James Bond in Real Life

I only met Ian Fleming once, at a party given by my fatherâ??s friend the director Carol Reed, at his house at 211 Kingâ??s Road, Chelsea, the garden of which he shared with Peter Ustinov. The party, given in honor of the American actor Sonny Tufts of all people, was star-studded and noisy, the noise level increased by the fact that one whole wall of the Reedsâ?? drawing room consisted of a floor to ceiling aviary full of angrily squawking, chattering and screeching exotic birds, cockatoos and parrots, outraged at this invasion of their privacy. This was well before Ian Fleming became a household name as the author of the James Bond books, probably in 1951, shortly after I had joined the Royal Air Force, and I was conspicuous only by my youth and my uniform. I was undergoing training at the time for radio (or, as we call it in the U. K., â??wirelessâ?) intelligence work involving a knowledge of Russian, about which I was forbidden to speak.