For Your Eyes Only Read Free

boys’ maids’, and was then sent to Fettes (the Eton equivalent in Scotland). Fleming escaped a similar fate when he was removed from Eton by his mother at the age of seventeen, a term early, sent to a tutorial crammer to prepare for the army entrance exams, and then duly crammed into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the training college for army officers.
    By turns truculent and romantic, Fleming was not cut out for the regimented life of a Sandhurst cadet. His tutor, however, predicted that he would probably make a goodsoldier, ‘provided always that the Ladies don’t ruin him’. It was a prophetic remark. During one of his many forays outside the barracks, Fleming conceived a passion for Peggy Barnard, the attractive daughter of a colonel. On the evening of Sandhurst Sports Day, this blameless girl had agreed to attend an Oxford ball with another man, a date that so irritated Ian that he vowed, if she went ahead with it, to go to London and ‘find myself a tart’. Peggy went to the ball, and Ian went to the Forty-Three Club in Soho, carried out his threat, and came down with a nasty dose of gonorrhoea. Fleming’s enraged mother booked him into a nursing home, told the Sandhurst authorities that he was ill, and then pulled him out of the college altogether. In a last-ditch effort to instil some sort of balance in her increasingly wayward son (and if possible prepare him for the Foreign Office exams, her newest ambition for him), ‘Mrs Val’, as she was known, dispatched Ian to a finishing school, the Tennerhof, at Kitzbühel in the Austrian Alps.
    The Tennerhof was a peculiar establishment, run by an eccentric English couple, Ernan and Phyllis Forbes Dennis, a former diplomat-spy and his novelist wife. Ian learned to ski, and spent much of his time conducting brief liaisons with the local girls. ‘Technique in bed is important,’ he wrote in a notebook, with somewhat unattractive languor. ‘It is the scornful coupling that makes the affairs of Austrians and Anglo-Saxons so fragmentary and in the end so distasteful.’ Far more important than brushing up his technique in bedand on the slopes, under the indulgent care of the Forbes Dennises, Fleming would begin to read, voraciously, and start to write, tentatively. Every evening, wild-haired Phyllis Forbes Dennis would spin fantastic stories at the dinner table (having spent the early part of each day in bed writing novels under a pseudonym), and she encouraged her pupils to do likewise. Many years later, Fleming would credit Phyllis with helping to launch his career as a writer, though it would take many more years for that talent to emerge. He wrote several poems and short stories, which were vivid and expressive if rather over-cooked.
    In Fleming’s memory, Kitzbühel was a ‘golden time’, and it was followed by two more years away from England, first in Munich and then Geneva. The young Englishman cut a dashing figure: he drove a smart black two-seater Buick, developed an excellent command of French and German, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. He also became engaged, briefly, to a young Swiss woman named Monique Panchaud de Bottomes, until his mother intervened. In 1931 he took the Foreign Office exams, but did not win a place. Young Fleming had successively failed to live up to expectations at Eton and Sandhurst, and now in his bid to join the Foreign Service.
    At the age of twenty-one, Fleming was handsome in a somewhat vulpine way. A broken nose (acquired in a collision on the Eton football field with Henry Douglas-Home, brother of the future Prime Minister) added to his rakishallure. Here, then, was a man of athletic good looks and Scottish ancestry, dangerous to women, cultured and charming, with a taste for fast cars, expensive things and foreign adventures. His time at Eton had been an unmitigated failure, but he could ski beautifully, speak German fluently, and seduce effortlessly.