“After five years of procrastination, Ian Fleming sat down at The Typewriter. He began to write not for The Joy of Creating, but as a way to avoid reality.
He was forty-three years old and troubled by thoughts of The Future.
At The Typewriter, he could escape reality and dream about the person he would rather be.
On The Surface, Fleming’s Life looked idyllic. It was 1952, and he was wintering in Goldeneye, a simple one-storey house near Oracabessa on the north shore of Jamaica. He had had this House built after the end of the Second World War, with the intention of using it as a winter Writing retreat. It was quite an ugly, sparse building, to the eyes of those used to beauty and luxury, and it lacked basic amenities like cupboards, hot water and even glass in the windows. It did include a separate garage which served as staff quarters, however; although he saw it as a rough, rugged, masculine retreat, Fleming still wanted servants.
Outside Goldeneye, the views and the weather were as close to paradise as you will find on this earth. So too was the act of walking through the rough garden and taking the steps down to the beach, entering the warm clear water and snorkelling among the coral of the Caribbean. Fleming left London and came to stay at Goldeneye for three months every winter. His life, clearly, was markedly different to that of his fellow Englishmen who were born in the Dingle.
It was not hard to see why it took him five years to start his novel.
Fleming was depressed and drinking heavily. He was also about to get married. His fiancée, Ann, was the love of his life and pregnant with his child, but this didn’t mean that he wanted to be married to her. He began writing, he later admitted, to take his mind off the ‘hideous spectre of matrimony’. A committed relationship requires a level of emotional maturity which he did not possess. Mutual friends suspected from the start that the marriage would be a disaster. As the playwright Noël Coward noted in his diary, ‘I have doubts about their happiness if [Ann] and Ian were to be married.’
When the pair first began their affair, Ann was married to an aristocrat and had the title Lady O’Neill. After Lord O’Neill was killed in action in the Second World War, she considered continuing her relationship with Ian, but decided against it. Instead she married Viscount Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail. In Ann’s opinion, Rothermere’s title and wealth made him a more attractive husband. The marriage was not a fulfilling one, however, so Ann and Ian resumed their affair.
Their physical relationship was a BDSM one, in which Ian inflicted pain on Ann. As she wrote to him after a liaison in Dublin in 1947, ‘I loved cooking for you and sleeping beside you and being whipped by you and I don’t think I have ever loved like this before […] I love being hurt by you and kissed afterwards.’
In a letter Ian wrote to Ann during the war, which was sold by Sothebys in 2009, he told her that ‘I love whipping you & squeezing you & pulling your black hair, and then we are happy together & stick pins into each other & like each other & don’t behave too grownup & don’t pretend much.’
Although Ann and Ian’s stormy relationship was an open secret in the social circles they moved in, Ann and Viscount Rothermere didn’t divorce until after she fell pregnant with Ian’s child. This left the pair finally free to marry. As Ian wrote in a letter to Ann’s brother ahead of their wedding, ‘We are of course totally unsuited … I’m a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of a bilious and melancholic temperament … Ann is a sanguine anarchist/traditionalist. So china will fly and there will be rage and tears. But I think we will survive as there is no bitterness in either of us and we are both optimists – and I shall never hurt her except with a slipper.’
Most of Fleming’s biographers link his fear of marriage with his lack of healthy emotional relationships in his formative years. His grandfather was Robert Fleming, who developed the concept of investment trusts and who founded the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. Robert Fleming has been called ‘one of the pioneers of investment capitalism’; he made his family extremely wealthy.
Robert’s son and Ian’s father was Valentine, a Conservative Member of Parliament who was killed in action at the Battle of the Somme in the First World War. His obituary in The Times was written by his friend Winston Churchill.
Ian was only nine when Valentine died. He was brought up to see his father as the epitome of male virtue – brave, successful in worldly affairs, incredibly rich, and entirely absent. As paternal figures go, Valentine was impossible to live up to. Fleming and his siblings used to end their nightly prayers with the words, ‘and please, dear God, help me grow up to be more like Mokie’ – their nickname for their late father, a child’s variation on ‘smokey’, because of Valentine’s love of pipe smoking.
