Becoming & Unbecoming: The Next James Bond

By Ken Evans

‘Becoming and Unbecoming Bond’ is a life-long journey. Involving, learning from real-life experiences, challenging the world (as it is), especially the wise-guys; also taking risks, as well as staying alive. If you can’t manage that, then you can’t become Bond, or anything! That doesn’t mean, I have spent my life looking for trouble, there’s enough of that without looking for more. But it does mean, that if it comes looking for you, you have to do a ‘Hamlet’, “To take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665596664

Ken Evans

Ken Evans has taught and applied ORM in English and French for 10 years. His know-how in data and process modeling and complex systems management comes from over 30 years in industry, including international jobs with IBM, EDS, Honeywell Controls, and Plessy and clients among the Fortune 500.

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BECOMING &

UNBECOMING

THE NEXT JAMES BOND

KEN EVANS

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©

2022 Ken Evans. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  02/07/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9667-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9666-4 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

ALBION

THEATRE OF WAR

RONNIE’S BAR

CHRISTMAS

TRONDHEIM PAINTING PARTY

CULDROSE REVISITED

LISBON

EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY

BOSCOMBE DOWN

YEOVILTON

ARBROATH

YEOVILTON REVISITED

NAVAL HUMOUR & LANGUAGE

INTERLUDE & PRELUDE

CONCORDE

FLOYDS

SOMETIMES, AFTERNOON TEA!

ALL DAY ENGLISH BREAKFAST

MACDO`S

SCARE HOME & OTHER STATIONS

POSH-PREP-SCHOOL

BISHOPS CONFERENCE

ANALYSIS AND REFLECTION

‘

Becoming and Unbecoming Bond’ is a life-long journey. Involving, learning from real-life experiences, challenging the world (as it is), especially the wise-guys; also taking risks, as well as staying alive. If you can’t manage that, then you can’t become Bond, or anything! That doesn’t mean, I have spent my life looking for trouble, there’s enough of that without looking for more. But it does mean, that if it comes looking for you, you have to do a ‘Hamlet’, To take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.

In Bond’s case, that’s the action, but in an ordinary everyday sense, its necessarily more subtle! You have to learn to know when you are being lied to, and how to play the long-game, without ever letting-on how you know it. Sometimes, something I’ve been reading, or heard about on the radio, connects with vaguely remembered events from my own real-life’s experiences, sufficiently similar to cause me to scratch around the clutter of my memories, for anything that might identify the missing pieces. Including strange theories, connecting literature to so-called reality. From that standpoint my experiences seem to be a sort of reversed ‘deja-vu, something akin to re-visiting existing accounts of my own intimate biography, as if the gods of History, Fate and Literature have somehow conspired together. Proving the point, there is nothing more prophetic than literature!

One such recent remembered event took me back to the Nineteen Sixties, during my final posting to the Royal Naval Air Station Yeovilton. While crossing the road one early morning, between the living-quarters and the guarded entrance to the Airfield. During the flow of bodies from one side of the road to the other, everyone on their way to their work; Officers, Ratings, Wrens, etc. were squeezed together in the mad rush, causing several amusing verbal interactions; but one provocative salutation took the biscuit! One of the Wrens shouted loudly in my direction. Good morning Mr. Bond, it was a saucy joke of course, but my buddies looked at me askance, nobody had the slightest idea what it meant. The name, Mr. Bond hung around for a few days, as a silly joke, with suggestions that I must be hiding something!.

Several days later, (by chance I think) I ran into the suspected Wren again, waiting by the Guardroom, as if expecting to meet someone. She cautiously smiled in my direction as if in recognition. She was certainly attractive enough to stop for a quick chat, and standing with such a defiant air. I came straight to the point, asking her if she had mistaken me for someone else, a certain ‘Mr.Bond’ perhaps? She seemed surprised, nervously fiddling with her shoulder-bag, looking for something, and muttering something about my red MG sports car. Finally, she produced a tattered dog-eared paperback book from her bag, offering it, saying If you read this, you will find out, . . . and, . . . if you like the book, you just might be lucky enough, . . . to ask me out! I couldn’t think fast enough to reply, startled by her boldness, trying to make sense of what she had said and how she had said it. I took the book with no immediate intention of reading it, and strutted off, more than a little ruffled. But later, sitting in the Air-Crew-Room by 849’s hangar, waiting for my pre-flight Briefing, I flipped through the pages to discover that the Mr. Bond she had mentioned, was in fact a fictitious MI 6 Special Agent who liked ‘fast cars and fast women’. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but that had been my first ‘Bond Moment’! I hardly need to expand on the details at this stage of my story, but she enjoyed sitting by my side in the MG, I never found out what alchemy had brought us together!

