Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (41 page)

‘The weather and the island were at their best,’ Bryce remembered of his last stay at Goldeneye. ‘Ian, although showing signs of deep fatigue to me, seemed to be gaining in strength and tranquility.’ ‘For old times’ sake’, they went rafting on the Rio Grande and, on another occasion, drove up to Bellevue, where Fleming’s Jamaican adventure had begun. It had been sold by Bryce’s ex-wife to the Roman Catholic Church, which had turned it into a seminary. (The ghost remained, however, and when an exorcism attempt failed, the Church sold up.)

Bryce remembered Fleming taking great trouble over the rock in the middle of the bay off the beach at Goldeneye, building a strange pot-like affair on it for a palm. He christened it ‘Fleming’s last erection’. In Ann’s absence, Blanche played the hostess, taking the other men on trips when Ian wanted to work. ‘Her acquaintance gave Ian much delight and solace in his later years and I was glad to see it,’ Bryce wrote, but he also noted that with Ian’s new book, ‘He was in trouble with his plot. The fecund mind was not so fertile with ideas.’

Housekeeper Violet Cummings, when interviewed shortly after Fleming’s death, remembered noticing that the rigid writing regime was now a thing of the past. ‘The last time the Commander came,’ she said, ‘he took longer in bed in the morning. He used to have a dip at seven, then shower, then breakfast. Now he stay in bed to eight. But I was not too worried. I just felt as if he was resting his brains a little … We all knew about his heart condition but he never mentioned it and of course we didn’t either.’

For what would turn out to be his last novel,
The Man with the Golden Gun,
Fleming returned Bond ‘home’ to Jamaica, now, of course, independent. The story starts with Bond back in London, having been brainwashed by the KGB after his adventure in Japan, and attempting to kill M. The attack with cyanide is foiled and M reacts by deciding, once Bond is cured, to send him to the West Indies to assassinate Scaramanga, the hitman of the book’s title and ‘possibly the fastest gun in the world’. Scaramanga frequently works for the Cuban and Soviet secret services, and has recently been responsible for the deaths of a number of British agents in the Caribbean. The Chief of Staff protests: ‘But that’s suicide, sir! Even 007 could never take him.’ M’s view is that ‘in exchange for the happenings of that morning, in expiation of them, Bond must prove himself at his old skills. If he failed, well, it would be a death for which he would be honoured.’ ‘It was better,’ M said, ‘that Bond fall on the battlefield.’

As ever, Bond is soothed and reinvigorated by Jamaica, swimming in the mornings and ‘letting the scented air, a compound of sea and trees, breathe over his body, naked save for the underpants’ while listening to ‘cicadas singing from the lignum vitae tree’. He is trying again, somewhat unsuccessfully, to cut down on his smoking and drinking – he ‘felt guilty that this was his third double’. Soon his eyes have lost their previous ‘dull and lacklustre’ look. Jamaica also evokes fond memories of ‘his many assignments and many adventures on the island’: ‘Beau Desert and Honeychile Rider …
James Bond smiled to himself as the dusty pictures flicked across his brain.’ For him, Jamaica was ‘the oldest and most romantic of former British possessions’.

Bond’s search for Scaramanga leads him to Jamaica’s south coast, ‘not as beautiful as the north’. At Savanna-la-Mar, there are fishermen’s canoes pulled up on the beach, and the small shop where he buys cigarettes smells of spices. He is later told that Savanna-la-Mar is ‘like sort of old Jamaica. Like it must have been in the old days. Everyone’s friends with each other. Help each other when they have trouble.’ (In one of his 1956
Sunday Times
articles, Fleming had described being met by people in the mountains ‘with those warm, wide smiles that “progress” is so rapidly wiping off the face of modern Jamaica’.)

His destination is a brothel at 3½ Love Lane, a building in the kind of romantic decline that Fleming loved about Jamaica: it has seen better days, ‘perhaps as the private house of a merchant’, but ‘the ginger-bead tracery beneath the eaves was broken in places and there was hardly a scrap of paint left on the jalousies … the patch of “yard” bordering the street was inhabited by a clutch of vulturine-necked chickens that pecked at nothing and three skeletal Jamaican black-and-tan mongrels’. Beauty is provided by a lignum vitae tree in full blue blossom, and a pretty girl on a rocking chair in the tree’s ‘delicious black shade’. She is ‘an octoroon, pretty as, in Bond’s imagination, the word octoroon suggested’.

