Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (10 page)

After dinner, a ritual was established of leaning over the railing at the end of the sunken garden and watching the ‘spray of the reef or the high bright large stars’. As Ann reported in her diary, ‘the air is so clear of dirt or dust there is an illusion of vast universe and the sea horizon is very round. Ian remains longer than us, smoking and wallowing in the melancholy.’

Loelia found the evenings equally as trying as the days. The problem for her were the huge open windows, which ‘in daytime was fine, but at night, when the lamps were lit, every insect known to man seemed to pour in from the darkness outside’. In general, she found the house ‘strangely uncomfortable’. The concrete floor, originally painted navy blue and cleaned with oranges, had for an unknown reason been covered in a layer of black boot polish, which created a condition known as ‘Goldeneye foot’ as it wore off on people’s bare soles. There
was no proper bathroom and only one cold tap. She found it a very masculine and austere place. Ian suggested to Ann that she and Loelia might help with furnishing. Ann thought that curtains might be a good idea, a suggestion Ian found appalling and ignored entirely, along with any other attempts to feminise the house.

Boasting a duchess and a lady, the Fleming party was much in demand at the island’s smartest addresses. On 26 January, there was a lunch with Lady Huggins and the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. Four days later came a trip to the Stephensons’ lavish Hillowtown mansion near Montego Bay. Guests included both Lord Lyle and Mr and Mrs Tate, out in Jamaica inspecting their new fiefdoms.

Still, Fleming’s two lady companions found some of these gatherings dull, while he blamed them for indulging in ‘Mayfair talk’ to pass the time, later writing: ‘If you burden yourself with the big-town malaises you came here to escape – the telephone, gin and canasta jitters, gossip and how to keep up with the procession – those will be the serpents in this Eden. But if you can leave this
triste
baggage behind, you will find Jamaica has everything you need.’

On Thursday, 5 March, Ann and Loelia left for Miami and New York en route home. From the RMS
Queen Mary
Ann wrote to Ian: ‘I did love it all and please take me back again next year. I shall like it even better because I shall have tiny roots there.’

In fact, this first visit would turn out to be the happiest time Ann ever had at Goldeneye. In high-end circles in Jamaica her affair with Fleming had been pretty much common knowledge, although one American gossip columnist – ‘Cholly Knickerbocker’ – got the wrong end of the stick and wrote that his lover was Loelia, describing Fleming as ‘a sort of Beau Brummel of the islands’.

Ian had a further month on his own in Jamaica before returning to London. A highlight was his first shark hunt, with Aubyn Cousins, the son of the man who had sold him the Goldeneye land. John Pearson,
Fleming’s first biographer, met Cousins in 1965, noticing that, like Bond’s Jamaica sidekick Quarrel, he had grey eyes. Cousins claimed to be part Irish – ‘My great great grandfather was captain of a schooner out of Dublin’ – and spoke very fondly of ‘the Commander’.

Fleming and Cousins dragged out to the deep water beyond the reef a pair of stinking animal corpses – a donkey and a cow – in order to lure ocean predators. It was clearly an inspirational episode. In
Live and Let Die,
Mr Big similarly throws blood and offal into the sea, causing ‘frenzy’ among the sharks and barracuda, ‘whirling and snapping in the water like hysterical dogs’. Here, the effect was almost as dramatic. Straight away two huge sharks appeared, the first biting the head off the cow with a sound Fleming uses for the death of Robber in
Live and Let Die -
a ‘terrible snuffling grunt as if a great pig was getting its mouth full. He knew it for the grunt that a shark makes as its hideous flat nose comes up out of the water and its sickle-shaped mouth closes on a floating carcass’ – and for that of Mr Big himself – ‘a horrible grunting scrunch’.

At that moment Cousins slipped a nylon noose over the nose of the shark and held on as the enraged animal struggled and thrashed. According to Cousins, Ian loved the danger of this moment, as the small vessel tipped violently, threatening to hurl them both into the sea. Fleming described this first hunt to Ann as ‘the most thrilling thing’ he had done in his life. But once the shark was ‘tied up good and firm’, said Cousins, ‘it seemed like he lost interest. And he never let me kill a shark. “Cousins,” he’d say, “cut the damn thing loose. We’ve had our fun for the day.’”