The family nickname for Fleming’s mother Eve, curiously, was ‘M’. Eve was less admired than her late husband. She was beautiful but could be domineering and was, according to her granddaughter, ‘a quite frightening woman’. She was aware that young Ian was sensitive, but she liked to humiliate him in public regardless. A cruel clause in her husband’s will meant that she would be cut off from his family’s wealth if she ever remarried, so Eve chose wealth over love and remained single for the rest of her life. When she later became pregnant by the painter Augustus John, she went away for the rest of the year and returned with a baby she claimed was adopted.
Later, when Ian was in his early twenties, he became engaged to an Austrian girl he had fallen in love with, who Eve didn’t approve of. His mother made him an ultimatum: either Ian split from his fiancée or she would cut him off from the family money. Ian also chose wealth over love and ended his engagement. Had he made a different choice, like the brigadier’s daughter Jeanette, his life may have been very different. Ian was sent away to a series of elite boarding schools. His first, Durnford, was described by Fleming’s friend and biographer Andrew Lycett as ‘a harsh and often cruel establishment […] If it existed today, it would certainly be closed down.’
Durnford led to Eton, where his housemaster was bluntly described, in Tim Card’s official history of Eton, as a sadist. Interviewed for a 2006 documentary, his friend Tina Beal recalled how at Eton, Fleming ‘was scheduled to be beaten and he was going to run in a cross-country race, so he applied to be beaten early so that he would be in time to run in this race’. At Eton, it was the tradition that boys were beaten at noon. ‘They beat him so savagely that blood came through his trousers and he ran the race with blood coming through his pants,’ Beal continued. ‘He finished second!’ As Lycett described the incident, Fleming ran the steeplechase with ‘his shanks and running shorts stained with his own gore’.
To modern eyes, the delight and amusement with which Beal recounts this story is disturbing. Beating children was then accepted as normal. There was little awareness that such trauma could leave lifelong psychological scars.
As his friend Robert Harling has argued, it was Fleming’s time in English boarding schools that forged his ‘imprisonment of emotions’. As Harling observed, ‘the English upper crust wants and needs affection as deeply as any other crust, but impulses towards this important emotional release are frequently stifled for them […] the boys grow up, professing to hate what they so need.’
Faced with an imminent wedding and a pregnant fiancée, with all the responsibility, commitment and emotional understanding that this entailed, Fleming struggled with his innate desire to escape.
It was this that finally pushed him into sitting down at his typewriter and starting his long-threatened novel. He would create a hero who was an avatar of himself, with the same tastes, background, opinions and prejudices, but with none of the troubles that weighed so heavily on him – an unashamedly unemotional masculine fantasy. Fleming could then set that avatar free to live the life he fantasised about, but could not have himself. He stole the name of the author of Birds of the West Indies, a book he had on his desk, and called the hero of this novel James Bond.
Fleming was growing into middle age at the time, and he had a long list of complaints about both himself and the direction that the world was going. In the real world these were things that he had no control over, and they made him feel weak and insignificant. In the world of the imagination, however, they were things that he could change, or simply deny, whichever he preferred. There was no end, he would discover, to the liberation found in fiction.
The first of these complaints was his health, which had already started to deteriorate. Suffering from chest pains, Fleming had been advised to cut back on alcohol and cigarettes. The problem was that he didn’t want to. Like a spoiled child, Fleming clung to the idea that he should be able to live as unhealthily as he liked while still remaining virile and energetic. His James Bond avatar, then, would be younger, smoke as much as he wanted, and drink like a fish.
Research published in the Christmas 2013 edition of the British Medical Journal reported that, across all of Fleming’s novels, Bond drinks an average of ninety-two units of alcohol a week, significantly more than the recommended fourteen. In Casino Royale, Fleming refers to Bond smoking his ‘seventieth cigarette of the day’. Even in fiction, this takes a toll. In the novel Thunderball, Bond’s blood pressure is revealed to be a frightening 160/90.