As planned, Bond meets Scaramanga at the brothel, and succeeds in being taken on as his temporary personal assistant (a repeat of the shaky plot device in
Goldfinger).
He then learns that Scaramanga is involved in a tourism development at Negril (‘the Thunderbird Hotel’), with investors from the American Mafia and the KGB. The group is involved in a number of schemes, which amount to a rather thrown-together medley of plots.

As Mary Goodnight, Bond’s former secretary now posted to jamaica, explains, the West Indian Sugar Company at Frome near Savannala-Mar
has been having problems with Rastafarians, ‘cane burning and other small sabotage – mostly with thermite bombs brought in from Cuba’. This is being organised by Castro in an attempt to raise the price of his country’s sugar crop. It turns out that Scaramanga is supplying the Rastafarians with ganja in exchange for ‘plenty fires and trouble on the cane lands’. The ganja comes from Scaramanga’s growers in ‘Maroon Country’. The KGB man also wants to smuggle huge quantities to the United States to corrupt American youth. The ‘group’ makes money from the drugs and from speculating in sugar futures. Meanwhile, the Russian agent is organising sabotage of the island’s bauxite industry.

A lot of this information is garnered thanks to Felix Leiter and a fellow CIA operative, who is pretending to be an electrical engineer while bugging the meeting room of the hotel. The CIA, it seems, is already on to Scaramanga and the group of villains, and is operating in Jamaica without comment, unlike in
Live and Let Die
and
Dr No,
when Jamaica was definitely Bond’s territory.

Scaramanga also suggests that they seek to open casinos in Jamaica, explaining that a few years earlier the mobsters kicked out of Havana had tried the same thing, but ‘overplayed the slush fund approach’. A combination of the Church, the opposition party and ‘the old women’ put a stop to it. Now, he says, ‘things have changed. Different party in power, bit of a tourist slump last year, and a certain Minister has been in touch with me. Says the climate’s changed. Independence has come along and they’ve got out from behind the skirts of Aunty England. Want to show that Jamaica’s with it. Got oomph and all that.’

For the benefit of the KGB agent, Scaramanga spells out the political advantages of Jamaica allowing gambling: ‘It’ll almost certainly lead to trouble. The locals’ll want to play – they’re terrific gamblers here. There’ll be incidents. Coloured people’ll be turned away from the doors for one reason or another. Then the Opposition party’ll get hold of that and raise hell about colour bars and so on … It can all
add up to a fine stink. The atmosphere’s too damn peaceful round here. This’ll be a cheap way of raising plenty of hell. That’s what your people want, isn’t it? Give the islands the hot foot one after another?’

So there is a very new threat to independent Jamaica from a desire for self-promotion and ‘modernity’ (the book ends with Bond noting the ‘traffic tearing up and down the Kingston roads’ and then news of a ‘multiple crash at Halfway Tree’), and from the fallout from the Cuban revolution, in terms of both American gangsters looking for a new playground, and ‘Redland’ looking to duplicate the establishment of a communist regime in the United States’ back yard. Still, there is also a curious timelessness about the threat. As in all the Fleming novels, the West Indies is a lawless, pirate-infested space. Scaramanga declares, ‘I guess you could call the Caribbean a pretty small pool. But there’s good pickin’s to be had from it.’ Bond also speculates about the ‘hot money drifting around the Caribbean’ and at one point even invokes the ‘redcoats’ of the eighteenth century. The references to the Maroons and rebellious blacks causing cane fires could have come from a melodrama by Herbert de Lisser or Hugh Edwards.

The Man with the Golden Gun
would not be published until after Fleming’s death. As a result, reviewers were on the whole polite, but most found it confusing, muddled and, with the exception of the detail about Jamaica, a great disappointment. It was clearly an unfinished work. His publishers at Cape were worried enough to ask Kingsley Amis to try to tidy it up, although his suggestions were not used. It was, in all, a sad end to Fleming’s career.

Halfway through writing, Ian suddenly found he really wanted Ann in Jamaica with him. A new telephone had been installed at Goldeneye and he used it to badger her to come out. She was his ‘solace’, he said. Ann herself was not in the best of health, but on 30 January, on a ‘perfect spring day’, she ‘reluctantly’ boarded an aircraft at London airport and flew to Kingston.

