When folks think of James Bond, a lot of things can come to mind: a finely tailored tuxedo complete with cuffs; a vodka martini shaken, not stirred, and with a lemon twist if you’re a literary purist; or sometimes just beautiful women in an exotic locale. Whatever vice or trapping you imagine for the character, chances are all of the above involves excitement. Action! It’s been the appeal of the character from the very beginning when he sprang from author Ian Fleming’s typewriter.
Yet the literary James Bond, it should be noted, is not the cinematic superhero he inspired. Fleming’s original 007 of the page was grittier, often meaner, and frankly more of a snob. But even then, he was still a fantasy alter-ego for the former lieutenant-commander of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy—the guy introduced in the opening paragraphs of Casino Royale (1952) covered in cigarette smoke in the wee small hours of the morning in a French casino where he was about to win big.
Which is why it’s so shocking, and perhaps illuminating, to see how Fleming ultimately reveals Bond’s idea of an active Christmas Day near the opposite end of the author’s literary output. While for most of Bond’s career in Fleming’s lifetime—which spanned 12 novels and two short stories—the character’s home life was notoriously kept circumspect, near the end of the road, the author was becoming a little more interested in exploring 007 as a man and an individual. He wanted to put more reality into the fantasy.
This was most apparent in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), the second to last finished and published Bond novel in Fleming’s lifetime, and the one that is now celebrated for being among the most thrilling and despairing of the books. This is, after all, the adventure where Bond meets the love of his life, Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo (the future “Tracy Bond”). He marries her and loses her to his arch rival Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the same book, but not before some pretty dicey exploits along the Swiss Alps where Bond must escape Blofeld’s clutches on Christmas Eve by way of a hair-raising ski chase that ends with Tracy secreting James away to the sound of Christmas music.
This sequence, it should be said, is recreated more or less faithfully in the 1969 film adaptation of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which leans into the holiday setting with an original Christmas song written by John Barry and Hal David. Yet even in one of the few Bond movies bold enough to end on a downer after Tracy is murdered on her wedding day, the film still glosses over the minute particulars that make the literary On Her Majesty’s Secret Service so revealing. Sure, a Christmas Eve chase across ski slopes is exciting… but what about the day after such shenanigans when the cold light of (Christmas) Day arrives like some ghost haunting Ebenezer Scrooge? That is where the book truly offers a window into Bond’s world… and perhaps Fleming’s as well.
A Very James Bond Christmas
While Fleming deliberately leaves vague what 007’s Christmas plans might have been if he wasn’t roped into infiltrating Blofeld’s winter sports stronghold, this omission might be the actual point. A character created to be a vicarious window into a world of high stakes espionage, glamour, and sex never needs to be home for Christmas… because when he is the reality is so much more telling.
Indeed, the chapters in question set on Christmas Day begin with Bond arriving from the airport out of Zürich, still reeling from his near-death experience and what might be construed as second thoughts about proposing marriage to Tracy earlier that morning (on the flight to London, he has a nightmare about attending a swanky aristocratic function with Tracy in top hat and tails). But that’s all spur of the moment excitement. Reality sets in once back at home where he has no one to see him home for Christmas, save for his secretary Mary Goodnight.
In the books, Miss Goodnight is far closer to what fans of the Bond movies might expect from Miss Moneypenny; she is Bond’s office confidant and flirting partner, and the one who reprimands 007 at the airport by saying, “As you’re wrecking so many other people’s Christmases, I thought I might as well throw mine on the slag-heap with the others.” Truthfully, she enjoys the distraction from lunch with her aunt, but the fact James can only condescend to her about not being home to stir the plum pudding (something she did weeks ago), reveals how little James knows about actual holiday life.
Afterward, Mary drives James to first his flat, where he is unaware if his beloved landlady is celebrating Christmas or not, and then to the office where a skeleton crew awaits his debriefing report. Finally, he is shuttled to no less than M’s home in the country, which is revealed to be a stately little Regency era house on the Crown Lands by Windsor Forest. Bond spends the drive brooding over whether M got a special deal from Her Majesty as head of the British Secret Service since 007 knows his boss only earns £5,000 a year, which even in 1963 couldn’t afford a home so near Windsor Castle.
