50 years of Fleming’s fiction
With Ian Fleming’s words and John Burningham’s illustrations, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is still magic, writes Eleanor Doughty
A“jolly good read” is how artist John Burningham would describe Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a book that he was commissioned to illustrate in 1963. It was quite the project, for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s creator was none other than Ian Fleming, the most successful author in the country. The first volume of three was published the next year. The story is still well known, both on account of being the Bond creator’s only children’s book, and due to its famous appearance on the silver screen. The 1968 film adaptation of the book saw the bedtime story written for Caspar, Fleming’s son, find its place on Christmas television schedules and Channel Five repeat lists ad infinitum. However, with a screenplay written by Roald Dahl, the film that starred Dick van Dyke and Lionel Jeffries sold a world so different from the book’s that it is far more a work of Dahl than his friend Fleming. The Child Catcher and the curious windup dolls are Dahlian classics that continue to unleash fear into the minds of children trying to sleep. But the book contains no such nightmares. The world of the mad inventor Caractacus Potts, his wife, Mimsie, and their children – the “black-haired boy” Jeremy, and “golden- haired girl” Jemima – imagined by Fleming, is innocent and sweet. It was while Fleming was in hospital recovering from a heart attack that Chitty came alive on paper. Motivation came from an unlikely source: a visiting friend gave him a copy of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. “He thought it was so bad, so appalling, that he thought somebody had to be able to do something better than that,” explains Fergus Fleming, the author’s nephew, who, in keeping woith the family’s link to publishing, is one of the directors at Queen Anne Press, the specialist imprint acquired by the Ian Fleming estate in 2007. The final volume of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was published in 1965, making this year her half-centenary. To celebrate, the book is being re-released in the original threevolume format. One special edition, with a limited print run of 50 and a price tag of £600, includes signed copies of Burningham’s original illustrations, tightly bound in glorious racing green. Burningham was a young graduate of the Central School of Art when he was asked to illustrate the book. Little guidance was offered. “I was given a sort of coloured picture of a racing car of some sort,” he explains. “I really designed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from reading the text and thinking, how do you make a car fly? What is it likely to do? I made a model which I strung up on a sort of fishing line, and got somebody to photograph it. That’s how I started, thinking about how it would work.” Fleming did not dole out the praise for Burningham initially. “It has taken me 50 years to find out that he actually liked the books,” the illustrator confides in the basement of his Hampstead house. Fergus Fleming explains: “He was writing to Leonard Russell at The Sunday Times, the literary editor, who wanted to serialise Chitty. Ian said he didn’t think this was likely to work.” This was, in part, due to the brilliance of Burningham’s illustrations. The story that the car-mad Fleming wrote for his son has sustained its popularity for the last 50 years. But why? “Fleming did capture childhood dreams really well,” his nephew says. “It’s just got all the ingredients.” Burningham agrees: “Being captured by the bad guy, escaping and just about getting away.” “The mad inventor, too,” Fergus Fleming adds. But of course, the illustrations bring the words to life. Before his death, Ian Fleming only requested a couple of changes be made to Burningham’s illustrations. “One was, I think, to a petrol pump, a sign on the petrol pump,” the artist recalls. “He [also] wanted a Tabac sign put in the Paris landscape. I didn’t see him again, and he was dead months later.” It is agreed, in a sketch-walled room in Burningham’s house, that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a Fleming classic. “It’s got a lot of hallmarks, a lot of the enthusiasm, the love of cars, and adventure,” Fergus says. But most of all, Ian Fleming really believed in it. “It’s done with great conviction that it’s a proper story, and that’s what kids like,” Burningham says. That is why, after 50 years, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is still one of the great children’s books of our time. And long may it continue. The three volume set, with a limited run of 100, is available for £125 from queenannepress.com