Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (17 page)

Fleming’s other favourite Edwards novel was
Sangoree
, set in Barbados during the time of slavery, published in 1932 and never reprinted. A garish take on West Indies history, it is full of cruelty and melancholy. Edwards depicts planters feasting for breakfast on black-crab pepper-pot washed down with claret, hock and rum; there is widespread gambling on faro, hazard and macao; slave girls dance naked and much else for the men; nature is ‘edenic’ and society characterised by ‘luxury and licence’.

When he wrote about Jamaica’s ‘literary associations’, Fleming championed the dark and violent gothic novelists ‘Monk’ Lewis and William Beckford, author of
Vathek,
a fantastical novel full of exotic locations, rapid action and exaggerated passions. Fleming would later conclude from his own plotting and characters, particularly the villains, that he enjoyed ‘exaggeration and things larger than life’, key elements of local Jamaican writing and storytelling and of European West Indian travelogues, as well as this gothic tradition.

Most highly recommended by Fleming in his
Horizon
article on Jamaica was Herbert de Lisser’s
White Witch of Rosehall,
a story of ‘hot-blooded sadism and slaves set in the 1850s’. This is the account (actually set during slavery) of a newcomer from England being at first appalled by the slave society, and then becoming corrupted by it. He works for a woman at Rosehall called Annee Palmer, who had dabbled in witchcraft, murdered four husbands and had countless lovers. She is finally hacked to pieces by the slaves she had terrorised.

Fleming was later famously accused of writing ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism’. Certainly de Lisser’s story has sex and sadism, but it is above all about the appalling cruelty of the plantation system. Jamaica was
the most brutal of all the British slave colonies, and this left a legacy of violence and resentment that Fleming could not have missed. The vicious tyranny of slavery was met by continual resistance, and Fleming’s parish was the epicentre of the island’s biggest slave rebellion of the eighteenth century. On Easter Sunday in 1760, fifty slaves on the Frontier plantation near Port Maria, then owned by Ballard Beckford, a scion of one of Jamaica’s most famous and notorious families, rose up under the leadership of an enslaved African called Tacky. They marched on Port Maria and captured the fort that guarded the harbour. Other slaves at the neighbouring plantation, Trinity, also rebelled, and soon much of the island was in uproar, with enslaved men and women burning cane fields and sugar works and destroying the hated Great Houses. Their aim was the ‘entire extirpation of the white inhabitants.’ Although outnumbered and ill equipped, Tacky’s followers held Port Maria and kept the British at bay for more than a month before the rebellion could be subdued, with help from the Maroons at nearby Scott’s Hall. Sixty whites and about three hundred blacks were killed. Fifty further slaves were subsequently executed in the main by being slowly burnt alive.

Modern Jamaica had a dark side for Fleming. In many of his stories the Caribbean functions as a lawless space, somewhere to hide for criminals, misfits and ex-Nazis. And in Jamaica itself, there is danger among the beauty, just as there is on the reef. In a newspaper article, he recommends avoiding ‘the stews of Kingston’ – ‘a tough town – tough and dirty’; in a later piece, he mentions wild stories about ‘naked black men, their bodies glistening with coconut oil, who roam abroad at night to thieve and rape’. When Fleming first arrived in Jamaica, Ivanhoe ‘Rhyging’ Martin, an outlaw and folk hero who inspired the film
The Harder They Come,
was still at large. He was finally tracked down and killed in a shootout at Lime Key in 1948.

In her writings, American artist Marion Simmons – a friend of Coward’s – is almost always upbeat about Jamaica and complimentary
– if patronising – about ‘the natives’, as she calls them. But, as Fleming also experienced, a more hostile aspect sometimes asserted itself ‘Some things have happened recently that make me wonder what possessed me to settle in this barbaric place,’ she wrote in 1951. She was driving her car when someone threw a stone, hitting and damaging the windscreen. Then ‘a black man’ yelled ‘White Bitch!’ at her. On top of this some (to me) fairly large sums of money have been taken from my purse … we have started locking up the house at night and suddenly everything is horrid.’

