For Your Eyes Only Read Free Page A

Ernan Forbes Dennis said of his young pupil: ‘He has excellent taste . . . and a desire both for truth and knowledge. He is virile and ambitious, generous and kind-hearted.’ There was also something solitary and reserved about his character, a central hardness. All these things could be said of the young Fleming; in time, they would also be true of James Bond.
    Mrs Val stepped in once more. Ian, she decreed, would become a journalist. Strings were pulled, and in October 1931 he took paid employment for the first time at Reuters news agency. This would prove a crucial formative experience. ‘I learned to write fast, and above all, be accurate,’ he recalled. ‘In Reuters if you weren’t accurate you were fired, and that was the end of that.’ Accuracy, speed and facts – the more colourful the better – these were the three key elements of a technique that would come to fruition with the Bond books. In addition, journalism would introduce Fleming to the wider world of international politics and foreign travel, the background for what was to come. In his first year in the job, Fleming covered the Alpine motor trials, an assignment that confirmed a growing fascination with fast cars, motor-racing and the associated high life, plus a Stalinistshow trial of six British engineers accused of spying. Fleming’s first taste of Moscow – gloomy, oppressive, granite-faced Communism – would inform his later images of Russian strength and menace. He loved it. With the chutzpah of youth, he formally requested an interview with Stalin; he was not surprised to be turned down, but was entirely astonished to received a note apparently signed by Stalin himself, explaining that he was simply too busy. The writer William Plomer, who met Fleming at this time, described him as ‘like a mettlesome young horse’ with ‘a promise of something dashing and daring’. He seemed, thought Plomer, to ‘smell some battle from afar’.
    Having found a job he was good at, and enjoyed, Fleming promptly abandoned journalism for an exceptionally boring job in the City. The decision was perhaps less peculiar than it first seems. Robert Fleming had died, leaving nothing to his grandsons, whom he expected to be provided for by their father’s estate. The nature of Val’s will, however, meant that they would not inherit anything unless or until their mother remarried, or died. Such wills were not uncommon at the time, but it had a profound and unintended effect on Val’s sons. The Fleming boys had been born to a world of money; the only problem was that they did not have very much of it. Ian Fleming, not for the last time in his life, decided to choose the more lucrative option and joined the merchant bank Cull & Co.
    Fleming was not a good banker and soon shifted tostockbroking, to which he was even less suited. Indeed, one friend described him as ‘the world’s worst stockbroker’. His plan was simply to ‘make a packet and then get out’ – an ambition often stated by financial folk that seldom comes to pass, and even more rarely produces satisfaction. Fleming spent money as fast as he made it, on golf, cards, books (he would become an avid bibliophile) and women: young women from the cocktail party circuit, including a ‘rather spiffing’ nightclub dancer (or ‘bubble girl’) called Storm, but also older women – these older women were often intelligent, with strong personalities, and by no means naive poppets or stereotypical Bond Girls; they also tended to be married, usually to people Fleming knew. Whereas Bond goes to bed with a particular type (and shape) of woman, Fleming was more catholic and perhaps less choosy in his tastes. As one girlfriend remarked, ‘For Ian, women were like fishcakes. Mind you he was very fond of fishcakes, but he never pretended there was any mystique about eating them.’ Bond dines on caviar and