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TO MY READERS:

I found what follows lying on my desk one morning.

As you will see, it appears to be the first-person story of a young woman, evidently beautiful and not unskilled in the arts of love.

According to her story, she appears to have been involved, both perilously and romantically, with the same James Bond whose secret-service exploits I myself have written from time to time.

With the manuscript was a note signed "Vivienne Michel," assuring me that what she had written was purest truth and from the depths of her heart.

I was much interested in this view of James Bond, through the wrong end of the telescope, so to speak, and, after obtaining clearance for certain minor infringements of the Official Secrets Act, I have much pleasure in sponsoring its publication.

IAN FLEMING

 

Part One: Me

One: Scaredy Cat

I WAS running away. I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from drabness, fustiness, snobbery, the claustrophobia of close horizons, and from my inability, although I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race. In fact I was running away from almost everything except the law.

And I had run a very long way indeed—almost, exaggerating a bit, halfway round the world. In fact I had come all the way from London to The Dreamy Pines Motor Court, which is ten miles west of Lake George, the famous American tourist resort in the Adirondacks—that vast expanse of mountains, lakes, and pine forests which forms most of the northern territory of New York State.

I had started on September the first, and it was now Friday the thirteenth of October. When I had left, the grimy little row of domesticated maples in my square had been green, or as green as any tree can be in London in August. Now, in the billion-strong army of pine trees that marched away northward toward the Canadian border, the real, wild maples flamed here and there like shrapnel-bursts. And I felt that I, or at any rate my skin, had changed just as much—from the grimy sallowness that had been the badge of my London life to the snap and color and sparkle of living out of doors and going to bed early and all those other dear dull things that had been part of my life in Quebec before it was decided that I must go to England and learn to be a "lady. " Very unfashionable, of course, this cherry-ripe, strength-through-joy complexion, and I had even stopped using lipstick and nail polish, but to me it had been like sloughing off a borrowed skin and getting back into my own, and I was childishly happy and pleased with myself whenever I looked in the mirror (that's another thing—I'll never say "looking-glass" again; I just don't have to any more) and found myself not wanting to paint a different face over my own. I'm not being smug about this. I was just running away from the person I'd been for the past five years. I wasn't particularly pleased with the person I was now, but I had hated and despised the other one, and I was glad to be rid of her face.