A friend, Val, tells her she must get a pistol, and a second-hand one is found for her – ‘an evil looking thing which I have no idea how to shoot, and indeed am loath to touch’. She got a licence from the police, then took the gun home and shut it in a drawer, ‘where it will no doubt rust and rot – but Val says everyone knows when you have one, whether you shoot it or not, and that it’s a sound idea’.

Fleming’s mother Eve, who moved to the Bahamas in 1950, also kept a gun – writing to Ian, ‘The thing is to let the blacks know I
have
a pistol’ – as did Fleming himself in Jamaica. In all, he owned three guns: a twelve-bore shotgun kept permanently at Holland & Holland gunsmiths; a Colt .38 given him by General Donovan of the US secret services; and a Browning .25 issued to him during the war, which he took with him each year ‘for defence against the Blackamoors’. (In his Jamaican short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’, it is no surprise that Havelock has a gun in his desk drawer.)

Writing about Jamaica, Fleming also conceded that ‘there will always be racial simmering and occasional clashes between coloured and white vanities’, and explained that Friday and Saturday nights saw ‘plenty of heavy drinking’ and ‘ganja’ smoking. But on the whole he reported that he had found Jamaicans ‘most law abiding and God-fearing’, with ‘a strictness of behavior and manners which will surprise you and charm you’. ‘Bad or indecent language’ was ‘almost absent’, and ‘law and the church are a great counterweight to the human extravagance which
the hot sun breeds. I think you will appreciate the fairly solid civic framework which contains this tropic luxury.’ In fact, Jamaica seemed to Fleming the perfect mix of British old-fashioned imperial influence and law and the dangerous and sensual, of reassuring conservatism and the exciting exotic: in effect, the same curious combination that would make the Bond novels so appealing and successful. Candia McWilliam admires this dichotomy in the novels’ ‘luscious clash of ostentation and restraint’ (a succinct summary, too, of Fleming’s character). When late in his life Fleming was asked the secret of his best-selling formula, he too was clear on this contrast: What I endeavour to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism.’

Fleming later described how during the six years between building Goldeneye and the start of his first book, he had had ‘plenty to do exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef’. But by the sixth year, he had done all this and was looking for a new challenge.

Now he was acclimatised. And each year, Jamaica had soaked into him, with its creative spirit and cocktail of luxury, melancholy, imperialism, fantasy, sensuality, danger and violence. Now, at last, it seemed he was ready to fulfil his Jamaican home’s original purpose as pronounced to Ivar Bryce on the aeroplane in 1943 – to write that book.

1952 Casino Royale

Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Bond, described in
Casino Royale

Fleming’s trip to Jamaica at the beginning of 1952 was the pivotal moment of his life. By the time he left in late March, he was both an author and a married man.

Much had changed since the previous visit in October 1951. Esmond Rothermere and Ann had agreed to a divorce, and by January Ann knew she was pregnant again.

Although many of his friends advised against it, Ian had decided this time to ‘do the right thing’ and marry her. The wedding was to be in Jamaica – ‘the easiest way’, according to Ann – just as soon as the divorce papers came through. Ann’s brother Hugo, although he disliked Ian, sent him a letter of support, to which Fleming replied: ‘We are of course totally unsuited … I’m a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of a bilious and melancholic temperament … Ann is a sanguine anarchist/traditionalist. So china will fly and there will be
rage and tears. But I think we will survive as there is no bitterness in either of us and we are both optimists – and I shall never hurt her except with slipper.’

But Fleming, the ‘sleek’ bachelor of forty-four years of age, was worried by the marriage, or ‘this dangerous transmogrification’, as he put it. Would his ‘difficulties’, he wrote to Ann, still be tolerated when she was no longer in love with him but instead settled into ‘the usual married friendship’? You might get too irritated, I don’t know,’ he wondered.

