Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (26 page)

Ian’s patience with Ann’s circle, so often packed round the dining table at their Victoria Square house, was now running out. Peter Quennell remembered one occasion at dinner where ‘the Commander was suffering greatly’ sitting next to a duchess. Quennell noted him looking ‘very Bond-ish, his handsome Aztec mask deeply scored with lines of pain, weariness and disgust’. Now Fleming much preferred going out to his club to play bridge in the evenings. But it was impossible when he returned home to avoid the ‘gab-fest’, as to get to his bedroom he had to go through the crowded dining room. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that he came back one night to hear Ann’s friends mockingly reading aloud from
Live and Let Die.

In the summer of 1954, Ann and Ian had separate holidays – Ian with the Bryces in Vermont, Ann with Fionn in Greece to stay with Patrick Leigh Fermor and his wife. The winter trip to Goldeneye, previously the scene of their happiest times together, now caused rows. Ann wanted to take Caspar, but Ian would not hear of it, arguing somewhat unconvincingly that it was far too dangerous for a two-year-old.

Ann acquiesced, but then insisted that they travel separately so that an accident, such as occurred to a BOAC Stratocruiser just before Christmas 1954, in which twenty-eight people died, would not leave Caspar an orphan. The result was that Ann arrived after Ian and, deciding to get a boat home, left two weeks before him.

While Ian’s love for Jamaica was entirely undiminished, for Ann the novelty seems to have worn off. Her letters that year show she left England ‘with great reluctance’ and was missing Caspar.

This year also saw them meeting and getting to know the
Gleaner
columnist Morris Cargill. He became a close friend of Ian, and would appear as a
Gleaner
journalist in
Dr No
and as a Justice of the Supreme Court in
The Man with the Golden Gun.
Cargill described Fleming as
‘a very interesting man. A very nice man.’ Ann was ‘highly intelligent and beautiful, but very strange. She loved men but disliked other women intensely.’ The Fleming marriage, said Cargill, was ‘armed neutrality’. Fleming told his new friend that ‘he felt totally trapped by the whole thing’.

To keep her company while Ian was, as Ann put it, ‘polishing up horror comic number four’ –
Diamonds are Forever
– Evelyn Waugh and Peter Quennell came to stay at Goldeneye. Quennell came first and was his usual mellow and accommodating self, ‘a peaceful and appreciative guest’, alternating ‘pursuing humming-birds’ with correcting his latest proofs.

Waugh’s mother had died in December 1954, and friends recommended he go somewhere warm to get over it. He stayed first with the Brownlows for two weeks but found it, he later told Ann, ‘a great intellectual strain to find words simple enough to converse with them – they are indeed a grisly household, gin from ten-thirty on’. Perry Brownlow had ‘troubles’ and drank far too much whisky, Waugh reported. ‘The women concentrate on a smooth sunburn and hairless bronzed shanks, the men lounge and yawn or play cards … There was a lady here went to sleep on a mattress in a red bathing dress and all the vultures thought she was dead and bloody and tried to eat her.’

Waugh sought early refuge with the Flemings, which he much preferred, writing to Ann afterwards: ‘Goldeneye was delightful, I should not have believed that a modern house could be so congenial.’ He and Quennell reportedly ‘hated each other’, but here they were forced to put aside their differences. On one occasion they both went rafting on the Rio Grande with Ann, while Ian pressed on with his writing. ‘Evelyn wore blue silk pyjamas and a pink-ribboned Panama hat,’ Ann wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘He ordered a stupendous lunch from the Titchfield Hotel – wine packed in ice in biscuit tins, cold roast fowls and legions of hard boiled eggs – he treated Peter
as a native bearer and we rode ahead on the first raft, Peter and the biscuit tins behind us; whenever we shot a tiny rapid he roared over his shoulder “Stop looking so poetical and mind the lunch” but alas it was Peter’s victory for the river was in spate, our punter inexperienced for he lost balance and fell overboard, we cannoned into the rocks and subsided slowly into the river – Peter said it was like watching an old-fashioned carriage accident … We swam for the shore, Evelyn doing a slow breaststroke, blue eyes blazing and mood much improved, for he liked things to go wrong.’