I discovered recently, there has been wild speculation about the next 007, with articles about possible actors, and about Ian Fleming, Bond’s author. Sending me off on my own investigations, which took me first to Martin Green’s book,‘Children of the Sun’, about a 1930’s literary cult; all Etonians; and all sharing particular ideas of a certain kind of Englishness, all enjoying their first-flush of manhood during the inter-war-years; each one of them ‘Dandies’ from wealthy families, dedicated solely to their own ‘perfection’, through the delicate ritual of ‘Taste’ . . .free of all human commitments that conflicted with that superlative ‘Taste’- of manners, passions, moralities, ambitions, politics, or occupations. (This is beginning to sound a bit like Mr. Bond of the Movies!)

Among those cult members, some who eventually became novelists, including; Amis, Raven, and Fleming, etc., described by Martin Green as; preoccupied with ‘power, with dominance (off one man over another), with command, self-aggrandisement, and humiliation of others, challenging, and revengeful’; Green described it as a kind of ‘power-pornography’. With all of these exclusive characteristics, to some extent subsumed within the psyche of Fleming’s hero, James Bond, 007.

Ian Fleming was a central figure and one of that gifted cultic generation of Etonians. Also mostly from the same prep schools, forty or so of them, including Evelyn Waugh, Randolph Churchill, W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, John Strachey, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, all sometime followers of Harold Acton and Brian Howard, as well as friends of the Sitwells, and Gertrude Stein, especially influenced by Diaghilev, who was their exemplary aesthete, especially admired for his sense of style, - his poise, gestures, clothes, personality and sexuality; very much a true Dandy, in every sense. His Gay-ness, deemed necessarily part of his flamboyant persona! At this time, French high culture was dominated by an almost overt homosexuality, especially in the world of ballet, and its music, and the commedia dell’arte. Diaghilev presented himself as the ultra-refined muscular artist; "confined in a mysterious way, to the way he was . . . claiming, "the creator must love only beauty, and must only commune with beauty, where his divine nature is manifest", claiming, the reactions of art to earthly difficulty, are not worthy of the soul of the Divinity. . . He claimed the sole function of art, to be, pleasure, its only instrument, beauty. . Such values, intended to challenge the older generation with scandalous hysteria and madness. The ritual of the ballet, (my own mother was a Ballet Teacher) with its wild music at that time, was seen as a revolt against England’s old hierarchical order, both of Art and Society; even in its smallest flourishes, such as the way one slouches! (Anthony Powell’s first school essay mentions, ‘… that the day after he first arrived at school, he saw a boy whistling a popular song, with his hands in his pocket, he thought this must be ‘an almost perfect specimen of the world-famous Eton slouch!’). He described it as the most sophisticated thing that I had ever seen. . . . ‘All this elegance gave me, at an early stage in my career, a conception of the school of which I was never able to divest myself entirely. . . There was a certainty about the standards of the people I found myself among, which was to make assurance even of university undergraduates seem vapid and self-conscious.’ He later mentioned that such small things were important signs of the ‘Etonian’s’ self-assurance. Of course, all of this also applies in some measure to most of the young Royal Navy Officers of those times, whose rules of conduct closely resembled the house rules of the best English Public Schools, with proper Oxbridge Dinners, not to say fine Dinners in Her Majesties Ship’s Wardrooms, where the cuisine and service at table matched any of the former, as well as from the best London Hotels and Clubs.

