Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (2 page)

In fact, many of the ‘ingredients’ that Fleming threw together in the warm bedroom of Goldeneye to create Bond – the high-end jet-set tourism world in which his hero moves, the relentless attention to race, the aching concern with the end of the Empire and national decline, the awkward new relationship with the United States, even the Cold War – all these roads lead back to Jamaica.

In 1965, a year after Fleming’s death at just fifty-six, John Pearson visited Goldeneye for the first time. ‘This really is Flemingland,’ he scribbled in his notebook. ‘It is the place where he wrote and the place he wrote about. His ghost is stronger here than anywhere else.’ Pearson concluded that only in Jamaica could Fleming ‘relax, be as much of himself as there was’. This echoes a comment made a decade earlier by the writer Peter Quennell, who was a frequent guest at Goldeneye in the fifties: ‘In Jamaica Ian seemed perfectly at home,’ he wrote, ‘if he could be said ever to be really at home in any place he inhabited.’

To understand Fleming’s relationship with the place so crucial to his creativity, we need to explore the huge changes occurring as the island, a microcosm for the wider empire, transformed itself and its
relationship with Fleming’s Britain. For it is Jamaica that offers the key to a fresh understanding of Fleming, Bond and our own strange relationship with this national icon.

Ian Fleming had found something in Jamaica that was irresistible, a combination of factors that made the island fit his awkward personality. In an interview close to the end of his life he described himself as ‘rather melancholic and probably slightly maniacal as well … Possibly it all began with an over-privileged childhood.’ He was born on 28 May 1908, the second of four sons, and was a naughty, difficult, restless child. His background was contradictory and complex: both ‘new money’ and establishment, puritan and hedonistic. His grandfather Robert Fleming had risen from a humble background in Dundee to found a bank and accumulate a fortune investing in American railroads. Although he was famously parsimonious, never taking a taxi in his life, the family acquired a town house in London and rolling acres and a mansion in Oxfordshire. A shooting estate in Scotland was rented for ‘country pursuits’. Ian’s father Valentine attended Eton and Oxford, trained as a lawyer and became a country gentleman, with his own pack of beagles. In 1910 he was elected as a Conservative MP for the Henley division of Oxfordshire, becoming a close friend of Winston Churchill, a fellow MP and officer in the Oxfordshire Yeomanry.

In spite of his lack of enthusiasm for outdoor gentry pursuits, Ian seems to have been his father’s favourite; Val called his second son ‘Johnny’ and spoiled him. The young Ian was endlessly curious about nature, from the highest birds to the lowest insects, but was not so keen on killing. He later wrote: ‘If I have to make a choice, I would rather catch no salmon than shoot no grouse.’ When he ‘should have been out doors killing something’, he preferred listening to Hawaiian guitar music, he later remembered, in particular the exotic tropical rhythms of the Royal Hawaiian Serenaders.

His mother Eve was a very different creature to her husband’s austere Scottish family. A striking bohemian beauty, she was vain, self-centred and extravagant. Her two brothers were notorious womanisers and rakes. Eve was also domineering. Her granddaughter Lucy Williams remembers her as ‘quite a frightening woman … beautiful and immaculate, she pierced you with beady eyes’. She had a tendency publicly to humiliate her sensitive second son. A picture of Eve Fleming with her boys shows them all smiling except Ian, who has his arm awkwardly wrapped around his mother’s, with a posture half dependent and half resentful.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, Valentine Fleming immediately volunteered and was very soon on active service as a major in the Oxfordshire Hussars. When Ian was seven, he and his eight-year-old brother Peter were dispatched to Durnford School near Swanage in Dorset, a boarding establishment old-fashioned even for those times. Conditions were spartan and crowded, the food meagre and repulsive; there were no proper toilets. The routine included obligatory cold dips before breakfast and frequent punishments. Ian learned to avoid the extensive bullying by giving nothing of himself away. He also acquired a lifelong, almost neurotic craving for time on his own that some close to him later would find unnerving, fascinating or irritating. In
The Spy Who Loved Me,
Vivienne Michel echoes this desire for solitude, but worries about its basis: ‘The fact that I was so much happier when I was alone was surely the sign of a faulty, a neurotic character.’

In May 1917, eight days before Ian’s ninth birthday, his father’s squadron was in Picardy, holding the outpost of Guillemont Farm. At 3 a.m. the Germans opened fire with artillery, the preparation for an infantry attack. ‘Parties of the enemy got to within 50 yards of our frontline,’ reads the squadron’s report, ‘but were driven off by rifle fire, leaving 2 prisoners in our hands. During the preliminary bombardment Maj. V. FLEMING, 2/Lt F. S. T. SILVERTOP and 3 O.R.s were killed.’ Ian was hauled out of school, then sent back again sharply. His father received a posthumous Distinguished Service Order, and a glowing obituary written for
The Times
by his friend Churchill, a framed copy of which Ian would carry around with him for the rest of his life.

Ian made ‘his inmost self strongly fortified’, as a friend later commented, and followed his elder brother Peter to Eton in 1921. There, although he made lifelong friends, he acquired a reputation for being aloof, with a self-destructive streak. His close friend Robert Harling, writing near the end of Fleming’s life, put the much-criticised
violence and sadism of the Bond books down to ‘the imprisonment of emotions’ that came from upper-class boys of eight being sent to boarding school: ‘the English upper crust wants and needs affection as deeply as any other crust, but impulses towards this important emotional release are frequently stifled for them … the boys grow up, professing to hate what they so need’. Eton schoolfriend Ivar Bryce remembered Ian as charming but moody. Another friend described him as ‘self-consuming’.