The issue of Fleming’s coming marriage was obviously another concern. Fleming wanted to sleep with glamorous, exciting women, and he wanted them to fall for him in the same way they used to when he was younger. Then he just wanted them to disappear afterwards, and not talk about marriage. Fleming had previously had a girlfriend who was killed during the war. This was a tragedy, but to Fleming it was also a neat solution. The idea that women would die after falling into bed with Bond entered the novels. It quickly became a recurring pattern in the secret agent’s relationships.
Then there was the issue of his war record. Fleming had been in Naval Intelligence and had held the mid-ranking title of Commander. He was proud of this title and insisted that his Jamaican servants called him by it. The war had taken him twice around the world and there is no question that he had served his country with honour, but the reality of his service embarrassed him. He had been the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, a cushy desk job he had been handed through family contacts, and he had never seen action or been exposed to any danger. He was the man who sent other men into battle while he lived a secure and comfortable life a long way from the front. He was referred to as a ‘chocolate sailor’, a nickname that defined him as not a ‘real’ member of the navy. Bond, in contrast, would also be a Commander in Naval Intelligence, but he would lead from the front, fighting the enemy face to face like Fleming’s father had. Bond would refer to himself as ‘strictly a chocolate sailor’ on board an American submarine in the novel Thunderball, but he did so in a charmingly self-deprecating way. There were no question marks about Bond’s bravery.
Another issue was Britain and its standing in the world. Fleming’s education and upbringing had taught him to unquestioningly believe in British exceptionalism – that Britain was automatically ‘better’ than other places, and that The British Empire had been a force for Good. Like many, he saw the world as it had been during his childhood as right and proper, and any changes that occurred later as terrible mistakes. The thought that the British Empire was ending, unloved and unwanted, was too horrible to contemplate.
He remained in denial for as long as he could. Like many of his class, he never really understood why Winston Churchill was defeated in the 1945 general election. Fleming was firmly against the post-war welfare state and the creation of the NHS which saved Ringo’s life. In Fleming’s eyes, Jamaica was one of the last places on earth that preserved all that he admired about the Empire. Here a British gentleman could enjoy an exotic but civilised life, where the climate was agreeable and the servants weren’t too rebellious. It was a place where he could fool himself that the sun would never set on the British Empire.
This image of Jamaica was delusional, of course. It was certainly not shared by the Jamaican people themselves. Ending ties with Britain dominated local politics and within a decade, Jamaica gained its independence.
A key moment in the end of the British Empire was the Suez Crisis of 1956. This was a moment of clarity for those who still saw Britain as a global power. As the Deputy Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend explained, Suez was ‘the psychological watershed, the moment when it became apparent that Britain was no longer capable of being a great imperial power’. In the aftermath of this ill-fated attack on Egypt, Prime Minister Anthony Eden fell ill. He decided that a holiday in Jamaica would help him recover, and he chose to recuperate at Fleming’s Goldeneye. His Conservative Party colleagues plotted against him in his absence, and he was removed from office three weeks after his return.
Goldeneye, the house where James Bond was born, was the last refuge for those still in denial about Britain’s place in the world.
An unquestioning belief in Britain was vital to the character of Bond. It was the source of another thing that Fleming desired, which was an ethical and moral excuse to be above the law and to do whatever he wanted. Bond famously has a licence to kill, which raises the question of who has The Right to grant someone permission to murder. The Answer, as Fleming and Bond saw it, was The British Crown.
Bond’s enemies also killed and destroyed, of course, but they did so without the correct paperwork and authority. This made them bad. His licence to kill and the freedom it offered has proved to be a major part of James Bond’s appeal.
Last but certainly not least, Fleming gave Bond absolute mastery of the physical world. He was a skilled pilot, marksman, driver, gambler, skier, linguist, bomb disposal expert, diver, lover, or any other skill that the plot demanded. He knew exactly what food, drinks, clothes or cars were the best available. More importantly, he would always triumph. He could suffer, but whatever scheme or plot he attempted, no matter how implausible, would always succeed. This was aspirational fantasy at its most alluring. Wherever he went and whatever he did, the material world bowed in his presence, subservient to its master. The spiritual or immaterial world, on the other hand, was almost entirely ignored.
