John Pearson - James Bond - The Authorised Biography

According to James Bond, the men in his family all tend to be melancholies. Through this side of the family he evidently inherited his shut-in, brooding quality. There is a lot of granite in James Bond. He also got the family determination and toughness mixed with a solid dose of Calvinism. The Bonds, as true Scotsmen, believed in guilt, great care with money and the need for every man to prove himself.

Bond's father, Andrew, was a true Bond. Extremely gifted, he appears as something of a paragon during his boyhood – prize scholar and captain of games at Fettes, he went on to Aberdeen to study engineering with considerable success. In his early twenties when the war began, he joined the Royal Engineers, survived the Somme, and was seconded to Ian Hay's staff at Gallipoli. Here he lost an arm but gained a D.S.O. and also a lifelong admiration for the Turks. When the war ended, he was an acting brigadier and joined the Allied Military Government to supervise the dismantling of the Ruhr, a task which must have suited this puritanical young engineer.

But the real passion in his life was mountains. Climbing suited his strenuous nature, and late in 1918 the handsome young ex-brigadier spent his first peacetime leave climbing the mountains he had dreamed of – in the Swiss Alps. He was trying to forget the horror of the war, but he did more than that. He found a wife.

Whatever else they were, the Bonds were great romantics, and Andrew's marriage was in character. Just as Garibaldi saw the woman that he married for the first time through a telescope, so Andrew Bond caught his first glimpse of his future wife half-way up a mountain. She was suspended at the tail-end of a rope of mountaineers ascending the spectacular peak, the Aiguilles Rouges, above Geneva. Climbing conditions were appalling. From below, Andrew Bond admired the tenacity of the climbers. When, later, he went to congratulate them, only to find that the final climber was young, female and extremely pretty, his fate was sealed. So was hers. Nothing deterred him – neither the fact that she was barely nineteen, nor that her family opposed the match, nor that she was already officially engaged to a Zurich banker three times her age. The same spirit that had inspired old James Bond against the Russians at Sebastopol urged on his grandson for the girl he loved.

The Delacroixs were rich and obstinate and somewhat staid. Their reaction to their daughter's one-armed suitor was predictable. Had Andrew Bond possessed a modicum of tact he might still have won them round. Tact was, alas, one of his several deficiencies. After a stormy interview with the man he wished to make his father-in-law, he delivered a brief ultimatum, had it rejected, and stormed out of the big white house, slamming the ornate front doors behind him. Two days later, he and Monique eloped.

The elopement was to cause years of bitterness which helped sour much of James Bond's childhood. Monique was instantly disowned and cut off without the proverbial Swiss franc. Andrew, in return, would never let the name Delacroix be spoken in his presence. From now on he did his climbing in the Pyrenees. The prompt birth of a son and heir, James's elder brother Henry, nine months to the day after the wedding, made little difference. The Bonds and Delacroixs were not on speaking terms.

This was a pity, especially for Monique. Pretty, high-spirited and frivolous, she clearly found the early days of marriage far from easy. Apart from the baby and their mutual love of mountains, she and her formidable husband had little in common, and, as she was soon pregnant again, mountain-climbing hardly seemed advisable. The elopement had been the great adventure of her life. Once it was done she started missing Switzerland, the nice big house in Vaud and the warm, reassuring flow of funds from Papa Delacroix. She would have probably done better with her sexagenarian from Zurich.

As always in such cases, one wonders how two human beings can have been so painfully mistaken over one another. How could Andrew Bond possibly have been the sort of husband she required? He was profoundly serious and solitary, a dedicated engineer and something of a puritan. Worse still, he had no money. His old employers, Metro-Vickers, were prepared to have him back. There was a job for him in Birmingham. Monique, for the first, but not the last time, kicked. Andrew gave in; to keep his young wife happy, he accepted his secondment to the Allied High Command in Germany. James Bond was born the autumn after they arrived.

It should have been an idyllic childhood for two small boys. Their parents doted on them and they had everything – love, comfort, playthings and security. In this defeated country, they were like spoiled young princes. The house at Wattenscheid had its own grounds and was filled with servants, nannies, dogs and horses. Summers were spent along the Baltic coast or down the Rhine, Christmases at Glencoe where all the Bonds would gather and stay for Hogmanay like the old-fashioned tribal clan they were.

This was where James Bond saw his paternal grandfather, old Archie Bond, for the first time. He was terrified of him; and the old man spoke such broad Scots that the child, who already spoke better German than English, could understand little that he said. There were the wicked uncles too, his father's brothers – whisky-sodden Gregor and wealthy Ian who was such a miser. But the one relative they both adored was their father's only sister, their Aunt Charmian – sweet, sad Charmian, bride of three weeks, whose husband had died at Passchendaele. She lived in Kent, grew dahlias and believed in God.

James adored his mother; indeed, the more that she despaired of him, the more he loved her. Even today James Bond still keeps her miniature beside him, and regards her as a female paragon. When he describes her he uses words like ‘fresh’, ‘gay’, ‘irresistible’. Neither her affaires , her dottiness, her wild extravagance can dim her memory.

Unhappy marriages often produce devoted children; the Bonds were no exception. The family was held together by its tensions. James loved his father but could not speak to him of anything that mattered, worshipped his mother, but could not forgive her for rejecting him. In years to come a lot of women were to pay the price of this rejection.

Even as a child, James was finding that life had certain compensations. One was his strength; after the age of eight he found that he could always beat his brother in a stand-up fight – and did so frequently. Another was eating; he became known as a greedy child and, for a period, was extremely fat. (As Fleming noted, even in manhood James Bond remains addicted to double portions of whatever he enjoys.) Fighting and eating and long rambles with his dog – these were the consolations of the young James Bond.

Another feature of his boyhood was the continual movement that went on – the Bonds were wanderers. After Monique's refusal to settle back in Birmingham, Andrew accepted a succession of overseas assignments from Metro-Vickers when his attachment with the Military Government ended. From Germany they moved to Egypt, where Andrew worked as consultant for three years on the Nile dam project above Aswan. By now James was five, and, just as in Germany, he proved himself adaptable in his choice of playmates. Soon he had his private gang of small boys from the neighbourhood, most of them Egyptian. James seemed to find no difficulty communicating with them, or with asserting his leadership. He had always been big for his age. The Bond brothers had an elderly French governess. James could elude her, and for days on end would roam the city with his gang of guttersnipes. Sometimes they played along the river, scampering along the waterfront and living on their wits. At other times they flitted round the market-place, picking up money where they could and playing their games with other gangs.