Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (31 page)

Blanche introduced Ian to her favourite book, Frank Cundall’s
Historic Jamaica.
Published in 1915, it describes, parish by parish, buildings and monuments surviving from the ‘glory days’ of the sugar empire. It is a remarkable work of scholarship, but even in the 1950s old-fashioned. No mention is made of the horrors of slavery in Jamaica, and multiple slave-owner Sir Charles Price is described as a ‘truly great man’. (In
Dr No,
Bond reads the
Handbook of the British West Indies,
published in 1926 and much in the same vein.) Blanche,
perhaps more at home in a sanitised, romantic, even heroic Jamaican imperial past than in the complex reality of the time, had undertaken to visit every site listed in Cundall’s book, and now recruited Ian to accompany her.

Ian also stayed with Blanche in Kingston, and spent a weekend with her and her friend Anne Carr in the Cayman Islands. This would give him material for another
Sunday Times
article. Because they had not booked in advance, on the first night the three had to share a room. According to Blanche, Ian took a sleeping pill and snored loudly, driving her to bunk down in the mosquito-ridden hallway. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to collect shells, but in this the Caymans were a huge disappointment. ‘It was the most ghastly sea bottom I had ever explored,’ Fleming wrote. He was clear as to who was to blame: ‘the American way of life, which has Grand Cayman in its grip, had penetrated the surrounding sea. Everywhere there was refuse.’

To Ann, Ian described the trip as ‘very chaste and proper … Blanche jabbers and the other is v dull and cold’, but then slightly ruined it by adding, ‘Wished you didn’t mind aeroplanes. We miss so many adventures.’

Ostensibly Ian was staying on in Jamaica to finish his latest book. After
From Russia, with Love,
he had been unsure whether he had another Bond book in him. Part of his lack of momentum had been the disappointments over selling film rights for his existing Bond books. Television rights to
Casino Royale
had been sold to CBS, who in October 1954 had broadcast an hour-long show with an American ‘Jimmy Bond’, helped by a British Felix Leiter, but the show is deservedly forgotten. At one point Peter Lorre, the actor playing Le Chiffre, is seen to get up after his ‘death’ and walk off to his dressing room.
Casino Royale
film rights had been sold for $6,000 in March the following year, but nothing had happened thereafter. With £3,000 of the money Fleming bought himself a Ford Thunderbird, described by Ann as ‘above our price range and below our age range’ (she now
started called Ian ‘Thunderbird’ in letters to her friends). There had also been interest in the other stories, but nothing had come of it. It was frustrating, as Fleming clearly saw Bond as a film property – much later, he would write, ‘You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties … but if you sell film rights, you do very well.’

In the summer of 1956, however, Fleming had been approached by Henry Morgenthau III, a rich film producer who had been in contact with the Jamaican government about developing a movie industry on the island, starting with a series of films for American television. Ian offered to write a treatment for a half-hour television series, based on Bond but with the central character called Commander Jamaica, later changed to Commander James Gunn.

The combination of the freedom from Bond, and the Jamaica setting – a ‘home fixture’ – reinvigorated Fleming. A storyline emerged that saw Commander Gunn battle with a sinister international spy of German-Chinese extraction. Fleming suggested locations around Goldeneye, and even put forward some local people for roles in the filming: Cousins, his shark-fishing accomplice, ‘would be an excellent labour boss and general fixer’; Barrington Roper, ‘the Caribbean overarm swimming champion’, had ‘a slightly Chinese cast of countenance and a good deadpan face’. He even suggested one of his favourite Jamaican calypsos as a theme tune.

The TV show came to nothing, but Fleming found that he suddenly had a fresh and inventive new Bond story ready to go.
Dr No
would, of course, be the story that launched the Bond film franchise and, along with
From Russia, with Love, Live and Let Die
and
Thunderball,
is one of Fleming’s finest novels. It is also one of the most fantastical, gothic and melodramatic; and at times frankly, even knowingly, over the top. Responding to later criticism, Fleming would declare:
Dr No
was very cardboardy and need not have been … The trouble is that it is much more fun to think up fantastical situations and mix Bond up in them.’