Ann was a little anxious about Ian being on his own, writing from America: ‘I do hope the remoteness of Goldeneye won’t force you to collect some sordid female to replace me.’ In a subsequent letter, she continued, ‘It would be an interesting feat to be faithful to someone for three weeks, you have never done it before and it might make you feel very happy.’ Ian assured her that he had been ‘steadfast as a rock’
and that there ‘had been little temptation to stick my umbrella into anything except the sea’. But with Ann away, there were a number of female visitors, including the society writer Elsa Maxwell, and the stunningly attractive novelist Rosamond Lehmann, who had read Fleming’s
Horizon
article and told him he was a good writer and should do more. Ian assured Ann that their relationship was ‘spiritual’.

Also staying for a couple of days was the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was researching what would become his successful book
The Traveller’s Tree.
Leigh Fermor took the opposite view to Loelia on the subject of the Goldeneye windows, declaring that Fleming’s design ‘might serve as a model for new houses in the tropics … great windows capture every breeze, to cool, even on the hottest day, the large white rooms’. Even better, the ‘enormous quadrilaterals’ framed a ‘prospect of sea and cloud and sky, and tamed the elements, as it were’. Fleming would return the compliment
when in
Live and Let Die
Bond reads Fermor’s ‘extraordinary book’ after a recommendation from M: ‘“It’s by a chap who knows what he is talking about.’”

Before going home after two months on the island, Fleming spent a weekend with the Stephensons and then a night with Molly and Sir John Huggins. He also penned a short article for the
Gleaner
under the heading ‘Commander Fleming Gives Modest, Practical Suggestions For Island’s Development’. And modest they were: better postcards and guidebooks for the tourists, and homespun wisdom about using more seafood and planting two new trees when you cut one down. What is perhaps most interesting is what it says about Jamaica at the time that a visiting Englishman with no particular expertise should be asked to comment in the national newspaper.

Back in London, Fleming resumed his usual life of leisurely work at the
Sunday Times,
bridge or dinners in the evening and golf at the weekend. But soon after his return, he and Ann found out that she was pregnant. In a letter to Evelyn Waugh, Ann mentioned her ‘sad condition’ and ‘sorry state’, but said that she was ‘resigned’ and ‘accepting her duties cheerfully’. Because of the timing of their Jamaican sojourn, it had to be Ian’s child.

Fleming had asked Loelia to use her stay in New York to try to find some rich American to rent Goldeneye in his absence. On 3 March, she was at a cocktail party in Manhattan given by the Broadway producer Gilbert Miller and his wife Kitty. There she met Noël Coward, and in spite of her grumbles gave him a favourable report of Goldeneye, making it sound ‘marvelous’. Coward was in need of a break after a demoralising flop on Broadway, and had visited Jamaica before, in 1944. Like Fleming, he had stayed at Bellevue and fallen in love with the country: ‘The spell was cast and held, and I knew I should come back.’ He arranged to meet up with Fleming when he was passing through New York a few days later.

Coward had encountered Fleming during the war but did not know him well. Ian’s brilliant brother Peter was married to Celia Johnson, star of the recent Coward-written
Brief Encounter.
In the previous three years, Coward had occasionally come across Ian at parties given by the Rothermeres, where Fleming was usually in attendance. Coward knew Ann, in society hostess mode, much better. In New York, he and Ian haggled over the price, with the latter claiming he had high-paying Americans already lined up, but the deal was soon done. Two weeks later, Coward became Goldeneye’s first paying guest, at £50 a week. This included the services of Violet and two other staff

Coward, together with his companion Graham Payn, reached Jamaica on 22 March 1948. ‘Ship arrived five hours late and rammed the pier,’ he noted drily. They were met by an aide-de-camp (ADC) from the Governor, who arranged the necessary paperwork, and the pair arrived at Oracabessa just before dusk. ‘It is quite perfect,’ Coward wrote in his diary that night. The house seemed fine, the staff friendly, and there was ‘a small private coral beach with lint white sand and warm clear water. The beach is unbelievable.’ After a delicious dinner from Violet, they swam, then lay on the sand, perfectly warm under a full moon. ‘So far,’ Coward wrote, ‘it all seems far too good to be true.’ Two days later, having spent the time painting, swimming, sunbathing and rowing the rubber dinghy, he was already musing on the possibility of himself ‘building a shack somewhere isolated on this island … an idyllic bolt-hole to return to when life became too frustrating’.

