“Naughty” was how Ian Fleming’s exemplary eldest brother described him. Restless, often in disgrace, Ian dropped out of Eton, then Sandhurst. There Fleming would have learnt to use firearms, and his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare opens up convincing links between Fleming and his fictional creation, the gun-toting James Bond, but the boy Ian reminds me of Peter Rabbit: naughty and courting risk as he pulls whatever he wants from Mr McGregor’s vegetable garden. In Beatrix Potter’s watercolour, this wilful one stands apart, eyes averted from his siblings, the three obedient bunnies belonging to Mrs Rabbit whose husband, sadly, is no more. A photograph of Mrs Fleming with her four boys has the biddable three bunched together, while Ian scowls to one side.
Was his singularity determined by nature or did experience shape his wayward character? His father, Valentine Fleming, a dashing war hero and model for Bond, was killed in 1917 when Ian was eight. Before Val vanished in clouds of glory, he sent two coercive letters to his son. The first, when the child was three, forbids crying on pain of ridicule by other boys, then offers a big-boy image of himself: a photograph of Val shooting a stag. A second letter silences his son at prep school in Dorset, when he misses his mother and finds no friend among the beastly boys. Val, writing from the trenches, says it’s not done to speak of problems.
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