It is this sense of Fleming’s enjoyment of the story, and in particular its Jamaican setting, that is the real strength of
Dr No.
It also provides a fascinating take on Fleming’s attitude to the changes taking place in Jamaica, and by implication in the wider empire post-Suez.

The novel boasts one of Fleming’s most memorable villains. Dr No, half German, half Chinese, is hugely tall, has steel pincers for hands and looks like ‘a giant venomous worm wrapped in grey tin-foil’. His particular interest is the human body’s ability to withstand pain. He has effectively annexed a portion of offshore Jamaica, ostensibly for the extraction of guano (in which Bryce’s family had made their fortune), but actually for the establishment of a secret radar station that can send American missiles from the nearby test base on the British Turks Island off-target. This allows him to collect the prototype rockets and sell them to the Russians or, failing that, the Chinese. He has a captive plantation-style workforce made up of devilish half-breeds – ‘Chigroes’, half Chinese, half negro.

Owing more than a little to Fleming’s boyhood reading of Dr Fu Manchu, Dr No blends the threat of the Yellow Peril’ and of the Mau Mau. But his base of Crab Key, thirty miles off the north coast of Jamaica, has already been partly ‘annexed’ by the Americans, in the shape of the Audubon Society, who want to protect a colony of Roseate Spoonbill birds. This leads to pressure from the United States on the British authorities to investigate Dr No.

After the disappearance of the local Secret Service agent, Bond, having recovered from his poisoning after all, is sent to Jamaica in large part as a rest cure, ‘something easy to start with … a bit of a breather’. As in
Live and Let Die
, ‘Dr Jamaica’ is highly effective in this regard. At the fictional ‘Blue Hills’ hotel, Bond ‘was welcomed with deference because his reservation had been made by King’s House’. Here he ‘took off his London clothes … washed his hair to remove the last dirt of big-city life. Then he pulled on a pair of Sea Island cotton shorts and, with sensual pleasure at the warm soft air
on his nakedness, unpacked his things and rang for the waiter.’

Elsewhere, the Jamaica of
Dr No
is a similarly ‘traditional’ one – the Jamaica drawn in
Live and Let Die
, and written about by Fleming back in 1947 in his
Horizon
article. It is a backward, unchanged place of sensuality, deference, colourful history, physical beauty and warm melancholy. Flying in over the island, Bond admires the ‘azure and milk of the inshore shoals’, and the ‘scattered dice of small-holdings’ in the high mountains of the interior, where ‘the setting sun flashed gold on the bright worms of tumbling rivers and streams. “Xaymaca” the Arawak Indians had called it – “The Land of Hills and Rivers.” Bond’s heart lifted with the beauty of one of the most fertile islands in the world.’ Driving over the mountains, Bond likewise enjoys scenes unchanged ‘for two hundred years or more’, and even imagines that he ‘smelled the dung of the mule train in which he would have been riding over from Port Royal to visit the garrison at Morgan’s Harbour in 1750’. Elsewhere, he wallows in the ‘melancholy of the tropical dusk’.

The distinctly old-fashioned figure of Quarrel makes another appearance, of course, with his unquestioning loyalty, childishness and superstition. Quarrel navigates his small canoe to Crab Key by ‘instinct’, and is backward enough, like most of the other blacks, to believe in the story about a dragon defending the island.

Bond’s love interest, Honeychile Rider, encountered gathering shells on Crab Key, is depicted as similarly ‘innocent’. Like Solitaire from
Live and Let Die
, she is a Creole beauty raised in the melancholy ruins of a Great House. As she explains to Bond, ‘The Riders were one of the old Jamaica families. The first one had been given the Beau Desert lands by Cromwell for having been one of the people who signed King Charles’s death warrant. He built the Great House and my family lived in it on and off ever since. But then sugar collapsed and I suppose the place was badly run, and by the time my father inherited it there was nothing but debts – mortgages and things like
that.’ The house was sold off, but Honeychile continued to live in the cellar, eating Jamaican food and looked after by a devoted black nanny. Bond finds himself ‘lost in the picture of the little flaxen-haired girl pattering about the ruins’. Honeychile believes in ‘duppies’ and is ‘naturally’ sensuous. The book ends with a clinch and a Creole cliché: ‘She had no inhibitions. They were two loving animals. It was natural. She had no shame.’

