Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (33 page)

Next came Paul Johnson in the
New Statesman,
who described Fleming as ‘the owner of Goldeneye, a house made famous by Sir Anthony Eden’s Retreat from Suez’. In a review headlined: ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism’, he declared that
Dr No
was the ‘nastiest book I have ever read’, but acknowledged that because of the novels’ popularity, ‘here was a social phenomenon of some importance’. Writing about the ‘dual Bond-Fleming personality’, it all got quite personal. ‘There are three basic ingredients in
Dr No,’
he went on, ‘all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult.’ Worse still, it was ‘very second-rate snobbery … not even the snobbery of a proper snob – it’s the snobbery of an expense-account man’.

Of course, Fleming enjoyed the success of
From Russia, With Love,
but he had returned from Jamaica and his time alone with Blanche to find Ann understandably suspicious and resentful. Blanche had got into the habit of visiting England every summer with her mother, and Ann took the opportunity to invite her for lunch at Victoria Square, along with a coterie of friends, including Paddy Leigh-Fermor and Peter Quennell. Ann, who could be prone to ‘flick-knife remarks’, did her best to make Blanche feel uncomfortable, introducing her to all and sundry as ‘Ian’s mistress’. In the awkward silence that followed,
Blanche responded quietly: ‘Ann, that’s an unfair attack.’ Blanche disliked Ann’s intellectual friends as much as Ian did. ‘They were talking so much,’ she remembered. ‘At that party I felt it was a whole lot of children frightened of the dark.’

Through the rest of the year, Ann and Ian’s relationship continued to deteriorate, which didn’t go unnoticed by her family. Her brother Hugo, who had never liked Ian, wrote to his other sister Mary Rose: ‘Ian is a subtle bitch and in fact married to no one but himself … Esmond was a come down from [O’Neill] – but Ian was really falling through the floor. And I believe [Ann] has really suffered with him – as one must being married to a person who really exists only for themselves – and who is neurotic and verbally violent into the bargain.’

In fact, Ian was immensely depressed about his failing marriage. In December, he and Ann had a ‘clear-the-air’ lunch at Scott’s. This achieved nothing except the decision that they would spend their winters apart. On 16 December, Ian scribbled in his notebook: One of the great sadnesses is the failure to make someone happy.’

So Ian was on his own at Goldeneye again in January 1958 to write the new book,
Goldfinger.
He had ‘arrived in a tempest’ and the weather had remained poor: ‘torrential winds and rain’, as he reported to Ann in the first of a series of anguished letters. ‘Thank God for the book, at which I hammer away in between bathing in the rain and sweating around the garden in a mackintosh … The sofas were covered with the stains of rat shit as it appears the servants have used the house as their own since I left. Paint peeling off the eaves, chips and cracks all over the floor and not one bottle of marmalade or preserves … ‘ Then, after completing the ‘sitrep’, Fleming ended the letter: ‘I can’t write about other things. My nerves are still jangling like church bells and I am completely demoralized by the past month. I think silence will do us both good and let things heal.’

There was no Noël Coward and entourage this time, as he was acting in his
Nude with Violin
in California, but Blanche was ever-
present. Soon a routine was established. She had now almost finished the rebuilding of Bolt and was spending most of her time there. ‘I used to come down to swim at twelve o’clock, when he had more or less finished writing, and that’s when we would go on the reef,’ she says.

‘He was strict with himself,’ she remembers. ‘Because he always had the shutters closed near his desk he didn’t know when I arrived but as soon as he found out I was there, then he came down.’ The two became closer than ever. Blanche found Ian ‘very unhappy, in a terrible state of depression. I was able to give him a certain amount of happiness. I felt terribly sorry for him.’

When Fleming’s friends the Pitmans arrived for a short stay, Blanche acted the hostess, taking the family off on long excursions along the coast or into the mountains while Ian worked. Later she would write to them in England, saying, ‘Someone should keep an eye on Ian.’ ‘She was really in love with Ian Fleming,’ says Blanche’s son Chris. ‘He was the love of her life. She saw her role as looking after him.’

While Ian was in Jamaica, Ann had checked in once more to the Enton Hall health farm in another effort to get herself off the pills. Soon the combination of productive work and the ministrations of Blanche and ‘Doctor Jamaica’ had mellowed Ian once more into a sympathetic husband. ‘I’m terribly worried about your health,’ he wrote in late January, ‘and I pray that Enton’s prison walls have mended your darling heart and somehow got you off this tragic switchback of pills which I implore you to stop… They are a way of life which is killing you … You’ve no idea how they change you – first the febrile, almost hysterical gaiety and then those terrible snores that seem to come from the tomb! … My darlingest darlingest love get well.’

At the end of his stay, with the writing of
Goldfinger
completed, Ian took the chance to go with Blanche on a trip to Pedro Cays, small islands sixty miles off the south coast. Blanche had signed up to help
with a mission there to collect insect, fish and bird samples for the Jamaica Institute. She remembers that the crew were inexperienced and the yacht almost entirely without charts. After a roundabout route they eventually found the Cays, where, to Ian’s horror, the scientists tipped the Indian poison curare into the sea in an effort to capture a specimen of a particular fish.

At the end of Fleming’s trip, refurbishment work at Bolt was still under way and so Blanche was invited to stay rent-free at Goldeneye in his absence. She paid her way by having the house painted, improving various comforts, and planting in the garden. Her old friend Errol Flynn also came to stay and worked on his autobiography. (Flynn was by now in a very bad way, ‘a floating, boozy bum’, according to David Niven. He would be dead the next year at the age of just fifty.) As a parting gift on her return to her home, Blanche presented Goldeneye with a small wooden coracle, which Ian christened Octopussy.