Waugh struggled with the snorkelling, and according to Quennell was ‘entirely unappreciative of nature’: ‘I have watched him, a cigar in his mouth and a large straw hat crammed on his angry head, wearing a striped suit that increased his resemblance to a rich plantation owner of the last century, stumping ponderously along a Caribbean beach without a glance for the spectacle of sky and sea, despite the humming birds that played through the hedge or the liquid aquamarine of glassy wavelets that slid up against the blanched sand.’

Waugh was also unusual among Goldeneye guests in noticing, or more exactly commenting on, Jamaica beyond the beauties of sea and garden. ‘Jamaica is an odd island,’ he wrote in a letter to his son, Bron. ‘The whole north coast has quite lately become the resort of millionaires, mostly American. Ten years ago the coast was an empty coral strand with a few negro fishing villages. Now it is all Hollywood style villas and huge hotels charging 40 dollars a day for their smallest rooms and the poor negroes cannot find a yard of beach to paddle in … Land on the coast which ten years ago could be bought for £20 an acre now costs £2,000. Great fortunes have been made in land speculation but no benefit goes to the people. Perhaps they will massacre the whites one day. At present they seem too lethargic.’

Waugh was prone to hyperbole in his letters, but it is still an arresting statement. For his part, the Governor, Sir Hugh Foot,
remained vigilant against what he saw as the communist threat. Labour leaders suspected of communist links were harassed and arrested. ‘The Moscow Trojan horse has arrived in Jamaica,’ he declared in 1954. ‘It is foreign to every good tradition which has grown up in the island … it depends on foreign money.’ In fact, the entire Latin America region occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities. Small amounts of money were, in the late fifties, passed by the KGB to communist parties in South America, but the Caribbean was ignored. In the event, Foot’s personal friendship with and respect for the Manleys, Norman and Edna, and the previous purging of the PNP made him relaxed about the expected victory of Manley’s party in the election of January 1955.

Those expelled from the PNP in 1952 had founded their own party, the National Labour Party, and ran three candidates in the 1955 election. Also running was the new Farmers’ Party, established by Robert Kirkwood to represent the interests of the landowning class. Neither won a seat at the election, in which the PNP garnered over 50 per cent of the vote and achieved a majority over Bustamante’s JLP for the first time.

Manley’s victory triggered huge celebrations. ‘Massive crowds jammed Duke Street,’ Edna wrote in her diary. ‘People climbed trees, clung to fences.’ A ‘huge emotional throng’ sang the rousing lines of ‘Jamaica Arise’. (‘The trumpet has sounded … so awake from your slumber…’)

Norman Manley’s speech on winning showed a new leader desperate to look and move forward, unlike some of Jamaica’s white semi-residents. ‘I am now stripped of the rancor or remembrance of hurt in the past,’ he declared, ‘and offer to one and all to go forward from here for a better Jamaica.’

There were, indeed, grounds for hope that Jamaica’s appalling poverty and inequality might at last be surmountable. It was an
optimistic time. Both major parties supported the establishment of the West Indies Federation, the fast-track to dominion status. Bauxite mining had started in earnest in 1952, even if its extraction was in the hands of North American companies. Manley renegotiated the contracts so Jamaica got a bigger royalty from the money made by the foreign companies. As a result, by 1957 it was one of the country’s biggest foreign exchange earners.

Sugar had revived a little, driven in part by the activities of Tate & Lyle. Although Manley was amongst those concerned that tourism would ‘spoil’ Jamaica and Jamaicans, the business was expanding rapidly, and the mass emigration of Jamaicans to Britain, which had risen from 2,000 in 1952 to nearly 20,000 in 1955, was now bringing in hefty remittances. The new government also set about land reform, founded the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, widened the intake of children to the best schools and centrally planned industrial development.

Morris Cargill, in an article in late 1954, had described Manley as ‘always more skillful as a national psychiatrist than as a politician’. For Manley, Jamaica’s biggest challenge was overcoming the psychological legacy of its past. He believed that it was the colonial relationship going back to slavery that had made black Jamaicans ‘lethargic’, to quote Waugh, and had created a culture of passive victimhood and dependency. We have to stop being colonials and start being Jamaicans,’ he frequently declared. He saw the ‘natural’ subservience and ‘childishness’ of the likes of Fleming’s Quarrel character as holding Jamaica back.

