James Bond: The Authorised Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

There is a lot of granite in James Bond. He also got the family determination and toughness mixed with a solid dose of Calvinism. The Bonds, as true Scotsmen, believed in guilt, great care with money and the need for every man to prove himself.
    Bond's father, Andrew, was a true Bond. Extremely gifted, he appears as something of a paragon during his boyhood – prize scholar and captain of games at Fettes, he went on to Aberdeen to study engineering with considerable success. In his early twenties when the war began, he joined the Royal Engineers, survived the Somme, and was seconded to Ian Hay's staff at Gallipoli. Here he lost an arm but gained a D.S.O. and also a lifelong admiration for the Turks. When the war ended, he was an acting brigadier and joined the Allied Military Government to supervise the dismantling of the Ruhr, a task which must have suited this puritanical young engineer.
    But the real passion in his life was mountains. Climbing suited his strenuous nature, and late in 1918 the handsome young ex-brigadier spent his first peacetime leave climbing the mountains he had dreamed of – in the Swiss Alps. He was trying to forget the horror of the war, but he did more than that. He found a wife.
    Whatever else they were, the Bonds were great romantics, and Andrew's marriage was in character. Just as Garibaldi saw the woman that he married for the first time through a telescope, so Andrew Bond caught his first glimpse of his future wife half-way up a mountain. She was suspended at the tail-end of a rope of mountaineers ascending the spectacular peak, the Aiguilles Rouges, above Geneva. Climbing conditions were appalling. From below, Andrew Bond admired the tenacity of the climbers. When, later, he went to congratulate them, only to find that the final climber was young, female and extremely pretty, his fate was sealed. So was hers. Nothing deterred him – neither the fact that she was barely nineteen, nor that her family opposed the match, nor that she was already officially engaged to a Zurich banker three times her age. The same spirit that had inspired old James Bond against the Russians at Sebastopol urged on his grandson for the girl he loved.
    The Delacroixs were rich and obstinate and somewhat staid. Their reaction to their daughter's one-armed suitor was predictable. Had Andrew Bond possessed a modicum of tact he might still have won them round. Tact was, alas, one of his several deficiencies. After a stormy interview with the man he wished to make his father-in-law, he delivered a brief ultimatum, had it rejected, and stormed out of the big white house, slamming the ornate front doors behind him. Two days later, he and Monique eloped.
    The elopement was to cause years of bitterness which helped sour much of James Bond's childhood. Monique was instantly disowned and cut off without the proverbial Swiss franc. Andrew, in return, would never let the name Delacroix be spoken in his presence. From now on he did his climbing in the Pyrenees. The prompt birth of a son and heir, James's elder brother Henry, nine months to the day after the wedding, made little difference. The Bonds and Delacroixs were not on speaking terms.
    This was a pity, especially for Monique. Pretty, high-spirited and frivolous, she clearly found the early days of marriage far from easy. Apart from the baby and their mutual love of mountains, she and her formidable husband had little in common, and, as she was soon pregnant again, mountain-climbing hardly seemed advisable. The elopement had been the great adventure of her life. Once it was done she started missing Switzerland, the nice big house in Vaud and the warm, reassuring flow of funds from Papa Delacroix. She would have probably done better with her sexagenarian from Zurich.
    As always in such cases, one wonders how two human beings can have been so painfully mistaken over one another. How could Andrew Bond possibly have been the sort of husband she required? He was profoundly serious