Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (8 page)

Molly now had a spectacular new project. To blame for Jamaica’s poverty and its attendant family breakdown, she had decided, was the high proportion of children born illegitimate. ‘If the moral standard of the women can be raised,’ she declared, ‘the whole island will benefit.’ The answer was to encourage marriage. But no Jamaican, she was told, would marry without a gold ring to hand over, which most could not afford. So Molly did a deal to buy wholesale from a London jeweller 2,000 gold rings, to be passed on at five shillings each, rather than the two or three pounds’ going rate in Kingston. She then organised a string of mass weddings, with fifteen couples at a time, who ‘came in cars, on mules, donkeys and horses’. These weddings were graced by
an appearance from Lady Molly herself, with tea and cakes provided by the Women’s Federation.

Her attitude to her own marriage was somewhat different, however. For her own conduct, she preferred ‘the Continental attitude’. ‘I didn’t quite see how two people could be expected to be physically faithful for all their lives, however fond of each other they might be … I saw no harm in occasional love affairs by either party,’ she wrote in her memoir, in which she is very frank about her sex life and her sexual appetite. Blanche Blackwell, who remembers her vividly, went as far as to describe her as a ‘nymphomaniac’. Even before she had arrived in Jamaica, Molly writes, the difference in age with her husband had begun to tell. One source of conflict, apparently, was that he was jealous of ‘the love of the people of Jamaica for me’. Soon after taking up residence in King’s House, she began a long-running affair with
Bobby Kirkwood, Tate & Lyle’s man in Jamaica. Little effort was made to keep it under wraps. Nor was Kirkwood the sole beneficiary of her affections; there were a number of other men who became ‘firm friends’.

Fleming returned to England in March 1947 in love with the Jamaica he had discovered. It would be the subject of his first substantial piece of writing, for Cyril Connolly’s
Horizon
magazine. What seems to have made the biggest impression on him was the spectacular beauty and range of the island’s flora and fauna. He writes of the ‘2,000 different varieties of flowers’ (in fact, there are more than three thousand, of which a thousand are endemic), as well as ‘innumerable butterflies and humming-birds and, at night, fireflies of many kinds’. Although he was a lover of nature from an early age, Jamaica brought out the ornithologist in Fleming. We learn of the ‘frigate birds, black and white, with beautifully forked tails, and dark blue kingfishers’ that ‘hang over the reef’, and the ‘clumsy pelicans and white or slate grey egrets’ that ‘fish at the river mouths’.

This passion for the natural world, in part inspired by the beauty of Jamaican wildlife, would become a recurring theme of the Bond stories. The short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’ opens with the declaration that ‘The most beautiful bird in Jamaica, and some say the most beautiful bird in the world, is the streamer-tail or doctor humming-bird.’James Bond never kills a bird or a mammal – except humans – and rarely kills a fish except to eat. Anyone who does kill a bird in a Bond story invites Bond’s fiercest anger and always ends up deservedly dead: Mr Big’s associate ‘the Robber’ in
Live and Let Die,
who shoots a pelican for fun; Von Hammerstein in ‘For Your Eyes Only’, who blasts an innocent kingfisher; Scaramanga in
The Man with the Golden Gun,
who shows off his shooting skills by killing two kling-kling birds. (Bond even criticizes Gala Brand in
Moonraker
for picking a flower.) And if cruelty to nature is a sure sign of villainy, an
appreciation and knowledge of the natural world, such as are shown by fictional Jamaicans Honeychile Rider and Quarrel, are a certain indication of good character.

In
Live and Let Die,
Fleming describes Jamaica as having ‘some of the most beautiful scenery in the world’. Elsewhere he calls it ‘the most beautiful large island in the world’. Best of all was the variety of landscape. On the cooler uplands lay meadows that reminded Fleming of Ireland or the Tyrol; then, he continues in his
Horizon
article, ‘you drop down, often through a cathedral of bamboo or a deep-cut gully of ferns’, into the tropical jungle, rich in palms, cotton trees and hardwood; after valleys of sugar cane and bananas, there is the sea, ‘breaking in silver on the reef’ – a description that Fleming would reuse in
Live and Let Die,
when Bond and Quarrel are driving across the island.

Other Jamaican attractions outlined in the 1947 article are the Great Houses, including ‘Prospect, belonging to Sir Harold Mitchell’ and ‘Bellevue Plantation, belongs to the Bryces’, and the hot springs at Bath and Milk River, the latter boasting ‘the highest radio-activity of any mineral bath in the world’, useful for ‘curing your rheumatism or sciatica (or just having an aphrodisiac binge)’.

The food was plentiful and exciting. Fleming details a mouthwatering menu that includes black crab, roast stuffed suckling pig, and guavas (as Quarrel would make for Bond and Solitaire in
Live and Let Die).
Here in Jamaica you could gorge yourself on treats unavailable at home, just as Bond would do. There were ‘Unbounded drinks of all sorts’. He also recommends the local weather, the
Daily Gleaner -
‘my favourite newspaper above all others in the world’ – the ‘electric rhythms’ of the music, and swimming in a bay after dark, shining ‘like an Oscar, because of the phosphorus’. He was a man clearly passionate about his Jamaica.

The only real shortcomings of the island for Fleming were ‘the mosquitoes, sandflies, grass-ticks and politics. None of these are
virulent hazards.’ Having dismissed it as a mere irritation, however, he then goes on to describe his views of the politics of the island in some detail.

