Free The Ian Fleming Miscellany by Andrew Cook

suburban houses of the Combined Services Interrogation Centre. As to killing someone, his invention, James Bond (‘licensed to kill’), would admit of himself that he ‘never liked doing it’.
    Somebody certainly passed POWs to him for interrogation of a gentler kind. There were people in Military Intelligence (Guy Liddell was one) who were pretty sure torture was less effective than the velvet glove. Ian was good at soft-soaping people. Wearing civilian clothes, he would take captured German U-boat commanders, who presumably were elegantly shod and given suits from decent tailors, to lunch in smart restaurants. In theory, rare beef and several bottles of Romanée-Conti could work wonders and probably did, until one day, when he and two such guests were enjoying an animated conversation at Scott’s in Mount Street, they were interrupted by Scotland Yard detectives. A waiter, hearing conviviality in German, had called the police, and Fleming and his friends were hauled away in a Black Maria. He never entirely lived that down in Room 39.

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    Captain Edmund Rushbrooke, Godfrey’s successor in the autumn of 1942, seems to have encouraged Fleming to carry on much as before, as Commander of 30AU – in command but never in the fight.
    His job in wartime is often described as ‘deskbound’. This is very much an elastic term. Throughout his naval service he had continued to draw a salary from Rowe and Pitman, and he kept in touch with City contacts. So that was some long lunches sorted; then there were the cocktails and dinners with his OSS liaison officer in London, Lieutenant Tully Schneider, at the American Officers’ Club in Park Lane. He was seeing a pretty colleague called Joan Bright at the time. At 38, and doing rather well on his own, he saw no point in marriage. Women, he told Schneider, were ‘like dogs; men were the only human beings, the only ones he could be friends with’. He did admit to being badly upset when Muriel Wright was killed by a bomb.
    He visited Cairo, a hub of British intrigue in the Middle East, for the Churchill-Roosevelt conference in November of 1943 and Joan Bright went along. A month later he and Anne were both Christmas guests at Send, a quiet, dispersed old village near Guildford, where Loelia Westminster lived at Send Grove.
    In 1944, Anne would receive news of Baron O’Neill’s death in action. Eve Fleming had lost her husband when she was 38 and had lived on a generous allowance ever since. Anne O’Neill was 41 when she was widowed, and there wasn’t a lot of money. She was miles from being poor, but in order to maintain her lifestyle and social position she needed a rich husband. The two favourites, had London society been opening a book on it, would have been Esmond or Ian. People were hard pressed to say which, but they probably thought both men were terribly well off. Esmond was extremely rich, but he and Anne were forever bickering. Ian was reluctant to marry and anyway hadn’t inherited the income Anne would require. His grandfather had left him and his brothers out of his will and his grandmother died intestate.
    Ian did not make a move. That winter he was travelling with Clare Blanshard, Hillgarth’s assistant, in the Far East. But as the Allies began to bomb Japan the Nazi threat to Britain diminished. The end of the war in Europe was within sight and he was thinking more and more about how to live when it was over. His job was being slowly wound down. In 1945, the mundane tasks were all that remained. Typical was a day he spent in Malvern, reporting on the office and accommodation proposed as home for staff of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment. He delivered a caustic but constructive two-page assessment of the state of HMS Duke , which had until then been a Royal Navy shore base. To sum up, the lavatories were disgusting and all its scant facilities required an upgrade.
    He tied up the loose ends of his naval career