“’One reads Fleming… for the pleasure of meeting an Elizabethan spirit allied to a modern mind,” wrote Vita Sackville-West in 1934, and for the rest of the 1930s Fleming was often referred to as “a modern Elizabethan”, reviving the lost swashbuckling spirit that had attended the founding of the British Empire – just as James Bond would later be said to do during the new Elizabethan age, encapsulating the best of the British gung-ho spirit even as the Empire faded.
As Peter grew older, he became an ever more impressive figure; although the highest rank he attained in the army was Lieutenant-Colonel, he was held in such esteem that generals would stand up for him if he came into a room. If we want a proto-Bond, we may be wiser to look not to Ian but to Peter.
Peter Fleming was the oldest of four sons of the Conservative MP Major Valentine Fleming, who was killed by German shellfire in France in 1917, a few days before Peter’s 10th birthday. Peter recalled that he and Ian were close as boys, “like two fox cubs”, but also fought “like cats and dogs”.
Peter was something of a paragon, being both sparklingly intelligent and well-behaved; when Ian found out as an adult that Peter had once thrown his porridge out of the nursery window, he exclaimed: “Oh, I wish I’d known that at the time. He always seemed so perfect.” According to Ian’s biographer Andrew Lycett, his “uncompromising sense of his own failure” throughout his life had much to do with “having to play second fiddle to Peter”.
After Eton and Oxford, Peter had a false start working in the New York office of the Fleming family banking firm – “My aversion to business and all that it stands for grows almost hourly”, he reported – and in 1931 he returned home to become literary editor of The Spectator, finding his niche at a time when Ian was dropping out of Sandhurst and then failing to get into the Foreign Office.
And then in 1932 came the fateful moment when Peter chanced on an advert in The Times: “Exploring and sporting expedition, under experienced guidance, leaving England June, to explore rivers central Brazil, if possible ascertain fate Colonel Fawcett; abundance game, big and small; exceptional fishing; ROOM TWO MORE GUNS; highest references expected and given.” Fleming, a keen marksman, decided to join this expedition to find out what had happened to the English explorer Percy Fawcett, who had vanished in Brazil seven years earlier trying to find the city of “Z” which he believed lay deep in its untracked jungles.
The trip resulted in Brazilian Adventure (1933), the book that made Fleming’s name – “a marvellous… travel book and skit-on-travel-book in one”, as Kingsley Amis once described it. There is no doubt that the dangers Fleming faced on this journey into the Amazon – he encountered caymans and cannibals, and got caught up in a revolution at one point – were considerable, and he evoked splendidly the “fierce and irresponsible delight that comes when you are contending with odds to the limit of your physical energies”.