Ultimately, these chapters offer a curious insight into the personal lives of Bond and his employer. The two are perhaps closer than the first several books suggest, with Bond being greeted with an “afternoon, James, Happy Christmas and all that,” by M. The master of spies is at the time in his study and leisure, working on what we are told is the “stock bachelor’s hobby” of painting watercolors of English wild orchids. We are reminded that M was a vice admiral in the Royal Navy before retiring for British Intelligence’s new, segregated role in the post-World War II era. But he still lives the life of a seaman, if regrettably by trees instead of water. His devoted former chief petty officer, a man named Hammond, even followed M into private life, working with his wife as the great man’s valet and chef, respectfully.
Hammond is the first one to greet Bond behind a wooden door with a big brass ship’s bell on its frame (from M’s former command of the HMS Repulse). The situation becomes even faintly comical when, due to James’ last minute arrival on Christmas, Mrs. Hammond puts out traditional British Christmas crackers for their dinner.
“Throw them out,” M bellows. “Give ‘em to the schoolchildren. I’ll go so far with Mrs Hammond, but I’m damned if I’m going to have my dining-room turned into a nursery.”
So it goes that James and M reveal themselves to be two good old boys in their after-hours, as well as two confirmed bachelors who spend Christmas alternating between M’s study and dining room, each adorned with mementos of their former lives at sea. In the dining room, the walls are decorated by the evolution of the British cutlass; in the study various paintings from different eras of faded imperial glory blanket the surroundings.
“Everywhere there were mountainous seas, crashing cannon, bellying sails, tattered battle pennants,” Bond observed. “The fury of ancient engagements, the memories of ancient enemies, the French, the Dutch, the Spaniards, even the Americans. All gone, all friends now with one another. Not a sign of the enemies of today.” The two even eventually reminisce about M’s earlier and more illustrious days in a period where Britain’s superpower status was still undisputed as masters of the waves.
Over cigars and coffee, “M continued with his stories about the Navy which Bond could listen to all day—stories of battles, tornadoes, bizarre happenings, narrow shaves, courts martial, eccentric officers, neatly-worded signals, as when Admiral Somerville, commanding the battleship Queen Elizabeth, had passed the liner Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic and had signalled the one word ‘SNAP’! Perhaps it was all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true and it was about a great navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again.”
An Empire in Christmastime Twilight
Such is Fleming’s window into a festive Yuletide for agent 007 and his boss: two men who had no intention of celebrating Christmas one way or the other, but who find camaraderie while waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ days on the high sea.
On the one hand, this quiet interlude between the action of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—an interlude that is unsurprisingly excised from the film adaptation—feels like a concession for Fleming. When the author first created 007, he did so to invent a literary alter-ego who could do all the incendiary, or lascivious, things Fleming might have dreamed about. Yet, nearer the end of his life, the author seemed eager to invest some reality to the loneliness of a life in espionage and public service, two things Fleming knew all too well about.
In fact, it is Fleming’s backstory that gives the sequence its other more intriguing contrast. It is indeed easy to draw a parallel between Bond and M and Fleming’s own personal relationship with Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, and the officer who recruited Fleming to the Admiralty where the future Bond creator became Godfrey’s personal assistant. These were two naval officers who were old enough to remember a world before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated—if only just so in Fleming’s case. But while the man who would create James Bond was but a boy when World War I started, Godfrey had been in the Navy for more than a decade, first entering as a cadet in 1903 and then going on to attend school at the HMS Britannia. By the time of the First World War, he was an officer aboard the HMS Euryalus.
So while the fairly quiet Christmas at play is a window into Fleming’s estimation of the life of espionage officers and agents, its unabashedly romantic nostalgia for M’s youth paints a pained longing for the glory of the British Empire, and a time when naval power meant supreme power.
More than a hundred years after Godfrey’s rise in the ranks, it’s a reminder of the turn of the 20th century imperial values that animated Fleming, and which to this day define the James Bond fantasy he created. And with a cup of coffee, a fine cigar, plus maybe a Christmas cracker or two secreted beneath the table, it has its own kind of antiquated charm to consider. Here is a relic of a bygone age. Merry Christmas, James.
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