Ian had first met Ivar Bryce, who would accompany him on that trip to Jamaica in 1943, on Bude beach in Cornwall in 1914, when Ian was six and Ivar eight. When they met again at Eton, Ivar was more a contemporary of Peter Fleming but got on better with Ian. Bryce was from an Anglo-Peruvian family who had made a fortune in the guano business. He put his good looks down to his Aztec or Inca blood. With his sensual face and laid-back manner, he also had a touch of the exotic and a rebellious streak that Fleming loved.

Bryce had laid his hands on a second-hand Douglas motorbike on which the two friends went on forays in search of excitement, or more exactly girls, round Windsor, Maidenhead and Bray. Thereby Ian lost his virginity on the floor of the box at the Royalty Kinema in Windsor, an episode replayed from the girl’s point of view in
The Spy Who Loved Me
(the boy was an arrogant public-school type). On one occasion, when Ian was sixteen, they took the bike all the way to London to visit the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.

But Eton was not a success. Although he was intelligent and did well at sports, Ian was always overshadowed by his brilliant and charismatic elder brother Peter. As he grew up, he increasingly chafed at the restrictions, and was unlucky enough to have a particularly sadistic housemaster. There were numerous warnings, then the latest trouble with some girls led to a looming expulsion. To avoid this embarrassment, his forceful mother intervened, taking Ian out of Eton a term early. She had decided that he should follow his
martyred father into the army, and so he started at a special tutorial college to prepare for the Sandhurst military academy examination.

He worked hard and did well, his teacher writing to his mother, ‘He ought to make an excellent soldier, provided always that the Ladies don’t ruin him.’ But the endless drill and strict discipline were not for Ian, and he bunked off as much as he could. When he missed a term having contracted gonorrhea from a London prostitute, he made up his mind not to return, resigning in August 1927.

His mother decided that he should instead try for the Foreign Office, but first Ian spent a year in the Austrian Tyrol, where he skied, learned languages, read a lot and conducted affairs (‘having fun with the local Heidis and Lenis and Trudis’, as his friend Cyril Connolly later described it). In his travel book
Thrilling Cities,
Fleming would report that Austrian girls ‘have a powerful weakness for young Englishmen’. They certainly did for this one, who, as a fellow student recalled, was ‘irresistible to women’. Another friend from that time later wrote that part of Ian’s appeal was that he ‘showed … a promise of something dashing or daring’.

After Austria, Fleming moved to Munich and then Geneva, studying for the rigorous Foreign Office entrance examination. In spite of working hard, he failed the test, and once more his mother swung into action, securing him a job at Reuters in London. Fleming would look back on his three years there, which included trips to Moscow and Berlin, with great fondness; but fed up with having to negotiate cash handouts from his manipulative mother, he now decided he wanted to earn serious money in the City. The last straw was the terms of the will of his grandfather Robert Fleming, who died in August 1933. The entire £3 million fortune went to his widow and surviving eldest son, with nothing for Eve or her family.

Ian’s first appointment in a merchant bank was not a success, so he tried his hand at stockbroking at an old and established firm. Here he drew a generous salary of £2,000 a year, enough to set up his own
house, but he was reportedly ‘the world’s worst stockbroker’, and the huge fortune he dreamt of never materialised.

Meanwhile, in his private life he drifted between book-collecting, golf, bridge and women. He was notorious for his open-minded approach to sex, his obsessional interest in it and his direct manner of seduction. He had many affairs with women, young and old, single and married. One of his girlfriends from later in his life said that he was the best lover she had known. Ivar Bryce remembered from this time ‘a series of appealing nymphs … the lady’s side followed a similar pattern composed of glamorous flirtation, abject slavery and fond nostalgia, in that order’.

So while his elder brother Peter went from triumph to triumph – publishing in 1933 one of the most brilliant travel books of the century,
Brazilian Adventure
– Ian languished, gaining a reputation for a ‘cruel face’, arrogant charm and a sophisticated manner but little accomplishment outside the bedroom.

He was rescued by the Second World War. As neurologist Sir James Maloney reflects in
You Only Live Twice,
‘countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting-rooms when the last war had broken out’. Thanks to recommendations from banking and stockbroking friends, Fleming was recruited by naval intelligence to work as the personal assistant to the Director, Admiral Sir John Godfrey, with the rank of commander (which Bond would share). Although his role left him guilty that his nerves and bravery had not been tested by combat action, it was the perfect job for his character and attributes – his fantastical imagination, his love of travel and gadgets, his curiosity and attention to detail.

‘I couldn’t have had a more interesting war,’ Fleming told
Desert Island Discs
many years later. Indeed, Ivar Bryce described him during that time as ‘happy and electrically alive’. But there was family tragedy repeated: his brother Michael was taken prisoner at Dunkirk and subsequently died of his wounds. In his travelogue
Thrilling Cities,
published fourteen years after the end of the war, Ian wrote: ‘I left Berlin without regret. From this grim capital went forth the orders that in 1917 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother.’ He also lost a devoted girlfriend, Muriel Wright, killed by a head wound in an air raid in 1944. He was called on to identify the body, and was reportedly full of remorse that he had not treated her better.