gregor Bond put it. She resisted – furiously. As she wrote to both sets of grandparents, ‘If James is sent away again, after all he's been through, we'll have a problem on our hands for the rest of our lives.’ Instead she said that she would keep him with her at Pett Bottom, and promised that she would coach him for the Eton examination. Finally everyone agreed. Aunt Charmian was a persuasive woman.
    Certainly it was thanks entirely to her that James Bond passed the Eton entrance examination and went to join his brother Henry there in the autumn term of 1933.
    *
    Like Hobbes of Malmesbury's description of life in the state of nature, James Bond's career at Eton might be summed up as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Certainly it is not a period of life on which he looks back with pride or much regret, and it was evident from the day he went there that this was not the school for him. Despite all this, the strange thing is that Eton put its trademark on him. Indeed, in some ways, he seems a very typical Etonian.
    From the beginning he found himself a rebel. It was a mistake to put him in his brother's house. Henry was predictably successful and had adapted well to school society; James was once more in his elder brother's shadow. As a result, he soon reacted against everything his brother seemed to represent. He refused to work. He saw the cliques of older boys as snobbery, the school traditions as tedious charade. He kicked against the fagging system and objected to the uniform. His contemporaries who wrote that he was ‘moody and self-contained’ seem to have had a point. He says now that once again he felt himself a complete outsider in this closed, upper-class society, and that for most of his time at Eton he was very lonely.
    James Bond is probably exaggerating. It is hard to see him being victimized by anyone. At fourteen he was enormous for his age – already nearly six feet tall, good-looking and distinctly self-possessed. Older boys appear to have treated him with caution. Before long he enjoyed a certain status and he had a few, carefully picked friends, all of them outside his house. They were all members of what he called ‘the unregenerate element’ in the school, and most of them had a reputation, like James, for being ‘flash’.
    Bond's favourite crony was a boy called Brinton, nicknamed ‘Burglar’. He was a year older, embarrassingly handsome, with the cool, mondaine sophistication of the cosmopolitan rich. He and James got on together. During the holidays, James visited his house in Shropshire, and later was invited to his father's place in Paris. Here, with his looks and his command of French, Bond impressed Burglar's father. It was this rich old rake who discovered the boy's natural talent for cards and love of gambling. He backed the two boys when they played bridge for money with his rich Parisian friends. The canasta craze was starting – James Bond cleaned up at that.
    Burglar père introduced Bond to his earliest Morlands Specials, and also gave him his first taste of the life of the very rich – something which, in his way, James Bond has been seeking and rejecting ever since. He liked the Brintons' sense of style – the luxurious flat, the drinks, the dress, the servants, and the cars – particularly he liked the cars. Burglar's father was not only rich, he was indulgent, to a fault. As a final treat he lent the boys his big café-au-lait Hispano Suiza and a chauffeur, sending them down to Monte Carlo for a week's holiday in style. In theory the chauffeur drove; in fact the two boys took turns behind the wheel and Bond got his first experience of what has remained an unabated pleasure – driving a powerful fast car across the Continent. He also had his first glimpse of a casino. Burglar's father joined them in Monte Carlo. James Bond won 500 francs at roulette.
    After all this, Eton seemed doubly boring. In his second year, James Bond did less work than in his first. He