Pearl Flynn, long-time resident of Oracabessa, sees this time as a watershed. She was working at the famous Shaw Park Hotel near Ocho Rios, owned by an Englishman. There was a huge staff, with thirty employed just to do laundry, but in the office, it was all ‘white girls’ apart from her and one other woman. The two black staff had to eat separately from their fellow office workers and Pearl protested:
‘I don’t see why me and the telephone operator from St Mary, we should sit with the gardeners, who come out of the sun and sweat. So I said I don’t eat.’ Her stand was successful and she and her friend were ‘promoted’ to the smarter restaurant: ‘We were satisfied,’ she says. She also tells the story, amid much gleeful laughter from her listening friends, of how ‘Mr [Frank] Pringle, who was the ADC to the Governor, came up one night. A taxi driver by the name of John Pottinger drove up and parked somewhere. And he came out and said, “You are not supposed to park there!” So this taxi man said, “I’m not going to move.”

‘Pringle said, “Do you know who I am? I am the ADC to the Governor!”

‘And the man said, “You could be the ADC to Jesus Christ himself, but I’m not moving.’”

It seems a trivial incident, but not to Jamaicans who remember the unthinking subservience of former times. ‘From then things began to get a bit better,’ Pearl remembers, ‘because they see the natives were getting, you know, different… getting hostile, becoming themselves.’

This was a change spreading outwards across the country. Cargill noted that ‘Jamaica in 1955 had come a long way from the outpost of empire of 1935. Increasing numbers of black or coloured people were in high positions of all kinds.’ At the same time, there was an upsurge of literature, theatre and the visual arts that celebrated black courage, strength and beauty. The popularity of hair-straightening and skin-bleaching products – promoted through demonstrations by the ‘House of Issa’ – began slowly to decline. Painters, playwrights and novelists stressed the need for self-reliance and self-confidence, underlining that black jamaicans were worthy material for art. In Port Maria, the literary Quill and Ink Club, led by Rupert Meikle, had the motto ‘Po’[or] thing, but mine own is better than fine raiment.’

Norman Manley always argued that ‘political awakening must and always goes hand in hand with cultural growth’. And as what he called
‘the dead hand of colonialism’ was gradually lifted during the 1950s, so ‘a freedom of spirit was released and the desert flowered’. In turn, nationalist poets and writers such as Roger Mais, Una Marson, John Hearne, Victor Stafford Reid, George Campbell, Archie Lindo and Evon Blake influenced and gave confidence to the politicians in the new House of Representatives, who now demanded that control of finance and local government be in elected hands. In 1957, the old imperial Executive Council was abolished in favour of a council of elected ministers. It was another firm step towards independence – now the British held power over only foreign policy and defence.

For Morris Cargill, writing in the
Gleaner,
it was as much about psychology as politics: ‘The umbilicus which attached us so sadly to Mother England was as much a fantasy as a reality and had to be cut.’ The ‘need for independence’, he continued, ‘the need to cut ourselves away from a deadening childishness was, and is, a profound psychological need’.

Ironically, the same year as Norman Manley’s ground-breaking election in 1955 saw an anniversary – 300 years of British rule of Jamaica. To help mark the occasion, the island was blessed with a visit from Princess Margaret, in whose name an edict was issued making it clear that Her Royal Highness would not dance with black Jamaicans. Coward thought this stupid: ‘Jamaica is a coloured island and if members of our Royal Family visit it they should be told to overcome prejudice.’ Sir Hugh Foot describes it as the only order from London in his career that he entirely ignored.

The Princess’s visit was a great success. The only complaint recorded by
Public Opinion
from poor black Jamaicans was that she had not spent more time with them. Bustamante was reportedly ‘dead gone on’ the Princess. Even Michael Manley, son of Norman and Edna and later Jamaica’s most controversial prime minister, wrote in his newspaper column for
Public Opinion
that she was ‘a very young woman of rare charm’. Edna Manley thought differently, however,
concluding from her meeting with the Princess that ‘whatever the magic that attaches to a throne it belongs to the past’. But she was in a minority among Jamaicans. As an American reporter wrote, ‘The populace would dearly love to see the pretty Princess appointed as the first Governor-General of the new West Indies Federation.’ So in spite of all the changes, it seemed that the ‘bamboozle’ still worked in Jamaica. Nonetheless, when Fleming returned Bond to the island in
Dr No
two years later, he would portray a very different country from the Jamaica of just a few years earlier.

1956 From Russia, with Love