Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Read Free

Fleming but got on better with Ian. Bryce was from an Anglo-Peruvian family who had made a fortune in the guano business. He put his good looks down to his Aztec or Inca blood. With his sensual face and laid-back manner, he also had a touch of the exotic and a rebellious streak that Fleming loved.
    Bryce had laid his hands on a second-hand Douglas motorbike on which the two friends went on forays in search of excitement, or more exactly girls, round Windsor, Maidenhead and Bray. Thereby Ian lost his virginity on the floor of the box at the Royalty Kinema in Windsor, an episode replayed from the girl’s point of view in The Spy Who Loved Me (the boy was an arrogant public-school type). On one occasion, when Ian was sixteen, they took the bike all the way to London to visit the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.
    But Eton was not a success. Although he was intelligent and did well at sports, Ian was always overshadowed by his brilliant and charismatic elder brother Peter. As he grew up, he increasingly chafed at the restrictions, and was unlucky enough to have a particularly sadistic housemaster. There were numerous warnings, then the latest trouble with some girls led to a looming expulsion. To avoid this embarrassment, his forceful mother intervened, taking Ian out of Eton a term early. She had decided that he should follow hismartyred father into the army, and so he started at a special tutorial college to prepare for the Sandhurst military academy examination.
    He worked hard and did well, his teacher writing to his mother, ‘He ought to make an excellent soldier, provided always that the Ladies don’t ruin him.’ But the endless drill and strict discipline were not for Ian, and he bunked off as much as he could. When he missed a term having contracted gonorrhea from a London prostitute, he made up his mind not to return, resigning in August 1927.
    His mother decided that he should instead try for the Foreign Office, but first Ian spent a year in the Austrian Tyrol, where he skied, learned languages, read a lot and conducted affairs (‘having fun with the local Heidis and Lenis and Trudis’, as his friend Cyril Connolly later described it). In his travel book Thrilling Cities, Fleming would report that Austrian girls ‘have a powerful weakness for young Englishmen’. They certainly did for this one, who, as a fellow student recalled, was ‘irresistible to women’. Another friend from that time later wrote that part of Ian’s appeal was that he ‘showed … a promise of something dashing or daring’.
    After Austria, Fleming moved to Munich and then Geneva, studying for the rigorous Foreign Office entrance examination. In spite of working hard, he failed the test, and once more his mother swung into action, securing him a job at Reuters in London. Fleming would look back on his three years there, which included trips to Moscow and Berlin, with great fondness; but fed up with having to negotiate cash handouts from his manipulative mother, he now decided he wanted to earn serious money in the City. The last straw was the terms of the will of his grandfather Robert Fleming, who died in August 1933. The entire £3 million fortune went to his widow and surviving eldest son, with nothing for Eve or her family.
    Ian’s first appointment in a merchant bank was not a success, so he tried his hand at stockbroking at an old and established firm. Here he drew a generous salary of £2,000 a year, enough to set up his ownhouse, but he was reportedly ‘the world’s worst stockbroker’, and the huge fortune he dreamt of never materialised.
    Meanwhile, in his private life he drifted between book-collecting, golf, bridge and women. He was notorious for his open-minded approach to sex, his obsessional interest in it and his direct manner of seduction. He had many affairs with women, young and old, single and married. One of his girlfriends from later in his life said that he was the best lover she had known. Ivar Bryce