Fleming’s first novel, in which the character of James Bond was born, was Casino Royale. It is a brutal, cold and sadistic book that sets the tone of the Bond universe. It was initially published on 13 April 1953, about six weeks before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, making the arrival of Bond the harbinger of the second Elizabethan Age. The book’s villain is Le Chiffre, the paymaster of a trade union secretly controlled by the Soviet counterespionage agency SMERSH. Like almost all of Fleming’s villains, Le Chiffre is dual heritage, in this instance a mixture of ‘Mediterranean with Prussian or Polish strains’. Purity of race is often an indicator of who is good and who is bad in Fleming’s books.
Bond’s mission is not regular espionage. Instead, he must bankrupt Le Chiffre by beating him at cards. This would force him to defect to British Intelligence in order to seek protection from SMERSH. If a thriller contains a card game, Fleming understood, then the stakes needed to be high. He later claimed that the inspiration for the plot came from a trip to Portugal during the war, in which he had attempted to bankrupt a leading Nazi at baccarat. This did not go well, Fleming claimed, and he was beaten and financially wiped out. His avatar Bond, on the other hand, was certain to win the game. On that trip to Portugal, Fleming was accompanying the Director of Naval Intelligence, Vice-Admiral Godfrey. Godfrey’s recollection of the trip was that Fleming had only played against Portuguese businessmen, but that he had fantasised about playing against German agents.
Before the game, Bond is told that another agent will be present to support him – a female agent. He does not take this news well: ‘What the hell do they want to send me a woman for?’ As he saw it, ‘Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around.’ The dialogue Fleming gives to Bond to express his feelings about working with a woman is typically disturbing: ‘ “Bitch,” said Bond.’
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the misogyny displayed by both Fleming and Bond in Casino Royale is quite a sight to behold. Bond complains about ‘These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men.’
After Bond meets the agent sent to assist him, Vesper Lynd, he decides that he does want to sleep with her, but only after the job is done. Sex with Vesper would be ‘excitingly sensual’, he decides, because it would have ‘the sweet tang of rape’.
That was a sentence which Fleming thought reasonable to type, and a publisher thought fine to publish. The 1950s were a very different time. Here were the ‘traditional’ attitudes that Fleming thought needed to be maintained in the new, technological future. For those familiar with the character of Bond from the films, encountering him in the books can be difficult. The films spare you from the interiority of Bond, and the coldness and cruelty of his thoughts are largely missing from the on-screen action. Once you encounter them in print it is hard to see Bond in the same light again.
Casual violence against women had been a common theme in Fleming’s creative writing throughout his life. As a student in Austria, for example, he wrote stories about the villainous Count Max von Lamberg, and included graphic details of the elaborate tortures the Count devised. Consider this limerick he wrote around the time:
There once was a girl called Asoka,
Who played three young fellows at poker.
Having won all their money,
She thought it so funny,
They calmly decided to choke her.
Casino Royale is not really a spy story, for all that its main character is employed by British Intelligence. Although Bond’s prime motivation is to defeat Russian Intelligence, the plot has little in the way of actual espionage or intrigue. Bond defeats Le Chiffre at baccarat through skill and luck rather than spycraft. This is to be expected, of course, due to Bond’s aforementioned mastery of the physical world. Instead, Casino Royale slowly reveals itself to be structured as a love story, albeit a deeply dark and disturbing one.
In the second act Le Chiffre gets his revenge. Bond and Vesper are kidnapped, and Bond is subjected to a lengthy sequence of genital torture. Here we perhaps glimpse Fleming’s burgeoning love for his alter ego, given his habit of demonstrating desire by inflicting pain. According to Fleming’s biographer Henry Chancellor, Le Chiffre is physically modelled on the English occultist Aleister Crowley, so that ‘when Le Chiffre goes to work on Bond’s testicles with a carpet-beater and a carving knife, the sinister figure of Aleister Crowley is there lurking in the background’. Fortunately for what remains of Bond’s testicles, Russian SMERSH agents arrive. They kill Le Chiffre and foolishly set Bond free – an act they will come to regret in later books.