Almost immediately, she regretted it. She arrived in a ‘tropical thunderstorm’, and the weather remained oppressively damp and humid. ‘There are great grey bags of cloud overhead,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh four days later, ‘no oxygen, dreadful humidity inducing even more dreadful lethargy … These conditions make Thunderbird very ill.’ To Clarissa Eden she wrote a week later: ‘I
loathe
the tropics, can only think of this glorious early English spring and the burgeoning bulbs at Sevenhampton.’ But she knew Ian needed her, so she was stuck in what she called ‘this gilded prison’ until mid March.

Ann reported that Fleming was now able to write for only an hour a day. ‘It is painful to see Ian struggle to give birth to Bond,’ she wrote
to her brother. Adding to the exhaustion was something that she had never quite realised: ‘the hysterical success of Bond’. In London, fan mail and press requests and other business had gone to Ian’s office, but now they were deluged. A local woman was taken on as a secretary to help with the mail, but there was a stream of journalists and film crews arriving to do interviews and take pictures. The
Gleaner
gave a special lunch for Ian. ‘It never stops,’ Ann wrote. In letters home, she started calling him ‘Beatle Bond’.

Ann was also appalled by the inauguration at nearby Ocho Rios of a new ‘Bunny Club’ by an ‘obscene American publication called Playboy’. Even closer to home, next to the garden gate of Goldeneye, a new petrol station had established an ‘infernal machine called a “sound system”. It relays calypso from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. Special favourite being a syncopated version of “Three Blind Mice”.’ (This had become a hit for Island Records after its use at the beginning of the
Dr No
film.)

Funnily enough, Ian does not seem to have minded the new sound system. In
The Man with the Golden Gun,
Bond enjoys ‘the softness of the night, the fact that the “Sound System” was now playing a good recording of one of his favourites, “After You’ve Gone’”.

He did, however, share Ann’s distaste for the direction Jamaican tourism was taking. In
The Man with the Golden Gun,
Bond complains that Kingston airport has sacrificed volume for comfort and is selling ‘piles of over-decorated native ware’. The ‘big tax concessions that Jamaica gave’ have attracted the likes of Scaramanga to the tourism business. At his hotel, unfinished areas are ‘mock-ups’, covered up with curtains and other essential props, and the dining room is hastily turned into ‘a tropical jungle’ with potted plants. It is all tacky, hollow and fake. Surveying the swamp at the edge of the property, Bond speculates, ‘If the hotel got off the ground … there would be native boatmen, suitably attired as Arawak Indians, a landing from which the guests could view the “tropical jungle” for an extra ten dollars on the bill.’

As elsewhere, particularly
Thunderball
and
Thrilling Cities,
Fleming also shows his dislike for the homogenised ‘Americanisation’ that came with the tourist business, with its air conditioning and ‘grim, impersonal’ rooms and ‘conventional cruise ship’ dinner that would be the same all over the world.

At Goldeneye, there was one set of guests they were amused to meet, however. The ornithologist James Bond and his wife turned up unannounced. Fleming gave them lunch and pronounced them ‘a charming couple who are amused by the whole joke’. For Ann, they were the exception. ‘It’s been an epic year for bores, mostly retired naval officers with letters of introduction,’ she wrote.

Goldeneye had provided Ann and Ian with the very best moments of their time together: the early, stolen holidays when they were so in love they forgot discretion; their shared love of the reef and the wildlife; their wedding in Port Maria. But now it provided what must have been one of the worst, partly because of the latest ‘epic bores’.

As Ann explained in a long, distraught letter to Peter Quennell, they had already been arguing when a couple of guests arrived for lunch. ‘Ian was as bored as me, and retreated to his siesta at 2.25.’ But no one could find the guests’ driver, so Ann was forced to make small talk for another hour and a half. Then she discovered that Ian had accepted an invitation to their hotel, Frenchman’s Cove, the following evening for a ‘Jamaican Beach Barbecue’ and a stay over. That night, ‘post-whisky’, there was another huge row, culminating in Ian shouting at Ann: ‘Fuck off! Go home at once. You spoil everything. Do you expect me to look at your face every evening? You’re a monumental bore.’ ‘The scene produced hypertension, tears, and screaming claustrophobia – how does one leave Goldeneye at midnight? No friends to go to, not enough money,’ Ann wrote to Quennell. Distraught, she packed, got out her winter coat, found her passport and tickets and prepared to leave. Then loud noises of partying and people letting off guns started coming from Oracabessa.
So instead of departing, she drank some more, took some pills and passed out.