James Bond: The Authorised Biography (5 page)

The British families had been herded together in Perlovska, a small place twenty miles from Moscow. By Russian standards the little wooden house the Bonds were given was the height of luxury – for Monique it was unspeakable. There were no shops, no night-life and no entertainment. With winter coming, life was bleak. There was famine in the land.

Ten-year-old James Bond was getting an impression of Soviet Russia that has never really changed. Deep down he still believes this is a land of starving peasants, cowed citizens and an all-powerful secret police. These conclusions must have seemed dramatically confirmed by the events he witnessed in the early months of 1932.

Historians are still arguing the causes of the so-called Metro-Vickers trial of that year, when several of the leading British engineers on the power-station project were put on trial in Moscow, charged with sabotage.

For the Bond family, huddled in their freezing house in Perlovska, it was all hideously real. Andrew Bond's friend, the minister Tardovsky, had already been arrested. Rumours were everywhere. Then the six British engineers – the Bonds knew them personally – were carried off to the fearful Lubyanka prison, by the secret police. It seemed a miracle that Andrew was not among them.

Throughout the desperate weeks of the trial that followed, James Bond was to become one of the few Westerners to have lived through a Russian purge at first hand. (Those who condemn him for his anti-Communism should remember this.) He has not forgotten the scared families, the hopelessness of waiting, the cold dread of the next move of the police.

Andrew was something of a hero, always on the move between the Kremlin, the British Embassy and the Lubyanka, briefing the lawyers and helping to keep the prisoners' spirits up. Monique was less resilient. As James Bond says, it was easier for his father – he had something to do. Monique could only wait. Under the tension and privation of the camp, her health suffered and her nerves got worse. She could not sleep, complained of headaches, and begged her husband to get them out of Russia. Sternly he told her that they would not leave until the trials were over.

During this period, James Bond had an uncanny glimpse into the future. Several of the accused engineers had been released on bail, and were waiting in the compound of Perlovska for the trial to start. James, along with most of the English nationals, was with them. Suddenly a car drew up, a big, official-looking limousine. Out stepped a tall, impeccably-dressed young Englishman, looking for all the world as if about to enter some St James's club. Sounding distinctly bored, he introduced himself. He was a Reuter's correspondent, sent out from London for the trial. His name was Ian Fleming.

The two things about him that stuck in James Bond's memory were his suit – an outrageous check, the like of which had not been seen before in Moscow, let alone Perlovska – and his unruffled ease of manner. Despite himself, James Bond was most impressed, and there and then changed his mind about being an engineer when he grew up. All these things considered, it seemed a better bet to be a journalist.

Although he had to stay on at Perlovska throughout the trial, James heard all about it from his father. It was from him that he learned of the impassioned speech of Andrei Vishinsky, the vitriolic Russian prosecutor. When the verdicts were announced they amounted to a triumph for Andrew Bond. All but two of the engineers were acquitted. Andrew was congratulated by his company and marked out for promotion. Still more important for the Bonds, their ordeal was over. The Metro-Vickers mission was withdrawn from Russia. The family was coming home at last.

With Andrew appointed to head office, he took a house in Wimbledon, 6 North View, an echoing Victorian monstrosity facing the Common. Here the Bonds settled for the summer. They must have appeared an odd, outlandish family. Andrew was thirty-eight, but looked much older, his big-nosed, craggy face now lined and battered by the last few years. The two boys also must have borne the marks of their ordeal. They, too, looked older than their years and both of them seemed strangely out of place among the well-to-do children of their neighbours. They were oddly dressed. James Bond ascribes his subsequent sartorial conformism to childhood anxieties on this score. He still remembers other children laughing at his
lederhosen
. He says he also felt distinctly foreign here in Wimbledon. He was not used to hearing English spoken – he and his mother generally conversed in French. As a result, he felt himself painfully unwanted. Although back in England, he was as much of an outsider as ever.

But the member of the family who fared worst was undoubtedly Monique. During the long months in Russia she had hung on, because she had to. The boys depended on her. Now that all this was over, she fell to pieces. Her zest for life deserted her. A photograph taken that July gives an idea of what was happening. The face is still beautiful but white and drawn, the thin hair turned prematurely grey, and there is a hunted look about the eyes.

James's brother, Henry, was the only one who seemed unscathed by life. The two boys were entered for the summer term at Kings College School. This was something of a stop-gap, since Andrew, possibly as a gesture against the wealth of the Delacroixs, had entered the boys for Eton when they were born. But the school was convenient, barely five minutes' walk across the common. Henry settled in and soon became a favourite pupil. James was difficult and withdrew in on himself. Then came the disaster that shaped his life.