For her part, Ann was aware that Ian liked his own company and that the change would be ‘quite a step for him after 43 years of solitude’. ‘I fear Ian’s martyrdom is imminent,’ she wrote to her brother and his wife, ‘with intrusion of talking parrot, saxophone, R. [Raymond], F. [Fionn], and self to his perfectly run bachelor establishment … the immediate future looks rather chaotic’.

Because of the difficulties of her first pregnancy, Ann took it easy after their arrival at Goldeneye at the end of January, passing the time sitting under a large straw hat in the sunken garden, painting birds, fish and flowers. Although most of her friends considered her entirely ‘London’, she had inherited from her naturalist father a love of wildlife, and like Coward found Jamaica conducive to creativity. Not that the north-coast social scene was entirely ignored. Soon after her arrival on 29 January, the
Gleaner
reported that Ann had been seen with local aristocrat Lady Brownlow on the Montego Bay cocktail party circuit. The north coast from Port Antonio to Montego Bay was christened by the paper ‘Jamaica’s Gold Coast’. In the sky above, they reported, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, ‘BOAC, with its Stratocruiser is bringing down the tourists in luxurious comfort from way above the clouds’. By this time, more than 80 per cent of tourists arrived by air, the majority still to the Kingston Palisadoes airport (later named after Norman Manley), rather than the north coast. Pan Am, however, were planning a direct route from New York to Montego
Bay, described the same year by an American newspaper as ‘the best resort in the British Empire’.

For Ann and Ian, there was also a trip across the Blue Mountains to the south coast. ‘I watched the banks for new flowers,’ wrote Ann in her diary. ‘Ian stopped whenever I shrieked for it was marvelous new territory. Two day lilies with stems inches thick.’ With a machete brought for the purpose, Ann dug these out to replant at Goldeneye. After a picnic of ‘iced limeade, bottle of gin, hard boiled eggs, marmalade, sandwiches and fruit’, followed by a siesta, there were more flowers to be found – ‘amaryllis lilies, smaller and far more
appealing than the hothouse variety … a very delicate pale salmon colour, or else salmon and white stripes. Presently green valleys of lemon orchards in flower, then baked fields with vast watermelons ripening upon them.’

Their destination was a spa hotel on the Milk River. When they reached it, they found a small eighteenth-century sugar planter’s house, its paint flaking and a ‘closed’ sign on the door. Nearby lay a dead alligator. It was just the sort of ramshackle Jamaican scene that Ian loved. Eventually he managed to rouse the proprietress and charmed her into letting them stay and even provide them with a dinner of lobsters straight out of the sea.

The spa itself, consisting of a large rocky excavation just below the hotel, seems to have been something of a disappointment, and the beach nearby was punishingly hot. But retreating from the scorching sand, they came across a deep pool of ice-cold fresh water. Ian dived in and speared three mackerel-like fish, which they enjoyed for supper. The planned crocodile hunt, though, was rained off.

On 7 February, Ann’s divorce was finalised, and she and Ian could start planning their wedding, now set for the end of March. On the 16th, Noël Coward arrived in Jamaica and once again rushed round to Goldeneye the same evening. ‘Dine with Ian and Annie,’ he wrote in his diary that night. (Previously they had always been referred to as Annie and Ian). ‘I sensed that Annie was not entirely happy.’

Ann reported of the visit in an undated diary fragment that Noël had ‘told all our favourite jokes’, but she was beginning to tire of ‘The Master’. A fortnight later, she complained in a letter to Cecil Beaton that Noël ‘should be used as a cabaret and not as a guest, he does not understand the give and take of talk and the deserts of pomposity between the oases of wit are too vast’. This new mood put a strain on the usual Goldeneye dynamic.

As the wedding loomed, and without the distraction of guests, Ann noted that it was ‘rather a tense period in our lives’. She had become
enthused by her painting, but Ian seemed at a loose end. According to Ann, she suggested that he should write something just to amuse himself And so, in the same undated diary fragment that tells of the Milk River trip, we find the following from Ann: ‘This morning Ian started to type a book. Very good thing. He says he cannot be idle while I screw up my face trying to draw fish.’