Now we enter the third act, in which Bond decides he is in love with Vesper. It is this lengthy final section of the book that structurally makes it a love story, albeit a highly disturbing one. Vesper nurses Bond while they wait to see if his genitals heal (spoiler: all is well). Bond asks Vesper to marry him. Unfortunately, Vesper notices a sinister figure from her earlier life as a double agent and commits suicide. Bond reacts to this as well as can be expected. ‘The bitch is dead now,’ he says, and the book ends. Vesper Lynd becomes the first woman to sleep with Bond and then die. The template for his future relationships has been set.
You can see why Ann was not keen on Fleming’s novels, which she used to dismiss as his ‘horror comics’. Fleming offered to dedicate Casino Royale to her, but she told him not to. In the novel, Fleming gave Vesper a piece of philosophical dialogue which was a clear statement of his own worldview. ‘People are islands,’ Vesper says. ‘They don’t really touch. However close they are, they’re really quite separate. Even if they’ve been married for fifty years.’ Here Fleming is explicitly denying the seventeenth-century Christian poet John Donne, who wrote that ‘No man is an island’. All islands are connected under the water, as Donne knew, but Fleming and the Bond novels are only concerned with The Surface.
This then was the character of James Bond, an avatar sculpted from his creator’s history and desires. Bond was the escapist fantasy of a privileged but damaged soul, but one sketched so vividly, honestly and unashamedly that he outlived his creator and went on to forge a globally successful life of his own. Bond was escapism and aspiration in human form, but as icons go he was a dark one. Here Bond differs from other British folk heroes, such as King Arthur, Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes. Inside, he is damaged and rotten to the core. He only does good because it is his job, and if you took away that job, the character would collapse. His creator’s wounds were so integral to the character that any attempt to try and fix or redeem him could break the spell.
And yet Fleming had also created a character who was, from certain angles, undeniably attractive. Fleming was ultimately a good thriller writer, and his journalist’s eye for detail helped make the exotic locations of his books feel real and believable. The world of conspicuous consumption and international travel was still an unattainable dream for most readers in austerity Britain, but Fleming dangled the promise of it, tantalisingly just out of reach. In this vivid world is placed the character of James Bond himself – Fleming’s greatest achievement. Almost from the beginning, this damaged antihero seemed to have the ability to step out of the page and into people’s minds, where he came alive and lived outside the books. Many novelists spend their entire careers trying to create characters who can do this.
Here it might be helpful to compare Fleming’s creation with the character of Jinx, from the 2002 Bond movie Die Another Day. Jinx is a Black, female, American version of Bond, who was every bit as skilled, brave and heroic as he was. She too is hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous and has absolute mastery of the material world. Like Bond, she would make heartless puns after killing enemies, to show how little emotion she felt. Even better, she was played by the talented, charismatic and strikingly beautiful Halle Berry, who had just won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Monster’s Ball. In December 2002 it was announced that Jinx would star in her own spin-off movie, which was scripted and allocated a budget of $80–90m. On paper, Jinx was every inch the escapist fantasy that Bond was. And yet, after the spin-off film was announced, it became apparent that nobody was really interested. The project was quietly shelved. Jinx may have ticked all the boxes that Bond did on paper, but she never felt like anything more than another two-dimensional cartoon. The same goes for the great majority of the Bond clones who have arrived regularly in cinemas since the mid-sixties, before disappearing due to dwindling interest. At one point it seemed that every European country was trying to create their own Bond, but few of these super-spies are remembered now. The character of 007 was born from the cauldron of Fleming’s damaged psyche, and his psychological wounds brought the character to life in a way that Jinx and the other Bond clones never achieved. The creation of Bond was, ultimately, a mid-life crisis put to good use. Fleming thought he was creating a hero, but through the strange alchemy of the novelist’s craft he unconsciously poured all of his own darkness into his avatar. This was partly because of the speed at which he wrote, and because his books didn’t always receive as much editing as perhaps they should have. The novel Thunderball, to give one example, includes the sentence, ‘It was a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture.’