Fleming, as an old Etonian, would be on familiar territory, working under his boss at M.I.6., Sir Stewart Menzies, also an Old Etonian blue-blood, three times married into aristocracy, and decorated with K.C.B., K.C.M.G., D.S.O., and M.C. who, at that time, represented the ultimate world of power and privilege, in an old-English- Gentlemanly style; who spent much of his time conferring in the Bar at White’s Club. Hence, authors and novelists such as Graham Green, John Le Carre, and Ian Fleming, etc, shared some of the same values of each other, and of their boss, (the original ‘M’) but with perhaps less glory, and were able to draw on the kind of kudos associated with M.I.6. (counterintelligence) and able to draw-on a reservoir of sometimes unbelievable fantasies, and life-style of its Operatives, with their personal characteristics imbued from their earliest Prep-Schools, through Public School (mostly Eton), Oxford, etc., then the mandatory ‘Ministry Job’ in this or that, or the Military, but most importantly, as completely untrained Special Agents and Spymasters, but most importantly, looking and sounding the part! Besides being proper (English) Gentlemen’, as well as possessing proper table manners and the necessary savour-faire to attract suitable stylish women; which is why, the next Cinematic James Bond cannot be anything other than the Real Thing: - A home-bred old-fashioned (certain kind of) ‘English Gentleman’ with the right kind of table manners, including knowledge of good food and wine, surprisingly witty with a wicked sense of humour as well as being not too sanguine about (sometimes) having to eliminate a few of England’s enemies, when they are attempting grabbing some of our possessions, such as (in my time); the Suez Canal! Some of my reminiscences of these, just pop-up from nowhere, so to speak. Others come in dreams, or in hidden messages from all sorts of writing, some perhaps I simply imagine. But whatever the case, they come! Sometimes, even with Mr. Bond to make his point! The Sixties were a breaking point for many things in my life; two deaths in the family, escaping to RN, to get away from the dullness of Post-War Britain, with free travel for tropical adventures, with dangerous women, fast cars, flying Skyraiders, and seeing some real-live action. In other words, all jolly-good ‘Boys Own’ stuff! The more I learned about Bond, the more ‘unbecoming’!

Open

Tuesday 18th September 1956

Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose, Helston Cornwall.

After a week of Harry-Clamper’s, the heavy fog-like grey sea-mist, native to the Lizard, began to clear. The late-morning sun breaking-through, beaming like a good omen, bathing the airfield in a dazzling radiant light. The sharp-bright light, now glancing off the outlines of three other fuselages and tail-planes, creating a ghostlike glare, as I followed them in-line. Taxiing along the perimeter track towards the main runway, ready for take-off. With very little cloud overhead, and the remains of a dissolving frost on the dark-damp tarmac, with the usual few airfield-hares chasing one another across the wet grass. Apart from this, the rest of the airfield was eerily frozen in time, and silently deserted, as our four large dark-blue Cabs (aircraft), Skyraiders of 849 Squadron, C Flight, chugged slowly into place at the end of the main runway. Whenever maneuvering a Skyraider into place, on the perimeter-track, she has the appearance of a lumbering, and clumsy-looking over-weight weary elderly lady, but once airborne becomes deceptively agile; a beautifully responsive bird to fly.

I bring my Cab to the start-line of the runway, and line- up besides the ‘Boss’; Lieutenant Commander ‘Paddy’ Sullivan, Commanding Officer, C Flight 849 Squadron. I glance across at him to give him my thumbs-up, ready for take-off. The remaining aircraft join us, and take-up their position close behind, as we wait for ‘Clearance’ for takeoff, from Air Traffic Control. Looking around, I see the other pilots in their cockpits completing their final pre-take off checks; operating their flight-controls; operating ailerons, tail-fins, throttle etc., with a quick last look at the surrounding airfield, seemingly still slumbering!

In that stillness, the only sound our four noisy Sky Raiders, awaiting to depart Culdrose, located at the tip of the Lizard Peninsular, Cornwall; our destination, HMS Albion, our Aircraft Carrier Mother Ship, presently steaming somewhere off the northern tip of Spain. Each of our four aircraft’s crews of pilot and two observers to each Cab, had become experienced in our routine duties; AEW (airborne early –warning) surveillance sorties, which we flew singly and individually. But this morning is different and unusual. Not because there are four of us flying together; that is normal when returning to our Carrier, but on this occasion the unusual element had been the surprisingly sudden termination of our main annual leave, and the unexplained hurried preparation for departure to our ship, the visible sense of urgency, as we now waited to take-off.

The whole of C Flight had been informed only one week before, by telegram, for all aircrew to return immediately to Royal Naval Air Station - Culdrose, our land-base. The rest of