I was a lone child. Don’t misunderstand: I am never lonely, but my only brother was four years older, a gap which widened as the 1960s blurred and the 1970s dawned.

So I grew up in a solo fantasy world inside my head, in Surrey, a rural county south of England’s capital.

I was either at the library or in the bookstore.

Yes, I paid attention throughout all seven grades of high school, just as, years later, I jumped through the hoops needed to earn my two degrees. But most of my true education has been my own. Books. More books. And more books.

Every school day I had 38 minutes to wait in the market town of Leatherhead between the two-station train journey and the Route 462 bus ride to my village. Time enough to wander into those beloved brick cathedrals of knowledge, where I found myself by losing myself in dusty pages of adventurous prose.

At the Bookworm in North Street, just yards from the bus stop, I spent my allowance collecting all 14 of the James Bond books. At the time, it seemed I read them as fast as Ian Fleming could churn them out. Checking the dates, I discovered the author actually died when I was seven, entering second grade. Like many childhood memories, it’s skewed. But “The Man with the Golden Gun” and “Octopussy” (including “The Living Daylights”), were published posthumously during my later school years.

I remember starting to read each one, squatting in the dusty corner to the right of the entrance, one eye on the window for the big green bus. The Bond shelf was chest height for me, knee for others. A sickly child, that dust never made me sneeze.

The store was rich in hardbacks, with shiny leather-like covers in muted green, blue and brown hues. Classics about Admiral Nelson or by the Brontes. The paperback covers I sought showed a fearless Sean Connery shouldering his pistol with barely-clad females draped around his leg, in the shadow of a villain or with a shark swimming off the page.

“Good living, sex and violent action …” was a tagline that the London Times Literary Supplement gave “Thunderball.” That triumvirate provided a feast of spycraft, glamour, danger. Card games, pistols, food, drink. Bond taught me baccarat, canasta and, in “Moonraker,” even bridge. Bond taught me about Moët champagne and pâté de foie gras. A little about Walther PPKs and Beretta 418s. And, there was the sex. It certainly sounded enjoyable, though it didn’t seem to treat ladies entirely nicely.

Fleming’s villains personified evil, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Oddjob, Rosa Klebb — no author drew them better. “Live and Let Die,” which spawned my brief fascination with voodoo, has the best chapter heading ever written (“He disagreed with something that ate him”). Even “The Spy Who Loved Me,” Fleming’s lone venture into first-person female narrative, offered dubious attractions for a boy who had no sisters to answer those kind of questions.

For birthday presents, I favored experience over gifts, so my parents obliged me with London trips to see the Harlem Globetrotters or James Stewart onstage in “Harvey.” One blissful year, the Odeon cinema at nearby Epsom offered a double bill of “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball.” Four hours and 2 minutes of Bond!

Years later, I learn that Cmdr. J.H. Bond, R.N. (ret.), was not merely a fictional hero saving the world from the Russian atomic nightmare. There was another agenda: salvaging Britain’s tarnished reputation as the nation of my birth faded from the world stage.

This theme is highlighted in “The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond,” by Simon Winder.

Winder is a Briton a couple of years my junior who shared my experience growing up fascinated, nay obsessed, with Bond. He writes how Fleming’s best, “From Russia With Love,” “Dr. No” and “Goldfinger,” set the standard for every spy novel that followed. But the former wartime intelligence officer had another agenda, too: perpetuating Britain’s invincible image.

Despite postwar bloodshed as India and Pakistan achieved independence, Great Britain’s stand against the Nazis in World War II gave it a strong position for about 10 years as the devastated world rebuilt. Although food rationing continued well beyond the war, the era saw the creation of the National Health Service, guaranteeing free care for all, and the splendor of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation; increases in car and television ownership signaled regained prosperity.

But everything changed mid-decade. Winder reminds readers of the extraordinary convulsions throughout Britain after a 1956 crisis. When Egypt’s leader nationalized the Suez Canal, British, French and Israeli troops parachuted in with rifles blazing. The invasion — condemned by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower — was a fiasco. The prime minister resigned in disgrace. Britain’s clout in world affairs has never again been so high.

“Here was a country whose ideology had been based around telling much of the world what to do, whose raison d’être had been to flick through newspapers seeing who this week had been invaded and incorporated into the Empire, who now found itself after enduring a decade of steady humiliation being howled down by virtually every country, ally or enemy,” Winder writes.

“It was the end of Britain as an independent actor. Most of the world breathed a sigh of relief, but for a traditional patriot it was not an appealing time to be alive.”

Winder says Fleming’s literary talents don’t match contemporaries like William Golding and Kingsley Amis (who would write the first Bond sequel, “Colonel Sun,” after Fleming’s death). But he praises the author, an uppercrust friend of the disgraced political leaders, for capturing the essence of his nation.

“I can think of no writer — and it doesn’t matter if it is accidentally or deliberately that Fleming does this — who comes close to bringing to life the neuroses, panics, highs, dreams and disappointments of a Britain that has now vanished and whose death throes he romanced.”

Times continue to change. Leatherhead Public Library remains open, a shell of its old self. The desktop computers that fill its busiest room had not been invented when I lurked there. Across town, Hamsey’s Bed Centre fills the Bookworm’s old storefront plus two adjacent shops. The Bookworm’s first owner, old Mr. Starr, was such a nice bloke. But he and his trendy grandson, Rowland, died; sadly, their heirs committed the sacrilege of closing it.

On return visits to my hometown, I wondered where all those books went. I learned the answer sitting — alone — at London’s Apollo Theatre. Something seemed strangely recognizable to my subconscious as I watched Peter Bowles (an English actor you would recognize if you saw his photo) starring in a revival of Terrance Rattigan’s “After Lydia,” a play about Rex Harrison’s actress wife, Kay Kendall, dying of leukemia.

The acting was fine, but the set gave me chills. Mocked-up living-room shelves were rich in books, polished, yet worn. Blues and browns, mostly. Some subdued greens.

I checked the program at intermission: “Books courtesy The Bookworm, Leatherhead.”

I was shaken and stirred.

North Coast writer Patrick Webb is a former managing editor of The Daily Astorian.

‘Good living, sex and violent action.’

London Times Literary Supplement

writing about ‘Thunderball,’ a tagline used on subsequent Bond advertisements

Book Review

“The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond,” by Simon Winder

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 312 pages, 2006.