*

It started with his mother's nervous breakdown towards the end of that July. She had been acting strangely for some time, complaining that the Russians were pursuing her and that she had seen several of the Soviet secret police from Perlovska watching the house from the common. Then one night she went berserk and tried to stab Natasha, the Bonds' devoted Russian maid. Fortunately, Andrew Bond was at home. The doctor came and Monique was sent off to a sanatorium at Sunningdale. She soon seemed to recover, but the specialist advised a change. At his instigation, Andrew Bond decided that the time had come to forget the past, make peace with the Delacroixs and take his wife home. It must have been a difficult decision for a man of his proud nature.

James Bond remembers how his father saw him and his brother off from King's Cross for their summer holiday in Glencoe. It was an emotional occasion. Andrew Bond assured them that he was taking their mother off to Switzerland and that when she came back she would be cured and happy. He promised that the days of wandering were over. The family would settle down and they would love each other. It was an unusual speech for so reticent a man.

The boys had been at Glencoe nearly three weeks when they came back from a day on the moors to find the house in uproar. Aunt Charmian had suddenly arrived from London. James Bond remembers that his grandfather was in tears. The sight was so unusual that it took some while for him to understand what his aunt was saying. The boys were to get their things together. They were to be calm and sensible. From now on they would both be living with her at her house in Kent. There had been a frightful accident … climbing in Switzerland … their parents had been killed.

It was Henry who broke down and wept. James Bond surprised everyone by his self-possession. He says that in a strange way he was prepared for what had happened. When his father saw him off from King's Cross three weeks before, he knew that he would not be seeing him again. Now he remembered his father's words, ‘You must look after yourself, laddie. If you don't there's no one else that will.’

The death of James Bond's parents remains a mystery to this day, although their son was gradually to piece together something of what happened. It seems that Monique had returned to her parents as planned. After an emotional reconciliation – her father was particularly shocked at her condition – she had stayed on for several weeks at her childhood home in the Vaud. Then Andrew came to fetch her; by all accounts there was a bitter argument between the husband and the family. All the accumulated resentments and recriminations were brought up. Andrew was shouting that Monique's place was back with him and her children. Her parents were insisting, just as forcefully, that she should stay with them, blaming Andrew for the state that she was in. As so often in such rows, the one person both sides were forgetting was the one that they were fighting over. During the uproar Monique fled the house.

It was some time before her absence was discovered, still longer before anybody found that she had taken a car and driven off towards Geneva. Andrew chased after her. He traced the car nearly as far as Chamonix. There he found it left outside a café. The caf owner said that he had seen the woman who was in it heading for the mountain. Andrew Bond knew then where to find Monique; the great mountain towering above the valley was the crag of the Aiguilles Rouges.

It was past midday and Monique had more than two hours' start on him. But he remembered the climb up the sheer face of the mountain where he had first caught sight of her so many years before. Monique was making her escape at last.

She must have climbed with desperation. The route she took was one which is normally for well-equipped mountaineers, fully prepared and roped together. Despite this, she had almost gained the shoulder of the mountain when her husband reached her. She was crouched on a ledge too narrow for the mountain goats.

By now there were people watching from the valley. Through their binoculars they could see the pink dress she was wearing outlined against the red mass of the rock. They could see her husband edging close towards her, and, for a while, it seemed as if the chase continued. It was nearly dusk by now.

The watchers in the valley saw the two figures on the mountain close together. Evidently Andrew was trying to persuade her to come down. Finally she did; the pink speck started to move back towards him, edging along the sheer face of the rock.

Whether he tried to clutch her, whether she threw herself or slipped no one will ever know. James Bond believes she could not face leaving her husband or returning to him. At any rate, they were together when they fell and what was left of them was buried in the village cemetery below the mountain.

*

One thing the situation did was bring out the best in Aunt Charmian. She was efficient, practical and calm – the only one who was. It was quite clear that no one in Glencoe could possibly take charge of the two boys and she was adamant against the Delacroixs doing so. She was the one who went to Switzerland, and saw that her brother was buried with the woman he had so disastrously loved. She also managed to convince the old man Delacroix that she was the best person to look after the two boys.

Pett Bottom is not far from Canterbury. This is a splendid part of Kent, some ten miles inland from the sea, a landscape of long valleys, undulating hills, and fertile orchards.

The name Pett Bottom – which inevitably appealed to Ian Fleming – is ancient, ‘Pett’ being Anglo-Saxon for a wood. Aunt Charmian's small house was still at the bottom of the wood, a few hundred yards from a small country inn, The Duck.

There is something wholly admirable about Aunt Charmian. In the two Bond boys she had found something her life had lacked – a purpose – and this slightly dumpy, gentle woman dedicated herself to them with all the single-mindedness of her family.

Early that autumn, Henry went off to Eton as arranged. There was inevitably strong pressure on Aunt Charmian to send James to a suitable preparatory school, ‘to knock some sense and some behaviour into his young 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’.