Coward would enjoy teasing Ian Fleming about Goldeneye’s drawbacks. He reckoned the stark, modern new building looked like a medical clinic, and christened it ‘Goldeneye, nose and throat’. He complained about the ‘plague of ants’, the loose shutters, the odd rat, the uncomfortable iron beds and the ‘hordes of ageing shells’ everywhere. Violet’s Jamaican food palled and had misses as well as hits. One meal of salt fish and ackee, followed by guavas with coconut
cream, ‘all tasted of armpits’. As for the spacious sitting room, Coward bemoaned that it faced so as to miss the sunset, and that ‘the long window-sills had been so cunningly designed that they entirely cut off the view as you sank into the sofa upholstered with iron shavings … All you Flemings revel in discomfort.’

But he loved wading out to look at fish through glass-bottomed buckets, and enjoyed the surrounding scenes inland: ‘Behind the house are banana plantations and then green covered hills and blue mountains in the distance.’ At the end of this stay he would write in the guest book that it had been ‘The happiest two months I have ever spent.’ Coward was so won over that by the time he left he had purchased not one but two plots of land nearby, and was already building his own house. Before half their stay was over, he and Graham Payn had found a property five miles along the coast east of Oracabessa on the brow of the hill before it made its descent to Port Maria. Sufficiently secluded to be hidden but open to the sea and protected by a reef, the spot was populated by ‘blue-green lizards splashed with red, electric-blue butterflies and beelike hummingbirds, with ominous John Crow black vultures wheeling above’. On the three acres grew oranges, limes, breadfruit, avocado pears, pimentos, ‘and all sorts of tropical deliciousness’. On 25 April, Coward wrote in his diary: ‘I am now a property owner in Jamaica and it is jolly fine.’ It was to be called Blue Harbour.

Straight away Coward employed an expatriate Englishman as a builder and Fleming’s architects Scovell and Barber, with Reggie Aquart again acting as overseer. The plans included a saltwater swimming pool overlooking the secluded bay. Two weeks later, with the design of the new house under way, Coward and Payn drove up to a high point above Blue Harbour called the Look-Out. Here were the ruins, ‘grown over with orchids’, of an old stone house, reputedly an observation post used by Jamaican legend Sir Henry Morgan. Coward loved the spot, in particular its view, and finding that Blanche
Blackwell’s brother Roy Lindo was selling the land at only £10 an acre, he bought the site for £150, with the idea of building a separate writing retreat.

Coward would spend much of the rest of his life in Jamaica, and so began what might in some respects be considered an unlikely close friendship between him and Fleming. It was, at its heart, a friendship made in Jamaica. The first time the two men met in London after Coward’s visit, they ignored the rest of the party and chatted furiously about the island. Through all Fleming’s adventures at Goldeneye over the next fifteen years, Coward would be a continual presence. For his part, Coward was so fascinated by Fleming-in-Jamaica that he would make him a recurring character in his writing.

Much of their relationship revolved around leg-pulling and friendly rivalry over their respective Jamaican homes. In ‘For Your Eyes Only’, for instance, we hear that ‘Somebody’s suddenly gone and bought that ghastly Blue Harbour hotel.’ Peter Quennell, who knew both men and made three visits to Goldeneye, in 1954, 1955 and 1962, reckoned that Coward played up to Fleming, ‘who was himself resolutely, even at times aggressively heterosexual’. Coward apparently treated him ‘as if he were a distinguished member of the opposite sex, almost a prima donna; and Ian, oddly enough, responded and dropped some of his masculine defenses. He enjoyed being admired and teased, and having a bouquet or two thrown at his feet.’ Coward’s attitude to Ian’s ‘dark moods and passionate prejudices’, Quennell later wrote, ‘was always subtly understanding. He humoured, scolded, occasionally derided, yet somehow never did the smallest damage to Ian’s ticklish
amour propre.
His victim, indeed, seemed positively to enjoy being teased or even ridiculed.’