Like other incomers, Fleming initially knew little about the political undercurrents on the island, although he does refer in his article to ‘recent disturbances’. Jamaica had been a Crown colony, ruled directly from London, since the 1860s, although twenty years later a very limited form of representative government was introduced. Nevertheless, by the 1930s, only a twelfth of the population was entitled to vote, and real power was still in the hands of the British Governor and the Colonial Office. One Caribbean historian has recently described the politics of this period as a ‘dictatorship of white supremacy’.

The first real challenge to this came from New York. Then, as now, the city played host to a large Jamaican community. New York, with its ‘Harlem Renaissance’, gave West Indians an opportunity that they did not enjoy at home to engage in political activity, and a context in which to assert themselves. In 1936, W Adolphe Roberts, Wilfred Domingo and the Reverend Ethelred Brown launched the Jamaica Progressive League, committed to ‘work for the attainment of self-government for Jamaica’. Soon the organisation was sending activists from New York to Jamaica.

What they found there was atrocious poverty, squalor and governmental neglect. Where tourists and visiting expatriates saw picturesque scenes of time stood still or romantic decline, they saw urgent social and economic problems. Disease and malnourishment were everywhere, and few places off the beaten track had electricity or piped water. A book about Jamaica published in 1938 described the hill dwellers as a ‘lost people’: ‘the children have yaws on their legs, or are blown with midget elephantiasis … there is no doctor here but the Obeah man’. Roads, hospitals and poorhouses were in a disgraceful condition. Education provision was amongst the worst in the Empire,
with most children only attending school three times a week, and then in classes of seventy or more. Only 3 per cent of the population was educated beyond the age of ten, and as much as half the black population was illiterate.

Unemployment was rife and the global depression had pushed down wages in the key sugar business to levels not much higher than in 1830. There was growing protest about poor pay and working conditions, including, in 1935, strikes and riots among the banana workers at Oracabessa. This came to a climax in May 1938, when Kirkwood’s new Tate & Lyle sugar factory at Frome advertised for workers. Thousands turned up, and when there was not nearly enough work to go round, riots broke out that claimed the lives of eight men and led to a declaration of martial law. Strikes and rioting spread across the island.

The disturbances saw the emergence of new unions under the leadership of the flamboyant and energetic Alexander Bustamante, and, more widely, a new Jamaican nationalism spearheaded by Norman Manley, a Rhodes scholar and the island’s leading barrister. Manley had fought for the Empire during the First World War as an artilleryman, experiencing violent racial prejudice from his comrades. (His brother Roy was killed near Ypres in 1917, aged twenty-one). His sculptress wife Edna Manley had already started a movement of anti-colonial Jamaican art.

In the same year as these disturbances, Manley launched the socialist People’s National Party (PNP), pledging to ‘raise the standard of living and security of the masses of the people’ and to ‘develop national spirit’. While empire nostalgists like Fleming looked back fondly on the old Jamaica of the Great House, Manley saw the island’s ‘ugly’ past as a ruinous curse that had created a ‘culture of dependency’, making people ‘turgid and lethargic’. ‘We are still a colonial people. The values of the plantation still prevail,’ he lamented. Manley was fond of quoting a British colonial official who had admitted:
‘The Empire and British rule rest on a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed.’

Public Opinion
newspaper, founded in 1937 to take on the establishment views of the
Daily Gleaner,
saw neglect of education in Jamaica as the result of a ‘social oligarchy’ deliberately aiming to ‘nurture a sense of inferiority in the masses’, who as a result ‘are embittered with a feeling of frustration’. ‘Each Jamaican is a smoldering little volcano of resentment,’ warned one magazine writer. Another predicted a ‘revolution because of class resentment’, which ‘would be suppressed by British bayonets and boycotted by Yankee capital’.

During the Second World War, the British Governor of the time, Sir Arthur Richards, used the cover of imperial security to enhance his own powers and harass and arrest his opponents, earning himself the nickname ‘the Repressor’.

But the authorities in London conceded that change had to come. At the Foreign Office, Anthony Eden, who would later, famously, stay at Goldeneye, urged that due to their proximity to the United
States, it was essential to ‘make our Colonies in the Caribbean good examples of our Imperial work’. Richards was replaced by Huggins, and in February 1943 a new constitution was proposed that allowed for a House of Representatives on the island, elected by universal adult suffrage. In July 1943, Bustamante, who had been imprisoned for seventeen months for sedition, formed his own political party, the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), to rival his cousin Norman Manley’s PNP. The election was to be held in December of the following year.

Bustamante, for now, was unsure about self-government, not just because he thought it unaffordable, but because he saw the inevitable outcome as the control of the black masses by the ‘brown’ middle class; what he called ‘a new slavery’. Bustamante was inherently conservative but also a shrewd and opportunistic populist and a stunning orator. To one cheering crowd he declared: ‘We want bread! B-R-E-D bread!’ When the election came, he managed to secure far greater funding than the PNP and to garner the votes of both the elite whites and the poorest blacks, winning twenty-two of the thirty-two seats in the House of Representatives. A disappointed Edna Manley wrote in her diary that ‘I shall never forget the rich people rolling in in their hundreds to vote Labour’ so
as ‘to keep Manley out’. This victory made Bustamante the unofficial government leader, under the title of Minister of Communication. But real power and responsibility resided with the Executive Council, made up of five elected members, or ministers, and five men appointed by the Governor, who himself sat in the chair and therefore kept control.