Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (14 page)

Like the shark-hunting episode with Aubyn Cousins the previous year, this watery peril would be poured into the novels. In
Thunderball
, Bond is on a dive at night when a barracuda approaches: ‘The gold and black tiger’s eye was on him, watchfully incurious, and the long mouth was half open an inch so that the moonlight glittered on the sharpest row of teeth in the ocean – teeth that don’t bite at the flesh, teeth that tear out and chunk then hit and scythe again.’ Bond’s insider knowledge of Caribbean waters meant that ‘his stomach crawled with the ants of fear and his skin tightened at his groin’.

For Fleming the danger was the grit in the oyster, the spicy seasoning to the mellow sensuality of the reef All of Jamaica should be ‘embraced’, he would shortly write. ‘It is easy to enjoy the orchids and the hummingbirds, but here is much that is very strange.’ Visitors should also be able to marvel at the ‘fruits that are sometimes deadly poison … the hideous vultures, the ants’ nests like brown goiters on the trees, the blood thirst of shark and barracuda …’

Ann joined Ian for a couple of weeks halfway through January. She would encounter the dangers of the reef at first hand when she stood on a spiny puffer fish. Other smart visitors suffered exotic injuries. When Laurence Olivier was staying with Coward, he was ‘lightly stroked across the shoulders by a stingray tail’ and had to lie on his front for two days. ‘I am still grateful for the gentle ministrations of Noël’s black maids, who periodically laid cool slices of melon, papaya
and mango all over my back,’ he later wrote. David Niven, friend of Errol Flynn as well as Coward, who visited in 1955, was nearly attacked by a scorpion and then, he reports, suffered an infestation of grass ticks in his crotch.

Ann’s short visit ended acrimoniously. In mid February, she wrote to Ian from New York alluding to the pain of leaving him ‘and the lobsters’ but also to a furious row – ‘Do you know that when you said that to me if I’d had a revolver I should have shot you? Damn you … You’re a selfish thoughtless bastard, but we love each other.’

Ian had promised that he would accompany her to New York to spend a few days together there, but when the time came, he suddenly decided that he’d rather stay in Jamaica than go to what he would call the ‘stressed-concrete jungle’ of the American city.

Britain’s uneasy and changing relationship with the new imperial power of the United States is of central concern to Fleming and his Bond stories. In fact, his takes on the Anglo-American relationship are some of the most sparky and deeply felt sections of the novels.

Fleming knew that for policymakers in Whitehall, the greatest threat to the British Empire lay in American support for the rising nationalist movements among colonised people. After all, self-determination was one of the founding principles of the United States. Following the signing of the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt had kept constant pressure on Churchill to address the issue of Indian independence.

At the same time, Britain could not afford a breakdown of relations with the US, who after the war had lent London money and put its troops on the ground to help prop up British interests in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and elsewhere. This dependence of the Empire on the upstart Yankees, who drove a hard bargain with Britain before, during and after the war, was not to the liking of those, such as Fleming, who looked back fondly on the days of British supremacy.

Both Fleming and Bond made frequent visits to the United States.
Certainly Fleming loved the country’s speed, its scale, its service and its food. He had huge admiration for its technical know-how and muscle. In
From Russia, with Love,
for instance, we learn that the Americans, in ‘such matters as radio and weapons and equipment, are the best’. Even the Russians use American knives of ‘excellent’ manufacture and American Zippo lighters. But at the same time, Fleming despaired of what he called, in a letter to Ann in 1947, ‘their total unpreparedness to rule the world that is now theirs’.

Scottish novelist Candia McWilliam identifies as part of the appeal of the Bond books their ‘continual homeopathic doses of Anti-Americanism’. It is striking how, with the exception of Felix Leiter, almost all the Americans Bond meets are surly, uncooperative and jealous of his success and panache. In
From Russia, with Love,
praise of American technical skill is countered by the criticism that ‘they have no understanding of the [espionage] work … they try to do everything with money’. And quickly acquired wealth has poisoned the country. In
Diamonds are Forever,
the Chief of Staff briefs an incredulous Bond on America’s appalling murder rate and ‘ten million’ drug addicts, and how gambling, controlled by the Mafia, is the biggest business, ‘bigger than steel. Bigger than motor cars.’ In his travelogue
Thrilling Cities,
having beaten the ‘syndicates’ of Las Vegas, Fleming goes to bed ‘after washing the filth of the United States currency off my hands’.

Elsewhere, we learn that Las Vegas is ‘ghastly’, New York is obsessed with ‘the hysterical pursuit of money’, and Chicago has ‘one of the grimmest suburbs in the world’. In all, the country is crime-ridden and in crisis, thanks to consumerism and the breakdown of the traditional family in a ‘society that fails to establish a clear moral definition of right and wrong’.

Fleming’s attitudes to the United States were shaped not only by his own experiences there, but also by the situation in Jamaica. One of the reasons Bond loves the country on his earlier trips is that it
is British space, where, for once, he is not dependent on American resources or approval. In
Live and Let Die,
the FBI’s surly Captain Dexter tells him that Jamaica is ‘your territory’. In
Dr No,
M is given the Jamaica case after nagging from the Americans ‘because the place is British territory’. When Bond comes to Jamaica from the United States in
Live and Let Die,
it is a blessed relief for him, an escape to a space uncontaminated by American materialism: ‘Bond was glad to be on his way to the soft green flanks of Jamaica and to be leaving behind the great hard continent of Eldollarado.’