In these circumstances, Fleming’s ideas and opinions slipped unfiltered into Bond. Like Dr Frankenstein, Fleming believed that he was creating something good. As Frankenstein reasoned, surely there was no higher goal than creating life? This thought blinded him to the macabre nature of the limbs he stitched together, or the horror of the monster he was building. Fleming’s brutally honest writing revealed an uncomfortable truth, which was that the dark side and the light side of Fleming’s idealised masculinity appeared to be intractably linked, and perhaps inseparable. To be brave and protect others in this dangerous world was noble, but to do so required emotional numbness and the cruelty needed to kill. This emotional numbness then prevented Bond from ever having a long-lasting loving relationship. Vesper Lynd had to die, in other words, because Bond would not be able make the sacrifices needed to protect the world if he found happiness. The alternative was to make Bond asexual, but that was clearly no fun. The idea that the women who Bond touches die, by this logic, became an unavoidable aspect of the character. From this perspective, Bond was an honest, fully realised depiction of the masculine paradox.
All the other knights in shining armour, in contrast, were little more than two-dimensional sketches. It was this mix of good and bad, and the uncensored honesty of the character’s depiction, which elevated him above so many other fictional heroes. It was this that granted Bond those mysterious qualities which enabled him to escape the racks of paperback thrillers and become a global icon. Fleming seems to have been only dimly aware of how emotionally damaged he was, or how much of his dark side he was pouring into his creation. Jungian psychologists refer to psychological blind spots like this as our ‘shadow’. They argue that we should work to understand and accept our dark shadow, rather than deny or destroy it. The aim is to bring it into the light of awareness, because to ignore or hide from our darkness only makes it stronger. Aptly for Bond, William Blake referred to the same concept as our ‘Spectre’. Over the decades that followed, the character of James Bond would slowly – sometimes almost imperceptibly – become aware of its own darkness. This process would not be quick, because a cultural concept as deeply ingrained as masculinity is not an easy thing to change. To the progressively minded, of course, Bond is always behind the curve. He is misogynistic and imperialistic now, just as he was in the 1950s or the 1970s. Being always wrong, the progressive argument goes, he is beyond saving. In a similar way, to the conservative or reactionary minded, the changes in Bond that would follow were always too much, too soon, and must inevitably lead to the loss of all that is good. The territory between these two positions is messy and it is not ideologically pure – but it is the terrain where change actually happens. From the moment James Bond appeared out of Fleming’s typewriter, he embarked on a long, slow quest to face down his Spectre.
"John’s experience of being sent away, and the impact that this had on his adult life, is similar in many ways to what Ian Fleming experienced when he was sent away by his parents to boarding school. In both cases, the child trying to understand why they have been sent away from their parents is told that it’s for their own good. They then must deal with the cognitive dissonance that this creates. Psychologists now refer to the cluster of emotional problems and unhealthy behaviours that are common among children sent away by their parents as Boarding School Syndrome.
Difficulties with attachment and trust in adult life are common, along with an inability to ever feel at home, especially if the child was sent to a place which not only lacked love, but which offered bullying and cruelty. The study of Boarding School Syndrome recognises that what is often dismissed as homesickness in children who have been sent away is often far more serious, and that it should be thought of as closer to a form of undiagnosed bereavement.
In 2021, the author Louis de Bernières wrote a painful account of his time at boarding school for the Sunday Times entitled ‘Aged 8, I was sent to hell’. The editors were shocked by the number of letters from readers – nearly a thousand – that followed its publication, with the majority telling of their own experiences in similar schools. These letters detailed rape and other forms of abuse at around five hundred schools over a period from the 1930s to the twenty-first century. After analysing these accounts, they reported that 54 per cent described physical abuse, 27 per cent mentioned sexual abuse and 18 per cent concerned emotional abuse. In contrast, 19 per cent of the letters told of a positive experience at boarding school, and there are many who were sent to a British boarding school who insist that it did them no harm. They often make a point of sending their children to the same schools, as if to prove the point.
When John Lennon was in his early teens, he learned from his cousin Stanley that his absent mother actually lived near to him. Bravely, he went round and knocked on her door. The reunion went well, and his mother once again became part of his life. Julia was fun and acted more like a friend than a mother. Where Mimi refused to have a record player in the house, Julia taught John how to play the banjo and bought him his first guitar. It seemed that the growing relationship between John and his mother, and her new family, was starting to heal his childhood wounds – even if John was still unable to explain to people at school why he lived with his aunt, rather than his mother.
