Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (34 page)

Fleming was certainly among those who, like Sir Hugh Foot, believed that Britain should support its former overseas possessions even after independence. So when, in April, he travelled to the Seychelles to write a series of articles for the
Sunday Times,
he first contacted Lennox-Boyd at the Colonial Office, offering to help promote tourism there in return for letters of introduction and travel advice. ‘Having visited Jamaica for twelve years for my holidays,’ he wrote, ‘it is very much a bee in my bonnet that English people should become empire-minded for their holidays, and I shall encourage this idea in all my articles.’

The purpose of Fleming’s trip was to report on a treasure-hunting project that was searching for a supposed hoard worth around £120,000 hidden by Olivier Levasseur, an eighteenth-century French pirate. But this proved to be a dead end, and Fleming found the place full of retired colonels, the ‘flotsam and jetsam of our receding empire’.
In a letter back to England, he crossed out ‘Government House, Seychelles’ on the headed paper and wrote in ‘State of Decay’.

The trip did, however, provide the setting for one of Bond’s adventures in the book of short stories Fleming would write the following winter at Goldeneye. In ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’, Bond is sent to the Seychelles to give an independent view on the notion of situating a naval base there, as there was trouble in the Maldives, ‘Communists creeping in from Ceylon. Strikes, sabotage – the usual picture.’

His mission completed, Bond is at a loose end. Then, as an ‘underwater ace’ (the story opens with Bond hunting a deadly stingray with his ‘Champion harpoon-gun’), he is invited to go along on a specimen hunt with an American hotel-owning millionaire, Milton Krest, who has the ‘finest damned yacht in the Indian Ocean’. Krest is gathering fish samples for the Smithsonian, but only as a tax dodge. Drawing on his experience of specimen hunting in Pedro Cays with Blanche the previous year, Fleming shows Bond appalled and disgusted when Krest tips poison on to the lovingly described reef in order to collect his target, a fish known as the Hildebrand Rarity.

Krest, who although American is of German ancestry, is an obnoxious drunk who uses a dried stingray tail to beat his beautiful English wife. He delights in patronising his guests. To Bond he declares, ‘there were only three great powers – America, Russia and China. That was the big poker game, and no other country had either
the chips or the cards to come into it. Occasionally some pleasant little country … like England would be lent some money so that they could take a hand with the grown-ups. But that was just being polite like one sometimes had to be – to a chum in one’s club who’d gone broke.’

Krest gets his comeuppance, of course, but his view of Britain as third rate, in decline and imperial retreat, is an ever more pressing concern of Fleming. The following year, he undertook a world tour for a series of articles for the
Sunday Times
under the heading ‘Thrilling Cities’, which would be collected and published in 1963. ‘A trip around the world, however hasty,’ he wrote, ‘brings home all too vividly the fantastically rapid contraction of our influence, commercial and cultural, over half the globe … it was a source of constant depression to observe how little of our own influence was left … our trading posts are everywhere in retreat.’ Instead, in the ‘Orient’, ‘where we did so much of the pioneering’, ‘Americans, and American culture, communications and trade have almost a monopoly’.

‘Can this contraction be halted or even reversed?’ Fleming asks. Only if, perhaps emulating Bond, ‘the spirit of adventure which opened the Orient to us can be rekindled and our youth can heave itself off its featherbed and stream out and off across the world again’.

In the West Indian stories in the
For Your Eyes Only
collection, there is also a palpable sense of decline and retreat. In ‘Quantum of Solace’, the Bahamas are tired and dull: ‘the winter visitors and the residents who had houses on the island talked of nothing but their money, their diseases and their servant problems,’ Bond complains. The Governor had ‘filled the minor posts for thirty years while the Empire crumbled around him’. In the title story, the estate of Fleming’s exemplary Jamaicans, the Havelocks, is portrayed as a rare island of efficiency amid general rack and ruin.

The story opens with an introduction full of fondness for the flowers and birds of Jamaica. Then Colonel Havelock looks up from his copy of the
Gleaner
to comment on the situation in nearby Cuba: ‘It
looks to me as if [President] Batista will be on the run soon. Castro’s keeping up the pressure pretty well.’ Later in the story, we discover that the man behind the Havelocks’ killers, von Hammerstein, is an ex-Nazi who worked as Batista’s head of counterintelligence. We also learn from M that Bond’s investigations won’t get anywhere with ‘the Batista people, but we’ve got a good man with the other side – with this chap Castro’. This was a time when Fidel Castro seemed very much the lesser of two dictatorial evils. After the US withdrew support and even recognition for Batista’s regime in December 1958, he fled on 1 January 1959; US-Castro relations did not begin to sour until the spring of 1960.

(In ‘Quantum of Solace’, Bond is in the Bahamas to stop a shipment of arms to the Cuban rebels: ‘He hadn’t wanted to do the job. If anything, his sympathies were with the rebels, but the Government had a big export programme with Cuba in exchange for taking more Cuban sugar than they wanted, a minor condition of the deal was that Britain should not give aid or comfort to the Cuban rebels.’)

However, the result of the revolutionary turmoil was that a lot of Batista cronies – ‘crooks and gangsters’ – were trying to get their ‘funk money’ out of Cuba. In ‘For Your Eyes Only’, von Hammerstein has taken a liking to the Havelocks’ Jamaica estate, and in a scene that is amongst Fleming’s most powerful and affecting, they are killed when they refuse to sell.