Goldfinger
is the longest and densest of the Bond novels. It went straight to the top of the best-seller charts and was well reviewed, the
Observer
commenting under the headline ‘Sophisticated Sapper’ that Fleming, ‘even with his forked tongue sticking right through his cheek … remains manically readable’. As in
Diamonds are Forever,
Bond in
Goldfinger
is on an economic mission. Britain is suffering from a currency crisis and high bank rate because the villain, Auric Goldfinger, is smuggling out gold, ‘the foundation of our international credit’. As during the recent Suez Crisis, the Americans are unwilling to help.

Goldfinger, ‘a misshapen short man with red hair and a bizarre face’, is the richest man in England, but not actually English, of course, and his international headquarters is in the badlands of the Caribbean, in Nassau. He is part of the international super-rich, a class Fleming of course knew from Jamaica’s smartest hotels and whom he increasingly disliked (in Miami, he speculates, his hotel bill
would have used up his year’s salary in just three weeks). Goldfinger’s allies are Germans and Koreans, ‘the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world’. Like Sir Hugo Drax, Goldfinger cheats at cards, and like Spang from
Diamonds are Forever,
he doesn’t drink or smoke — he’s not to be trusted on either count.

Bond gets the better of his enemy twice – in Miami and on the golf course – but then, in a possibly fatal plot flaw, Goldfinger makes the mistake of employing Bond to help in his plan, with the aid of American gangsters, to rob Fort Knox and hand the gold over to SMERSH in the form of a waiting Soviet cruiser. ‘It was modern piracy with all the old-time trimmings,’ Bond muses. ‘Goldfinger was sacking Fort Knox as Bloody Morgan had sacked Panama.’

So Bond once more comes to the aid of the Americans on American soil, and although they are grateful, he is left dissatisfied after Goldfinger escapes. ‘Who in America cared about the Bank of England’s gold?’ he asks himself. ‘Who cared that two English girls had been murdered in the course of this business? Who really minded that Goldfinger was still at liberty now that America’s bullion was safe again?’ Bond wonders in a passage that seethes with post-Suez resentment at the United States.

For Ian, the 1958 trip was perhaps the most cocooned of any he made to Jamaica. With Ann absent, there was no pressure to go to any parties, and there was no Coward dropping in with his friends. Nonetheless, outside the Goldeneye bubble, there were significant events taking place for Fleming’s Jamaica.

Sir Kenneth Blackburne, previously governor of the Leeward Islands, had been appointed as Foot’s replacement in Jamaica, but now the post had little to do with the day-to-day running of the country, which was firmly in the hands of elected Prime Minister Norman Manley. There had been some significant achievements: the national income of Jamaica had more than doubled from 1952 to 1958, and
exports increased by 250 per cent in value. In the same period, industrial output by value quadrupled, in all producing an annual growth rate of 8 per cent. Manley would retain power in the election of 1959, increasing his party’s share of the vote and its majority

But at the same time, the huge promise of the PNP’s victory in 1955 had not been met. Expectations had risen faster than tangible wealth, and the population had grown even more than the economy. Land reform had failed and industrial development had degenerated into going cap-in-hand to foreign investors with ever-increasing inducements. Manley was forced to admit that the rich had got richer, but the poor poorer.

Against this backdrop, on 3 January 1958, two days before Fleming’s flight touched down at Montego Bay, the West Indies Federation came into being. Its capital was in Trinidad and its first prime minister was Barbadian Grantley Adams. As part of the post-Suez rush to decolonise and disengage with those parts of the Empire
that were unprofitable, it was planned in Britain that the Federation should achieve independence as a dominion within four or five years. The American consul in Trinidad made an accurate assessment: he reported to Washington that British support for the Federation had two aims: ‘(1) To impress the United Nations with its eagerness to grant self-government and independence to its colonial dependencies; and more important, (2) to rid itself of the continuing financial drain of supporting an area which is dependent upon grants and development aid.’

The Americans were watching closely. As colonial ties with Britain are loosened,’ one United States newspaper opined, ‘the possibilities for lucrative trade will increase with the development of the islands … American influence, too could help the new-born federation towards the stable democratic government now lacking among some of its Caribbean neighbors.’

As early as the 1947 Montego Bay conference, federation had seemed inevitable. But in the intervening years, enthusiasm for the project had ebbed away as scepticism grew in all quarters about the viability of the plan. It was a blow when Belize (then British Honduras) and Guyana (British Guiana) refused to join: it was hoped that these largely empty territories would have provided scope for immigration from the disastrously overpopulated islands. At the same time, distrust had worsened between the British and the local Caribbean governments. By the time it was launched, both sides had shown their reluctance to confer significant authority on the federal government. Instead, national governments and the British Governor-General would pull the strings.

Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd had virtually promised the position of Governor-General of the new Federation to Sir Hugh Foot, who remained hugely popular in Jamaica. But instead it was decided by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that the new man was to be Patrick Buchan-Hepburn, 1st Baron Hailes, a former personal secretary to
Winston Churchill and chief whip for the Conservative Party, recently appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. No one was consulted in the West Indies, where Hailes was almost unknown. The American embassy in London reported the prevailing opinion across the political spectrum that ‘his lack of distinction … was not particularly complimentary to the new Federation’. Instead, ‘it gave the appearance of a political deal’, a sinecure. Morris Cargill described Hailes as ‘a bird-brain. His attention span was about ten seconds.’

At Hailes’s inauguration, Manley complained about Britain’s ‘parsimonious attitude towards this new Federation’. Frequent requests for loans had been turned down, causing an editorial in the
Jamaica Times
to lament: ‘In the Commonwealth and Empire, in the way of loyalty and belief in a straight British future, few other territories can today equal the West Indies in sincerity. Yet we are the people that Britain, it appears, has chosen to leave to swim if we can, or sink if we can’t.’