In
Dr No,
Bond is specifically defending Jamaica. So he is fulfilling his role as defined earlier by Felix Leiter: ‘protecting the security of the British Empire’. There is a possibility that if Dr No is not stopped, one of the mis-guided missiles could hit Kingston. But there are other threats to the colony, both obvious and subtle, as the fascinating opening pages establish.

The novel starts with the sun setting ‘punctually’ over Richmond Road, uptown Kingston, Jamaica, welcomed by the ‘zing and tinkle’ of crickets and tree frogs in the ‘fine gardens’. The wide street contains the large homes, withdrawn from the road, of the colony’s white elite – top civil servants, bank managers and company directors. Everything is quiet, ‘an empty stage’. Inside the houses, the man, back from work punctually at five, is having a shower or discussing the day with his wife. At half past six, the ‘street would come to life again with the cocktail traffic’.

It is Jamaica’s Park Avenue, Fleming tells us, ‘its Kensington Palace Gardens, its Avenue D’Iéna’, and at its top ‘lie the grounds of King’s House, where the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Jamaica lives with his family. In Jamaica, no road could have a finer ending.’

Fleming’s eye, having gazed seemingly adoringly in the direction of King’s House, the centre of British power, now focuses in on the top intersection, where a ‘substantial two-storey house’ with pillared entrance stands among tennis courts and sprinkler-fed lawns. This is the ‘social Mecca of Kingston’, Queen’s Club, and an accurate
description of a real place, the Liguanea Club. Here are gathered, as ‘most evenings’, a bridge four representing colonial power – a brigadier in charge of the British armed forces in the Caribbean, ‘Kingston’s leading criminal lawyer’, a senior professor from the university and our old friend from
Live and Let Die,
the dashingly naval-looking John Strangways, ‘the local representative of the British Secret Service’. All are obviously British, with their ‘blast you’s and ‘damned nuisance’s, and white – in contrast, we are informed, the steward is ‘coloured’.

Suddenly we come to the point: all this is under mortal threat. ‘Such stubborn retreats’ as Queen’s Club, Fleming writes, ‘will not long survive in modern Jamaica. One day it will have its windows smashed and perhaps be burned to the ground.’

It is a shocking and fascinating aside, calling to mind not just Evelyn Waugh’s letter from two years previously – ‘Perhaps they will massacre the whites one day… ‘ – but also the deep fear that haunted the white community from the first days of slavery. It explodes a bomb under the scene just set. Certainly it makes us look back on the preceding four paragraphs of the book. There we can now see the tiny warning signs: the predictable, deadening routine; the gardens ‘too trim’ and slightly fake, with ‘the finest trees and flowers from the Botanical Gardens’. Although Richmond Road may be withdrawn from the ‘hot and vulgar sprawl of Kingston’, it is there ‘where its residents earn their money’. The street may be the ‘best’ and have the ‘best’ people, but the quotation marks are Fleming’s. In all, it is complacent, flabby, shallow, drifting. The reference to the glory of King’s House will, of course, prove ironic.

And what are the attractions of Queen’s Club to its members? It is ‘well run, well staffed and [has] the finest cuisine and cellar in the Caribbean’ – this is civilisation as expressed by good staff, food and wine, with perhaps even a hint that such pleasures have blunted the effectiveness of the white elite. Certainly its days are numbered: it is, Fleming tells us, ‘a useful place to find in a sub-tropical island’, but only ‘for the time being’.

Then comes the actual violence: the murder of Strangways by the ‘three blind beggars’. In part, it is Strangways’ ‘iron routine’, at once an expression of his commendable meticulousness and his lack of excitement and energy, that proves his downfall, as it allows ‘the enemy’ to plan his death. ‘Unfortunately, strict patterns of behavior can be deadly if they are read by an enemy,’ Fleming notes. But there is also a hint that the divide between white and black, rich and poor is a contributing factor. The beggars ‘would not have been incongruous in Kingston, where there are many diseased people on the streets, but, in this quiet rich empty street, they made an unpleasant impression’.