But in subtle ways Jamaica is also shown to be under threat of American colonisation. In
Live and Let Die,
the Harlem gangster Mr Big has taken control of Surprise Island, just off the coast. Strangways, station commander in Jamaica, explains to Bond that this involves complications: ‘You see, it belongs to an American now … with pretty good protection in Washington.’ Dr No, who has colonised another Jamaican island, has ‘a trace of an American accent’, and his men call Bond a ‘Limey’ in the American manner. More obviously, both Fleming and Coward saw the preponderance of Americans among Jamaica’s hotel owners and tourists – ‘millionaires in beach clothes’ – as cause for regret and a threat to Jamaica’s integrity.

The Spanish-American war at the end of the nineteenth century had left the United States as the dominant power in the Caribbean, further enhanced by the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914. In 1911,
The Times
newspaper had predicted that the ‘islands of the West Indies … will gravitate in due course to amalgamation with the Great Republic of the North’. But while the US intervened freely in Central America and what had been the Spanish Antilles, the British islands remained part of the Empire, albeit a neglected one.

This had all changed with an agreement signed in March 1941: in return for much-needed destroyers, Britain gave the US long leases on eleven military bases in the area. For London, the deal represented
the abdication of exclusive authority over the British Caribbean and, at the same time, the very beginning of the ‘Special Relationship’. The Caribbean and the deals done there, such as at the naval conference attended by Fleming in 1943, formed a bridge between Britain and the United States.

The American aim was threefold: to secure the islands, should Britain surrender in Europe; to counter the serious submarine threat; and to maintain order in the region lest it cause trouble for their national interest. In 1942, as anti-colonial winds blew in from Asia, US troops were used to suppress revolt in St Lucia and the Bahamas, in the latter case after a personal request from the Duke of Windsor, the recently abdicated Edward VIII.

On the islands, it was called ‘the American invasion’. In Jamaica, there were two large bases: an airfield at Vernamfield, Clarendon, and a naval station at Goat Island in Old Harbour Bay. For almost all Jamaicans, this was their first contact with North Americans. Lower classes largely welcomed the free-spending incomers. Sweets were handed out to children. Operators of popular nightclubs like
downtown Kingston’s famous Glass Bucket prospered. In Trinidad, a new calypso swept all before it: ‘Working for the Yankee Dollar’.

But employers saw their control of wages and the labour market challenged, and political activists found themselves in a dilemma. Although historically Americans had seemed pro-self-government, the lack of local consultation on the destroyers-for-bases agreement pointed in the opposite direction. Jamaican nationalists were uneasy that the deal might be the sharp point of a wedge that would presently see the ownership of the colonies simply shift from Britain to the United States. For them, then, the much-expanded American influence in the region offered both threat and promise. The fear of being subsumed within a new US colonial system was weighed against the opportunity to exploit American anti-colonial rhetoric to reinforce opposition to British rule.

The issue of race was similarly complicated. During the wartime rule of Governor Richards, black trade unionists and nationalists, including Bustamante, were rounded up and imprisoned. But when in 1941 Wilfred Domingo, founding member in New York of the Jamaica Progressive Party, was arrested on his arrival on the island, there were vigorous protests from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), based in New York. Worried that New York blacks were going to cause trouble, the US government complained about the arrest. In 1942, Domingo was released, and Richards replaced. The conceding of the universal franchise soon afterwards was also hastened by American pressure.

By the end of the war, however, the power of Harlem and the NAACP had faded, and American influence started to be viewed rather differently by black nationalists in Jamaica. The precedent of racial segregation in the Panama Canal Zone was worrying, as were the examples of how tourism was developing in the British colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas, where US dominance in hotel ownership and in visitors was even greater than in Jamaica. The American-
owned British Colonial Hotel in Nassau refused entry to a number of distinguished Jamaicans, even Bustamante, for fear of upsetting its white patrons. Evon Blake, in his
Spotlight
magazine, highlighted these cases to show the possible effect of expanded American influence in Jamaica, writing that the attitudes in Nassau towards negroes ‘were equalled only in the most sociologically retarded of Dixie backwaters’. In late 1952, Blake urged the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, to outlaw such ‘Jim Crow’ practices. But in the House of Commons, Lyttelton announced that he was ‘advised that [the maintenance of the colour bar in Bermuda] is essential to the tourist trade on which people of the colony as a whole depend for their livelihood’. In Blake’s estimation, Lyttelton was presented with a choice between ‘US dollars and democracy’, and ‘by excusing racial discrimination as a modus operandi of tourism, had unapologetically chosen the former’. It was a decision, according to Blake, that ‘threatened the undoing of the British Empire’.

Nonetheless, for Blake, the Empire, however indifferent, remained preferable to the active racism of the Americans. Writing in
Spotlight
in August 1950, he urged locals to buy bonds to help ‘the present and future welfare of this great little island of ours’, and added the warning: ‘The Yanks would love to own it, you know.’

But Jamaica still needed American dollars. In 1950, the Jamaican government lifted restrictions on foreign capital investment and on taking the profits of such investment out of the country. It was very much the dollar, rather than the pound, that was being targeted. A delegation from the Chambers of Commerce of Kingston and Montego Bay toured the US the same year looking for investors. According to a US official report, ‘the delegation made it plain that the position of these Islands places them fully within the sphere of North American influence. There was no question of less than complete allegiance to Britain, but Britain’s “many problems” made that country unable to offer immediate major economic assistance.’

Jamaicans also hoped to play on British fears of an American takeover to get what they could from the mother country. ‘I was in New York. It’s only good to make money,’ Bustamante told the British press while on a visit to London in late 1948. ‘Jamaica stays with Britain,’ he announced, thereby highlighting the alternative. By 1951, frustrated by trade restrictions that forced Jamaicans to buy expensive British imports, he was threatening to switch allegiance away from Britain and towards the US.