Bond, Uncle Bond

As the 25th Bond film comes out, Kate Grimond remembers Ian Fleming – her prescient, funny, diffident uncle

I last saw my uncle, Ian Fleming, in church at his mother’s funeral in 1964. He was in the pew opposite, supporting himself with a stick and with that grey-white visage of the very ill. Less than a fortnight later, he too was dead, at the age of 56.

For the previous few weeks, he and his mother (my grandmother) had been in nursing homes – he in Hove and she nearby in Brighton – which was distressing but, it has to be said, made visiting easier for members of the family. My father, Peter Fleming, drove there with his half-sister, Amaryllis, who, always more straight-talking, said on the way back, ‘You realise that Ian is dying’. My father refused to countenance this and said, ‘Nonsense’ – or some such.

Ian died on 12th August 1964, poignantly on the 12th birthday of his son, Caspar. It was also the day that the first copies of his only children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, were sent out.

For our side of the family – well, for my father – the Glorious Twelfth, the opening of the grouse-shooting season, was always a red-letter day. And there we were that day, on a moor in southern Scotland (Sister Teresa of these pages among our number). During a damp, tweedy picnic – tartan rugs, steaming dogs, tin thermoses – I noticed my father sitting a little away from the group and not joining in. He had heard the news of his brother’s death that morning – but told us only when we returned to the house. He then left for the south. Tributes to the creator of James Bond poured in.