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?

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