This piece appeared in the TLS of March 22, 2002
Ian Fleming had a tried-and-tested seduction ritual, we were told on a recent
Channel Four documentary, The Real James Bond. He would ask girls round to
his London house and serve them sausages in front of the fire. Pornography
and nude playing-cards were also on the menu, as was a little light sadism.
He was very good-looking and always dressed the same: dark-blue suit,
bow-tie, short-sleeved light-blue shirt and loafers for speedy undressing.
"All he had to do was press a button for whichever girl he wanted", said a
friend.
I was interested in those sausages. They may not seem like much of a ritual -
more of an economy - but they go straight back to Eton, where they were a
way of life in the late 1950s. There were shops at the school where you
could buy something called a "banger" - a life-saving sausage squashed
between two slices of white bread. As a "fag", I remember having to cook
sausages over an open fireplace for some older boy who wasn't always easy to
please. Beatings by prefects for such trivial crimes as eating in the street
or wearing a hat indoors were common in my day, so it is easy to imagine
that burning a sausage would have been enough in the 1920s. Fleming probably
experienced the entertainment from both points of view. "I'm afraid I loved
being whipped by you", his wife Anne wrote to him many years later. "I long
for you even if you whip me, because I love being hurt by you and kissed
afterwards."
Fleming played truant from Eton, then from Sandhurst, eventually catching a
dose of gonorrhoea in London and being sent by his widowed mother Eve to a
clinic in Austria, as a sort of punishment. He brought home a Swiss girl
called Monique, but his mother, "a beautiful bird of prey" who interfered
with every aspect of Ian's life, said she had to go. "I'm going to be quite
bloody-minded about women from now on", said Ian afterwards.
The hardly original gist of this one-dimensional but entertaining film was
that Ian Fleming was James Bond. It's certainly true that the warming
effects of beatings were inextricably mixed up for boys of my generation
with the experience of reading Fleming's early Bond books. "He plunged his
mouth down on hers, forcing her teeth apart with his tongue and feeling her
own tongue working at first shyly and then passionately. He slipped his
hands down to her swelling buttocks and gripped them fiercely, pressing the
centres of their bodies together." The passage brings back the flavour of
that long-ago time before sexual intercourse began. The books were
considered risque at a time when Forever Amber was the alternative and
innocently airbrushed Health and Efficiency was positively pornographic.
The spell didn't last. The year before I left school, Cyril Connolly published
in Encounter a parody of Fleming, called "Bond Strikes Camp". This was
educational for me. I remember roaring with self-congratulatory laughter,
ravished as much by my own new sophistication as by the piece's humour. I
wonder did Fleming laugh. Or did he feel the sting of another beating from
Old Etonian Connolly? The Real James Bond made the older Fleming out to be a
figure of fun to the smart set surrounding his wife Anne.
I have just been back to Eton to do a reading at the Praed Society. I went
down early on a grey Thameside afternoon and attempted to cruise my old life
for a while, before the light failed. The High Street has a preserved look
about it now. The once rough-and-ready Cockpit tearoom is a smart
restaurant, boasting medieval connections. As I walked through the streets,
I felt unable to take myself any further back than my last visit ten years
ago. Even the entrance to my old house had been moved round the corner.
Opposite it, shockingly prominent on the railings to Canon Yard, was a
poster advertising my reading with a picture of a red and white Triumph
Bonneville and the slogan, "Women . . . Motorbikes . . . Poetry". My first
feeling was guilt, as if I deserved a beating for defacing a public building.
As I walked towards the playing fields, the edges of everything seemed tidier
than I remembered: more owned-looking. Signs indicated Private Property.
When I tried to look into School Yard, I was stopped and told that the
tourist season didn't begin till the end of the month. Instead, I went to
have a look at the little River Jordan and the great jump across it that was
the muddy end of the School Run. A piece of film survives of a beautiful
young Fleming, somehow refusing to smile, having just won the race for the
second time in about 1926. When I reached the spot, I found the jump had
gone. In its place was a neat bridge.
I was cold and fancied a banger, so I made my way to the Fives courts, where
Jack's shop was located. I remembered Cokes and ice-cream floats on long
afternoons playing Fives -a n essential part of the Eton experience for me.
As I approached, I could almost taste the sausage between its slices of
white bread. I was out of luck. On the door was a notice about coffee
mornings. Inside were toys and playpens. Jack's had become a creche.
Rowland's, the other cafe, bigger, more shambolic, strangely peaceful, had
likewise disappeared.
So where did people go for coffee nowadays? I was told the hairdresser's did
coffees now, so I headed for "Nutters" (formerly Thomas's). Here, I was
amazed to see a tableau of lifesize dummies in one of the windows entitled
"Six of the Best", depicting a woman bending over, showing her suspenders,
while a man fondled a leather strap. I went in, ordered a coffee and said I
liked the display. "We had some trouble with the Eton authorities over
that", one of the women present, Susan Mason, told me. The headmaster had
been involved, also the local vicar, who accused Nutters of promoting
sado-masochistic activities. The tableau had originally shown an Eton boy in
tails and yellow brocade waistcoat, about to administer "six of the best" to
a girl in bra and pants. They would have had to take it down and eat humble
pie, but because a certain master had burst in and berated the hairdresser
while she was doing someone's hair, they'd been able to negotiate this
"compromise". It seemed a very English situation. But why hadn't they used
the defence that canes were once sold openly at Thomas's, along with their
hair preparations? After all, they were only carrying on a tradition. As
recently as the 1960s, I said, Thomas's used to have a display of canes,
arranged criss-cross in the window. Susan Mason was amused by this and said
they would certainly have used it, had they known.
As I left, I wondered if Ian Fleming had ever been sent down to Thomas's, as I
once was, to buy a suitable cane with which to be beaten; more to the point,
if he'd ever sent anyone. His love of gadgetry would surely have been
engaged by the different weapons on offer - the straight "House" cane, the
knobbly "School" cane, the curved-handled "Pop" cane. The "Real James Bond"
would have been in his element. Punishment, when it came, was administered
by older boys in common rooms called "Libraries" - book-free areas plastered
with pin-ups. Were these rooms decorated with pictures of film stars in the
1920s, as they were in the 50s? Did the young Fleming glimpse the face of
Clara Bow smiling saucily at him as he put his head under the table? Did
Louise Brooks pout over his shoulder at some quaking victim, as the older
Fleming flexed his cane and handed down some justice?
