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

also started to antagonize his house master who saw him as a pernicious influence. Soon it was clear that Bond's days at Eton were becoming numbered. Despite this, he is still irritated by what he considers the poor taste of Ian Fleming's so-called joke about the reason why he was finally asked to leave, the coy reference to ‘some alleged trouble with one of the boys' maids'. Bond says that Fleming knew quite well that the girl was not a housemaid, but Burglar's illegitimate half-sister, a very beautiful half-French girl of seventeen he was in love with. She had been staying with her father at the Dorchester. James Bond, aged fifteen, borrowed £5 and a motor cycle from Burglar, rode up to London, and took the girl out to dinner before riding back to college. It was his brother Henry who reported him. It was exactly the incident the house master had been waiting for.

3
     
    Les Sensations Fortes
     
    B OND HAD BEEN talking all the morning. I was surprised. After the ritual show of reluctance of the night before, I had expected to have trouble getting him to talk – quite the contrary. Indeed he showed all the symptoms of someone who had lacked an audience too long – now that he had one, nothing would stop him. He was clear-cut and businesslike, precise on facts and quite uninhibited about himself. After my unfavourable first impressions, I found myself starting to like him.
    It was nearly one o'clock when he finally broke off and suggested we should have a drink down on the terrace. He had his favourite place near the pool, shaded by the succulent green leaves of several banana palms. As we arrived, couples were coming up from the beach for lunch; I was amused at the automatic way his grey eyes followed the plump bottoms of the girls. None of them seemed to take much notice, but I did wonder how they would have reacted had they known the identity of the lean iron-grey-haired man eyeing them so professionally.
    The sight of female flesh clearly relaxed James Bond. He smiled to himself, leaned back in the steamer chair where he was sitting and, from his T-shirt pocket, produced a familiar object – the famous gun-metal cigarette-case. He flicked it open, offered it to me.
    ‘The first today,’ he said. ‘I hope you weren't expecting Morlands Specials. Officially I've given up, but one can't be too strict about these things. These are the latest de-nicotined Virginian. I'd better warn you that they taste revolting.’
    ‘Fleming would have a shock,’ I said.
    ‘After he had me smoking seventy a day? He exaggerated that, you know – as with a lot of other things as well. He was a strange fellow. With the cigarettes I'm sure it was an excuse for his own heavy smoking – he liked to think that there was someone who smoked even more than he did. In fact I never have been more than a two-pack-a-day man, and then only in times of tension.’
    ‘And drink?’
    ‘Oh, he got that about right. What did he say I drank – half a bottle of spirits daily? No one can call that excessive. Even Sir James Molony says it would be wrong to cut out alcohol entirely. Perhaps with his authority behind us, we should have something now to quench the thirst.’
    ‘Shaken not stirred?’
    Bond laughed. ‘Precisely.’
    By the telepathy that marks the finest waiters in the very best hotels, Augustus was waiting for our order just as James Bond finished speaking. I was intrigued to see how Bond treated him. In fact he gave the order just as Fleming had described in the precise, clipped voice of the man who knows exactly what he wants and is used to getting it – the vodka iced, the French vermouth specified by name, the single slice of lemon peel. I felt there was a touch of parody in the performance – Bond acting out the part of Bond – but he seemed unaware of this and coolly nodded to Augustus when the drinks arrived. Fleming had been right. This was a man who, as he said, took an almost old-maidish pleasure in attention to the