Bond on the Beach

 

A seaside reminiscence set on the five-mile promenade of Royale-les-Eaux, on “one of those Septembers when it seemed that the summer would never end.”

What a long time ago they were, those spade-and-bucket days! How far he had come since the freckles and the Cadbury milk-chocolate Flakes and the fizzy lemonade! Impatiently, Bond lit a cigarette, pulled his shoulders out of their slouch and slammed the mawkish memories back into their long-closed file. Today he was a grown-up, a man with years of dirty, dangerous memories—a spy. He was not sitting in this concrete hideout to sentimentalize about a pack of scrubby, smelly children on a beach scattered with bottle-tops and lolly sticks and fringed by a sea thick with sun oil and putrid with the main drains of Royale. He was here, he had chosen to be here, to spy. To spy on a woman.

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953)