Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (30 page)

Towards the end of the three weeks, Coward received a note from Clarissa thanking him for the ‘goodies’ and saying she was feeling much better, although her husband was ‘rather fretting at being out of England!’ And well he might. During Eden’s absence, Macmillan and Butler were plotting his downfall, while the
Spectator
commented on 7 December, ‘Jamaica has done more damage than Suez to Sir Anthony’s standing in his party at Westminster.’ So the Edens returned to London ‘to find everyone looking at us with very thoughtful eyes’, as Clarissa wrote in her diary. Three weeks later, Sir Anthony Eden was ousted, with poor health given as the excuse. For Eden, Goldeneye had been a political and public relations disaster.

Not so for Ian Fleming. The use of his house had brought him to the attention of a much larger public than his books had hitherto done, and it was the beginning of a run of good fortune for both him and his Bond creation.

There was a more oblique and subtle benefit as well. The Suez disaster had ended Britain’s imperial pretensions. Even the thickest-skinned nostalgist could no longer deny the country’s second-class status. But this would make the escapism of Fleming’s stories, in which, behind the scenes, Britain in the figure of super-agent 007 still bestrides the globe, more popular than ever. The world of Bond was rapidly becoming a place where the nation could congregate around a vision that denied Britain’s disappointing new reality.

1957 Jamaica Under Threat – Dr No

I feel horribly insecure, like this house when the mountain rumbles and the walls tremble, scared of what might happen next.

Adela, in
Volcano

Before Ian returned to Jamaica at the beginning of 1957, Coward had completed his play
Volcano.

An unflinching examination of marital breakdown, it is set on Coward’s Jamaica stand-in, Samolo, where Melissa Littleton arrives suddenly, having been alerted that her husband Guy is having an affair with a local widow and plantation owner called Adela Shelley. Several people recur from Coward’s other Samolo stories, and, as in the novel
Pomp and Circumstance,
there are two very obvious Ian and Ann characters. There’s also a similarly obvious new arrival: Blanche.

The jealous wife Melissa shares Ann’s fear of flying, her renown as a society hostess and her difficulty with getting on with other women. She doesn’t like the rigours of the tropics and is described by various others as ‘hectic’, ‘brittle’ and ‘scratchy’.

Her errant husband Guy speaks in nautical metaphors and spends all his time in Samolo spearing fish. He has a spartan house with
uncomfortable furniture and a ‘vast living-room that throws the whole house out of balance’. His wife complains that he considers the island ‘his own private bachelor paradise’. He is immensely attractive, but has a ‘sex ego too strongly developed, too greedy; it demands constant attention like a child banging its spoon on the table’.

The Adela/Blanche character is the most sympathetically portrayed of the three. A widow in her forties who runs a profitable plantation – bananas, coconuts, sugar – she is well liked by her friends, self-reliant, ‘steady’ and dignified, but with a heart as ‘lively as a cricket’. We learn that she had become accustomed to being on her own but the previous year had met Guy and they had fallen in love while swimming and snorkelling together. Guy’s wife Melissa is used to her husband’s casual indiscretions but flies out to Samolo to check out Adela, who ‘might have been just that exception’.

At their meeting, tensions are high, with everyone drinking strong spirits heavily, as they do relentlessly throughout the play. Melissa thanks Adela for ‘how kind’ she was ‘to him when he was out here on his own last year’. Adela now feels guilty and foolish.

The atmosphere gets even heavier as the volcano in the background – seen by some as the characters’ buried anger, by others as the coming of independence – gets louder and threatens their night-time outing to see the dawn from its summit. Guy then seduces a much younger married woman who is also part of the group. This sidesteps the stand-off between the Ann and Blanche characters and turns both of them against him.

Melissa responds by threatening divorce, clearly not for the first time. Guy replies: ‘You knew perfectly well when you married me what I was like. You knew that I was temperamentally incapable of remaining faithful for long to any one person. I never tried to deceive you about it, in fact I told you so myself, and you settled for it … I am what I am and I’m too old a dog to change my ways … Are you going to pretend that you’ve been strictly faithful to me in the last few
years?’ he adds. ‘No. I’m not going to pretend anything,’ says Melissa. ‘I’m not even going to pretend that there’s any hope.’

