James Bond: The Authorised Biography (14 page)

6

Bond's War

‘T
HE WAR CHANGED everything,’ said Bond, ‘but it's a complicated story and it will take a lot of telling. Right now I feel like a siesta. Perhaps we'll start again this evening after dinner.’

He had an abrupt way of dismissing one, almost as if suddenly upset at the thought of how much he had revealed. With an impatient gesture he pushed back the coffee and went loping off in the direction of the hotel. He had an odd walk, forceful yet relaxed. People made way for him. Whether he really would be taking a siesta, I had no idea.

That afternoon I took a motor-scooter – the standard means of tourist transport on the island – and rode off to the beach. It was a perfect day – the sun exactly the right temperature, the sea the ideal shade of blue. Lazy Atlantic breakers were arriving, as if by previous arrangement, on the meticulous gold sand. It was all most agreeable, but there was something wrong. Was this perfection just a little empty? Didn't this immaculate toy island act as a sort of limbo-land, a background against which one inevitably waited for something, anything, to happen. Already I could feel impatient, and, as for Bond, could all too easily understand his restlessness and longing to be back at work.

And yet the island suited him – the heavy sun-tans and the golden girls, the long cool drinks, striped awnings, and hibiscus-scented evenings – in its own tiny way, Bermuda was authentic Bond-land.

At dinner I looked out for Bond – he wasn't there. But afterwards I saw him in the bar. There was a woman with him. Was this the mysterious companion of the last few days? I felt that Bond would want to keep his woman strictly to himself, but he must have seen me and immediately called me over. He was unusually affable, almost as if relieved to have me there. The woman was, I felt, less welcoming.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is Mrs Schultz. Fleming described her in his book on Dr No, but she was still Miss Ryder in those days – Honeychile Ryder.’

He seemed amused by this. She was quite clearly irritated. She seemed a hard, bad-tempered, very beautiful, rich woman. Certainly she could hardly have been more different from that appealing child of nature Fleming had described living in the ruins of a great house in Jamaica. The golden adolescent with the broken nose had metamorphosed into a tough and all too typical socialite American in her early thirties. As Fleming had predicted, the nose had been remodelled – quite triumphantly; and Honeychile, like Miss Jean Brodie, was in her prime. Bond looked, I thought, a little hunted.

Rather as if making conversation, he told her about the plans for his biography. She thawed immediately – as some women do at the promise of publicity.

‘But James, you never
told
me. You mean your
real
biography? Isn't that just what I always
said
that they should do? I mean those books of Ian's were
ridiculous
. I never will be able to forgive him for the way he described me in that
dreadful
book of his. But, darling, I'm so happy for you. Truly, I think that it's the greatest thing that possibly could happen.’

Bond grunted then and asked what I was drinking. He and the Mrs Schultz were taking bourbon on the rocks. I chose the same. Bond, as usual, made it doubles, then steered the conversation firmly away from literature.

‘Honey,’ he explained to me, ‘is cruising. In her yacht. It's her own floating vodka-palace – all eighty feet of it. Twin diesels, state-room designed by David Hicks, a crew of twelve. Somehow she heard that I was here and paid a social call.’

She pouted. This did not improve her looks. She had, I noticed now, a thin upper lip.

‘Don't think that you're the only reason why I'm here. When Mr Schultz passed on I was a nervous wreck. Mr Schultz worshipped me, and I felt I owed it to him to pull myself together. He would never have wanted me to sit there getting miserable. You know Mr Schultz's last words to me?’

Bond shook his head, resignedly.

‘“Honey,” he said, “be happy.” So to respect his wishes I brought the
Honeychile –
he named her after me – down on a sunshine cruise. I feel that it's what he'd've wanted.’

‘Indeed,’ said Bond.

She prattled on about herself. Bond seemed in full retreat and I thought that she was set to stay all evening. But she refused another drink, explaining that she had to be back on board by nine and that her chauffeur was already waiting. We walked out of the hotel with her. A Rolls Corniche drew up as she appeared, and, as it purred away, I recognized its scratched bodywork and badly smashed rear wing.

Bond grinned, a little sheepishly, and said,

‘Be sure, as dear Aunt Charmian would say, your sins will find you out. I always knew that girl would travel far – but not so far as this.’

‘But didn't she marry some clean-cut young New York doctor after Dr No?’

‘She did – and left him four years later to become Mrs Schultz – of Schultz Machine Tools Inc. He, I might add, was in his seventies. And now, unless I'm much mistaken, she's after husband number three. I recognize the look.’

He drained his glass and settled himself comfortably back into his chair. Without the woman he seemed more himself. Somewhere a band was playing a calypso. The bar was filling up. The big windows to the terrace had been drawn back and from the beach below came the faint murmur of the sea.

‘I was telling you about the war,’ he said.

I would have preferred to have known more about the spectacular Mrs Schultz, but Bond was obviously relieved to change the subject.

‘I didn't realize at first quite what the war would mean. For years I had been thinking it would be my great moment. Instead, when I came back to London, I found that nobody was remotely interested in me. Maddox was stuck in France. Headquarters had just been moved into its present offices by Regent's Park – sheer bloody chaos everywhere. When I reported there, the place seemed full of Oxford dons and refugee Hungarians. All of my records had gone astray and some moron would insist on calling me James Band. When I told him the name was Bond and that I'd been working for the Service for the last three years, he told me not to lose my temper, and gave me the “don't-ring-us-we'll-ring-you” routine. To cap it all, the Carlton Hotel was full.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Where d'you think? Back to Aunt Charmian of course. But even she was busy winning the war – civil defence, evacuees, the Women's Services. Aunt Charmian was in the thick of it. It was the old girl's finest hour. I stayed with her for something like a month. I'm sure that she believed I was some sort of draft dodger, but she was too polite to say so. She would go on about my brother Henry though. He was in the War Office
and
he had a uniform. Two or three times a week I'd call Headquarters, but they had somehow found out I was born in Germany. At one stage I'm sure they wanted to intern me.’