In July 1958 Julia left Mimi’s house on a summer’s evening and was headed for the bus stop when she was hit by a car. She was killed instantly. The driver was a police constable who had not passed his test. He was acquitted of all charges but given a short suspension from duty. John, naturally, was devastated. There were no McCartney-esque rational comments about practical matters when Lennon was told the news.
Instead, he wept. He could not bring himself to look at her body when he was taken to the hospital, and he buried his head in his aunt’s lap during the funeral.
As he later told Playboy, ‘I lost her twice.
Once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie. And once again at seventeen when she actually physically died […]
That was a really hard time for me. It just absolutely made me very, very bitter. The underlying chip on my shoulder that I had as a youth got really big then.’
By this time, Lennon had become friends with Paul McCartney, even though McCartney was two years younger, which was a significant gap during teenage years. That Paul had also lost his mother brought the pair closer – they had been marked as different, but now they were not alone. They would both go on to write songs about their late mothers, and both named their first child after them.
When you see early film of Lennon and McCartney, it is striking how close they are, ending each other’s sentences and delighting in each other’s company. Lennon would later talk about how he felt they had a psychic connection, able to communicate without words. They referred to their relationship as being as close as brothers, but it is perhaps more accurate to describe their bond as being like a marriage. They joined their names together, after all, when they decided that all the songs they wrote would be credited to Lennon/McCartney. When the time came to end their song-writing partnership, both referred to it as a ‘divorce’.
As teenagers, the pair bonded despite the disapproval of their remaining guardian. Aunt Mimi thought that McCartney was common because he lived in a council house. She wouldn’t let him use the front door. Paul’s dad Jim McCartney thought, probably correctly, that Lennon was Trouble. But as in all the best romances, parental disapproval could do nothing to break the close connection between those two grieving boys.
For all the undeniable importance of George and Ringo, the relationship between Paul and John would become the engine that powered the Beatles.
There is an argument to be made that this was one of the most important relationships between two men in the post-war Western world. Beatles biographers have often treated John’s loss as more significant than Paul’s, because John always appeared more damaged. Lennon struggled with anger and issues of abandonment for the rest of his life while Paul, in contrast, was able to just get on with things. Although young Paul had experienced real grief, like Ringo he still had a loving family around him to help him process it.
Lennon’s situation, in contrast, was closer to that of Ian Fleming, whose father had died after Ian had already been exiled from the family home. Fleming’s parents, of course, thought that by sending him away to boarding school they were doing the best for him. It is perhaps an important question as to what has the greater positive impact on a child’s adult life – being sent to elite schools or knowing that they are loved.
The damage caused by being sent away from their mothers was the initial wound to Lennon’s and Fleming’s sense of themselves, and how they fitted into the world. They were already damaged children when they had to process the death of their parents, so it should not be too surprising if they never managed it. There was further loss in Lennon’s early life, including Aunt Mimi’s husband George, who was the closest thing young John had to a father, and his close art-school friend Stu Sutcliffe.
But it was the double-loss of his mother that all biographers see as the most significant. Lennon and McCartney’s different reactions to their loss illustrates something that, as they grew to adulthood, became a significant difference in their personalities. Paul’s intelligence could sometimes seem cold, while John’s anger could burn bridges. As Paul described their differing personalities: ‘that was the balance between us: John was caustic and witty out of necessity and, underneath, quite a warm character when you got to know him. I was the opposite, easy-going, friendly, no necessity to be caustic or biting or acerbic but I could be tough if I needed to be.’ Of course, their differences were part of what drew them together and made their friendship so special. They had complementary personalities, and each seemed to offer what the other lacked. But in time – after their relationship was put through unheard-of pressures – what were once complementary differences would become incompatibility, and the fault line between them would give. From the very beginning, as the two teenage rock ‘n’ rollers and aspiring songwriters found and inspired each other, the seed that would bring about the end of the Beatles was already planted.