The fault is laid at the failure of the ‘physical passion we had for each other when we were first married’. This, Guy says, ‘never lasts, you know that as well as I do, we’ve often discussed it’. Now they only stay together, ‘jog along’, for the sake of their child, a young, rather difficult son. At the same time, Melissa admits that she is tied to Guy, whatever his behaviour. ‘Yes. I do love him,’ she says. ‘And I accept I always shall. I can’t help myself. I have no illusions about him. I don’t admire him or even respect him. But there it is. He was my choice and I’m stuck with it. Nobody can explain that sort of thing can they. It’s far beyond reason and common sense.’

For Adela, the arrival of Melissa together with Guy’s latest escapade on the volcano turns her against her former lover. ‘You have an exaggerated view of your own personal charm,’ she tells him witheringly. Earlier she announces that she no longer loves him: ‘I thought I did for a little – but not any more.’ When, right at the end of the play, he brings her shells as a peace offering, she smashes them on the stage as the final curtain comes down.

Before the end of 1956, Coward approached his Jamaica friend Katharine Hepburn to play the lead, Adela, and sent the play to his long-time theatrical producer ‘Binkie’ Beaumont. Both rejected it. Beaumont may well have considered that the drama’s very overt discussion of sex might have gone down badly with Coward’s now middle-aged audience, or even fallen foul of the censors of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. In addition, although a dissection of marriage every bit as probing and ruthless as
Private Lives, Volcano
was far from Coward’s best work.

The play remained unperformed until 2012, when after a brief regional tour it arrived in London. But the production struggled with the material: the colonial setting was jarring, with the locals portrayed, if at all, as unreliable, untruthful and hysterical. The only humour
was at the expense of the servants and their ‘funny’ way of speaking English. Reviews were unkind and the run was short.

Blanche Blackwell and Ann’s daughter Fionn, now good friends, both saw the play soon after it opened. Fionn found it ‘not terribly good’, but Blanche insists she enjoyed it, although she claims that the Adela character is nothing like her: much more articulate and forceful.

Blanche’s version of the story told in
Volcano
is not so different from the play, apart from the ending. (In fact, Coward also wrote a different ending, in which the Blanche character accepted Guy’s advances.) Ian and Blanche had indeed become very close that first winter in 1956 while swimming, hunting and dodging barracudas on Goldeneye’s reef, but Blanche denies that they became lovers that year.

In January 1957, however, Ian arrived in Jamaica alone with the news that Ann, in a burst of post-health-club positivity, had ‘renewed her marriage vows’, but then within days had started her affair with Gaitskell, to Fleming’s fury. Blanche says this made her less inclined to continue to resist Ian’s persistent advances, and to suppress her own attraction to him. By this time, she had another suitor in Jamaica, and marriage had been discussed, but Ian now insisted she drop him and Blanche agreed.

Two days later, Ann and her party arrived. Ian had come by air, but because of Ann’s fear of flying, she had taken the boat, along with four-year-old Caspar, his nanny, Joan Sillick, and Ann’s twenty-four-year-old son Raymond O’Neill.

It was a ‘horrific’ journey, Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh from Goldeneye. For eight of the eleven days at sea, there had been a ‘full gale’. Nanny Sillick suffered from ‘seasickness, rheumatism and neuralgia’, meaning that Ann had to entertain her sons. Caspar woke at six each morning, while Raymond insisted on being taken to the nightclub each evening. ‘I remained mobile on Dramamine and gin … in a stupor of fear and dope,’ Ann wrote. Everyone on the boat was ‘old and ugly’.