Bond laughed and signalled to Augustus for some more to drink.

‘It really was one of the most depressing periods of my life. I was just nineteen, and I felt useless and unwanted. It also dawned on me that my whole way of life was over. Nothing would ever be such fun again – and, to be quite honest, it never really has.’

By a strange coincidence the man who rescued Bond from the stagnation of the ‘phoney war’ was Ian Fleming. He was already working in intelligence – as personal assistant to Admiral Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty – and he was on the look-out for suitable recruits to the Admiral's empire. He must have heard about the strange young man that he had met at Kitzbühel, checked on his records, and decided, as he often did, that this was the sort of man Naval Intelligence required. Thanks to his backing, Bond was commissioned as lieutenant in the Royal Navy with immediate secondment to the D.N.I. Bond's war had finally begun – and also the bizarre relationship with Ian Fleming.

M. has authoritatively described the two of them as ‘personal friends’. If he is right, it was a most uneasy friendship, for they were very different characters.

Fleming was a dreamer, an intellectual
manqué
, the perfect desk-man at the D.N.I. Bond was essentially a man of action; he had inherited from his father the clear-cut mind of a good Scottish engineer. He was a realist, and his experience of life had taught him to keep his imagination in check and not to be too sensitive with people.

Fleming was witty, sociable and worldly. Bond was plain-spoken, wary of others and something of an outsider. And yet they seemed to complement each other. Each came to play a vital part in the other's life – so much so that today it is difficult to think of them apart; even in 1939 there are clear signs that this strange interdependence was beginning.

During this period Fleming must have seen that Bond had been living the life that he had dreamed of, the life which just conceivably
he
might have followed had he continued his original career with Reuters instead of leaving it in 1936 and entering a City stockbrokers. And, similarly, Bond was acknowledging the power figure which he saw in Fleming. This was the person that
he
envied; and, as with Fleming, this was a self that he could never be – the settled, rich, impeccable insider, an influential cautious man who spoke to press lords by their Christian names, hobnobbed with admirals, and played bridge with members of the Cabinet.

During these first months in Naval Intelligence Bond was impatient for action. Finally, with one of Fleming's wild-cat schemes, he found it.

Fleming had written of the D.N.I.'s concern with the movements of the U-boats and the German fleet from Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven into the North Sea and the Atlantic. This was a constant headache for the British Admiralty, for these North German ports were impossible to blockade. The U-boat packs could come and go and there was constant risk that the German battle fleet would choose some unguarded moment to issue forth. Naval Intelligence at Whitehall had to do its best to find out what was going on, but this was difficult. We had our spies in Hamburg, but they were at best erratic, and the ports were beyond the range of normal aerial reconnaissance.

Different solutions were discussed, and it was Fleming who brought up the idea of the isle of Wangerooge. It was a typical Fleming plan. The island is an elongated sand-bank off the German coast, pointing out to the German Bight. Its sole inhabitants were fishermen and sea-birds, but it lay along the main channel out of Wilhelmshaven. Shipping from Hamburg and Bremerhaven used it as a landmark as they sailed to the North Sea.

‘It ought to be quite possible to hide a trained observer there,’ said Fleming casually.

‘How on earth?’ said somebody.

‘It could work,’ Fleming said. ‘Those off-shore German islands are pretty bleak at the best of times. At this time of the year there'd be nothing there but miles of God-forsaken sand dunes. A trained man with binoculars and a radio transmitter …’

Somebody asked how he proposed to hide such a man under the noses of the Germans.

‘Didn't you ever read
The Riddle of the Sands
?’ Fleming replied.

The idea hung around as ideas do but Bond could see its possibilities. Unlike the other members of the department, he had worked as an agent inside Germany and knew how often the most daring scheme succeeded. Without Bond's interest the idea would have lapsed. Fleming, the potential thriller writer, liked to devise his daydreams, but for James Bond anything was better than this futile life in London. And, for once, Fleming was spurred to action.

It was the first time Bond had seen the practical side of Fleming. Every objection was politely swept aside, each difficulty calmly coped with. Fleming displayed an obsessive attention to detail, almost as if he, not Bond, were going. Bond, who lacked this sort of mind, could value it in others. Fleming worked hard. Within a day or two he had decided on the sort of clothing Bond should wear, the food that he should take, his weapons and his sanitary arrangements. The two men spent several afternoons at Brookwood, testing entrenching tools in the Surrey sandhills, and planning the living quarters Bond could dig for himself on Wangerooge. Experts were summoned to devise a form of shuttering to hold back the sand. Binoculars and periscopes were lovingly selected and Bond instructed how to use the latest model short-wave transmitter. Fleming performed all this with boundless energy. He was planning an adventure – Bond had merely to perform in it. The fact that his life would be at stake seemed almost incidental.

This did occur to Bond. Increasingly, it seemed as if he were simply taking part in some complicated game. He wanted action now – not suicide. His doubts, however, merely acted as a spur to Fleming. For the last few days Bond had been through a crash-course in identifying German warships and had been practising the final points in the construction of his shelter. Fleming explained arrangements for landing and retrieving him by submarine. This would take place at night.

‘God willing,’ said James Bond.

‘My dear chap, it will go like clockwork. There'll be no problems for a submarine. No problems at all.’

‘And if I'm caught?’

‘You won't be. There are only a few fishermen around, and they won't bother you.’

It was too late to argue, and at the beginning of February, Bond joined H.M. submarine
Thruster
at Harwich at the start of a three-week Baltic patrol.