Fleming writes in an interesting subtext. It was, of course, widely known that the Batista regime had for a long time been propped up by the United States government and corporate interests, as well as cooperating closely with the American Mafia. So although the hitmen in the story are Cuban, and their boss German, they carry Pan American holdalls stuffed with ‘solid wads of American money’. Havelock tells them, ‘I do not share the popular thirst for American dollars.’ When they make their escape from Jamaica, Fleming makes a point of informing us that their boat flies the Stars and Stripes. Once
again, he implies that the threat to Jamaica comes in a roundabout way from the United States, a society, he declares in
Thrilling Cities,
riddled with ‘criminality’.

The Havelocks had been friends of M – he was best man at their wedding – and Bond agrees to take on this mission of private revenge, recasting it as ‘protecting the security of the British empire’: ‘If foreign gangsters find they can get away with this kind of thing, they’ll decide the English are as soft as some other people seem to think we are … They had declared and waged war against British people on British soil.’

In the course of tracking down and killing von Hammerstein, Bond encounters the Havelocks’ daughter, Judy. She is one of Bond’s favourites, another very un-Ann-like and even Blanche-like Creole: ‘wild and rather animal … good hard English stock spiced with the hot peppers of a tropical childhood … Bond thought she was wonderful.’

There is one very unusual short story in the collection. ‘Quantum of Solace’ only features Bond as a framing device for a tale narrated by the Governor of the Bahamas about marital infidelity that gives a chilling glimpse into Ian and Ann’s relationship around this time. It is based on a story that Blanche told Ian about a Jamaican couple (as ‘payment’, he gave her a Cartier watch). ‘She was a very lovely woman,’ says Blanche. ‘He was a very unattractive little man. And she was having a terrific love affair.’

In real life, the man was a police inspector, but here Fleming makes him a colonial civil servant, Philip Masters. After Fettes and Oxford, Masters is sent by the government to Nigeria, where ‘he was lenient and humane towards the Nigerians, which came as quite a surprise to them’. Although ‘shy and rather uncouth’, Masters meets and marries an air hostess, Rhoda. When he is posted to Bermuda, Rhoda starts an affair and, rather like Molly Huggins with Robert Kirkwood, ‘didn’t make the smallest attempt to soften the blow or hide the affair in any
way … poor Masters was wearing the biggest pair of horns that had ever been seen in the Colony.’

Masters is then posted to Washington for five months, and Rhoda, ditched by her lover, prepares to be reconciled with her husband. But when he comes back, he tells her that they will divorce in a year, and in the meantime, he has split the house into two sections. He will never speak to her in private, although they will continue to appear as a couple in public. A year later, Masters returns to England, leaving his wife penniless and with debts, an act of cruelty that he would have been incapable of a few years before.

‘When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn’t care if the other is alive or dead, then it’s just no good,’ explains the Governor. This was when the Quantum of Solace stood at zero. ‘It’s extraordinary how much people can hurt each other,’ says Bond.

Fleming travelled to Jamaica alone again at the beginning of 1959, but then pushed hard for Ann to come and join him, adding that he was impressed with Blanche’s improvements to Goldeneye. Ann was not quite ready to cede to her rival proprietary rights in Jamaica and flew out a few weeks later. The trip was not a success, with Ian failing to hide his great affection for Blanche (in the summer of the previous year he had tried to persuade her to join him in New York to ‘snatch what we can’, although she had declined).

On her return to London, Ann received a letter from Peter Quennell that gives some indication of the anguish she had suffered whilst away. Blanche was not a ‘formidable rival’, he wrote. ‘It’s tragic, nevertheless, that she should have cast a shadow over your visit and dimmed the goldenness of Goldeneye! How tiresome of the Commander to let her bother you.’ He went on to explain that Ian’s ‘gallant escapades’ were only his way of shoring up his ‘often badly-battered ego’, more affected by her and her friends’ disdain for
his novels ‘than you have ever quite suspected’. Thus he was in need of ‘the classical “little woman”, whose big eyes reflect only trust and love and admiration’.

For Ian’s winter trip the following year, Ann, pumped full of tranquillisers for the flight, came along with reinforcements: Caspar, on only his second trip to his father’s Jamaica house, Caspar’s governess, Mona Potterton, and later in the month, Ann’s own lover Hugh Gaitskell made an appearance. The result was a mixture of farce and tragedy.

Caspar, now aged seven, was clearly a precociously intelligent little boy, interested in everything. Ann’s daughter Fionn, who remembers him with immense affection, describes how he was always treated as
an adult, and seemed as a result far older than his years. In Coward’s play
Volcano,
the Ann character Melissa calls her son a ‘little monster’, but blames herself: ‘I’m not the mother type. I say the wrong things.’ Her son is like his father ‘inside and out’, she says: ‘He’s got Nanny and me and my sister exactly where he wants us. He’s started young, taking women for granted.’

Violet, now the leader of a house staff of five at Goldeneye – an extra cook, Miss Elfreda Ricketts, a maid, Luna Smith, a laundress, Rena Oliphant, and an errand boy, Leaford Williams – remained a huge fan of Caspar. But most others depict him as highly difficult, with Evelyn Waugh describing him as ‘a very obstreperous child, grossly pampered’. Fleming himself complained to Ann: ‘I am nauseated by his bad manners which you seem to tolerate so indulgently.’