It was Raymond’s first visit to the tropics, and he was enchanted by Jamaica and Goldeneye.
Time
magazine the following year would describe it as Fleming’s ‘luxurious Jamaican residence’, but Raymond remembers it from that time as being still ‘extremely primitive, the simplest house I’d ever been in. But it didn’t matter – you spent all your time in bathing trunks. I love nature so I spent most of the time in the sea.’ Everyone had a swim in the morning, ‘then spent a lot of time in the sunken garden reading. Hummingbirds were buzzing all around you, and the doctor birds with their long tails – it was an absolute paradise.’

The snorkelling was a highlight, and they often went out further afield in the little inflatable boat and would eat for supper the fish they had caught that day. An octopus found living very near the beach was befriended and christened ‘Pussy’. Ann had one setback: she thought she saw a shark and in a panic put her foot on to a rock, which ‘happened to be the home of a moray eel. Grabbed her by the ankle. Her whole leg swelled up.’

At night, Raymond remembers, because there was no glass in the windows, ‘the most amazing wildlife flew in. Enormous moths flapped in, landed on the wall and then were consumed by lizards, also on the wall. I loved it because you were really in the bush.’

Caspar had inherited his father’s interest in nature, and was wildly excited when he saw a scorpion, but most of the time, while Ann painted, wrote letters or read, Raymond swam and Ian hammered out
Dr No
in his new gazebo, the little boy was looked after by the nanny. On a couple of occasions, Ann took him to the Tower Isle Hotel swimming pool, where Barrington Roper gave him swimming lessons. When he was not writing, Fleming undertook to teach his son the Latin names for the fish on the reef. Housekeeper Violet, who at this time had two maids working under her at the house, adored Caspar. ‘He’s a fine little boy and I hope his mother brings him to Jamaica again,’ she said. ‘He and I got along just fine.’

There was a certain amount of social life, Raymond remembers, but it really only ‘revolved around Blanche and Noël Coward and Noël Coward’s friends, of which there were a large number around’. On one occasion, Ian sent Raymond to Blue Harbour in the Austin saloon car kept at Goldeneye to collect ‘Noël-y and Coley, Binkie and Perry’ (John Perry, ‘Binkie’ Beaumont’s partner). He also ran errands into Port Maria, and stayed a night in Kingston with Blanche at Terra Nova. On another occasion, he was sent to visit Bolt and shown round the banana estate by Blanche and the plantation manager. But ‘real’ Jamaica, or Jamaicans other than staff, was largely ignored. It was, he says looking back, life ‘in a little bubble’.

Raymond was very fond of Ian. They had a shared love of motor cars (Raymond had hurtled round the roads of Kent to help research the timings for the car journeys in
Moonraker
); Ian was, he says, a ‘far better step-father than Lord Rothermere’, but he believes Ian and his mother ‘should never have married. He was a bachelor at heart. Ladies were for a short time.’

Like almost everyone, he got on well with Blanche, but did not entirely miss the awkward tension that her presence in the Fleming-Coward circle was causing. Even before leaving England, Ann had been rather put out to hear from Clarissa Eden how wonderfully helpful ‘someone called Blanche Blackwell’ had been during their stay. Once in Jamaica, she was irked by the evidence of Blanche’s sprucing up of Goldeneye for the Eden visit, and by her popularity in their little circle. Ann could see that she had a serious rival. Nonetheless, after only four weeks, she and the rest of the family boarded the ship back to England, leaving Ian alone once more.

According to Blanche, this was when they became lovers. They spent much of his last two weeks in Jamaica together. In a sign that their relationship had reached the stage of affectionate teasing, Ian called the ‘aged’ guano tanker in
Dr No
the
Blanche.
‘She was a tomboy kind of girl, really,’ Chris Blackwell says of his mother. ‘Somebody
ready to go swimming, climb a mountain. His wife was not like that at all. She liked her society more.’ Ian found Blanche easy and relaxed company, very different from Ann. Blanche says that with her, Ian did not need to make any effort. If he was rude, she just ignored it. One of the most important things he said to me,’ she remembers, ‘was if you don’t have anything to say, for God’s sake don’t say it.’ Blanche didn’t mind this at all: ‘He was a charming, handsome, gifted man,’ she says, ‘exceptionally manly and definitely not for domesticating.’