Bournville

    A visit to the cinema in Porthmadog, one evening in the early summer of 1969, had marked the start of a family tradition. Since that day, when all three of Mary's sons had fallen under the spell of Thunderball, they had measured out the 1970s in James Bond films. On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the first one they had seen as a family, in the spring of 1970. Martin in particular was captivated by its pristine snowscapes, by the notion of an Alpine hideaway populated entirely by beautiful women, and by the unexpected, devastating melancholy of the film's final scene. Mary had complained that George Lazenby was not as sexy as Sean Connery, and was relieved when Connery returned for Diamonds Are Forever. They saw it one Saturday afternoon in central Birmingham, a wintry day in mid-January 1972, and although fans would not judge the film kindly in the decades to come, to escape for two hours from the freezing drizzle that whipped along New Street into the sunshine of the Nevada desert and the glamour of Las Vegas was blissful. Live and Let Die, released in July 1973 and consumed by the Lamb family on their caravan holiday near Plymouth the next month, saw Roger Moore replacing Sean Connery, at which point Mary abandoned the franchise. She thought he was too old, too English, too posh, insufficiently serious and insufficiently masculine, and from then on, watching these films would be a ritual shared only between the men of the family. The Man With the Golden Gun made a perfect post Christmas treat in December 1974, at the end of a year which Jack, Martin and Peter had thoroughly enjoyed, but Geoffrey had found alarming: oil prices had soared in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, the trade unions had flexed their muscles, the IRA had killed twenty-one people in a Birmingham pub and a Labour government had been elected. Under the influence of these developments Geoffrey slipped into a mood of chronic apprehension, and the film itself was not involving enough or memorable enough to snap him out of it.

    But two and a half years later came The Spy Who Loved Me, and with this instalment Bond truly came to the rescue of his country. It was released, in fact, at a moment of fleeting, sunbathed national optimism. The Queen's Silver Jubilee (twenty-five years since she came to the throne! Twenty-five!) had been celebrated with souvenirs, street parties and boisterous singing of the national anthem even as the Sex Pistols' “God Save the Queen” was climbing almost to the top of the charts. It was somehow wonderfully revealing of the national character that these two songs could be on everybody's lips at the same time. The jubilee celebrations were succeeded in early July by two miraculous events: Virginia Wade winning the women's singles championship for Britain at Wimbledon, and Peter Lamb passing his Grade 8 Violin exam with distinction. Geoffrey and the boys were already feeling chipper, then, when they filed into the dress circle of the Odeon New Street one balmy night towards the end of that month. The cinema was packed. Buoyed up by the news of recent weeks, the audience's first big laugh of appreciation – along with a scattered round of applause – came after just two minutes, when Bond […] on being told by the lucky female in question that “I need you, James,” answered, “So does England,” with a charmingly rueful smile. But the audience response to this line was nothing compared to what came next. Escaping his pursuers on skis and hurling himself over the edge of a snowy precipice, Bond went into freefall and was well on his way to certain death when the backpack he was carrying opened out into a life-saving parachute and this parachute revealed itself – joy of joys – to consist of an enormous Union Jack. The crowd in the cinema went wild. People were rising to their feet, punching the air and raising cheers that filled the auditorium and probably spilled into the street outside.