Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (6 page)

Back in London, Fleming had secured a job at the
Sunday Times
as foreign news manager. The newspaper’s proprietor, Lord Kemsley, was a bridge-playing friend of Ian’s and had generously agreed to his new employee’s stipulation that he have two months’ paid leave every year to spend in Jamaica.

Goldeneye was completed in December 1946, a gently sloping roof now rising above Fleming’s design of a ‘squat, elongated box’ with its large main room with huge open windows looking out over the sea. The following month Fleming was back in Jamaica to live in his new house for the first time. With him to stay for a few weeks were Ivar Bryce and another louche ex-Etonian friend, John Fox-Strangways. With the exception of a large Barringtonia tree that pre-dated the construction and still stands just outside the west-facing door, the
new house was not yet softened by surrounding vegetation. Bryce found it ‘a cubist arrangement of concrete surfaces … a masterpiece of striking ugliness’.

The visit was something of a bachelor party. The three friends swam naked in the sea before breakfast every day and started drinking at 11 a.m. In letters to his lover Ann, Ian assured her that there was no female company, but one visitor remembered a ‘beautiful married blonde from Bermuda’ being part of the group at Goldeneye. By the rail at the end of the sunken garden there were now outdoor chairs and lilos, as well as a table pierced by a big sunshade. When the mood took them, the three men moved earth around to create a garden, and two paths were cut through the bush from the house to each frontier limit along the cliffs. Inside, they hung shelves and a set of French horse portraits. Ivar gave Ian a dog called Fox, the first of many mongrels that lazed around in the sun at Goldeneye. Another was Himmler, which acted as a guard for the property.

There was much exploring, from the mountains that rose behind the property to Negril at the farthest west of the island. In Falmouth, on the north coast west of Oracabessa, they admired the surviving Georgian buildings from the high point of empire and discovered a shop called Antonio’s. Antonio was a ‘Syrian’ – Jamaican for anyone from the Levant. He was a merchant and shopkeeper who, Bryce later wrote, stocked ‘a million fragments of damaged cotton goods from Manchester, printed in strange designs and bright and jarring tints for the West African markets. These prints are unobtainable in Manchester, but when stitched together into shirts, give great pleasure to the connoisseur of early Jamaican touristiana.’ Bryce purchased one in mauve and puce, depicting Winston Churchill holding up his fingers in the V sign. ‘Ian had many
trouvailles
from Antonio,’ he reported, ‘which all lent colour and character to the Goldeneye scene.’

On one occasion, travelling along the north coast road on his own, Fleming noticed a substantial building on the crest of the hills near
Duncans, a village perched above the road just east of Falmouth. He assumed it was a Great House and was intrigued. Turning up the hill, he drove up a narrow winding drive until he reached the gates. He rang the bell pull, which was answered by a picturesque old butler with crinkly silver hair and a majestic smile. ‘The Colonel will be delighted to receive you, sir,’ he intoned. Fleming was shown into a large, dimly lit room containing an old couple who, from appearances, seldom left the house. The butler soon reappeared bearing a silver salver with three full glasses. ‘Vespers are served,’ he announced. The drink turned out to be a curious mix of frozen rum, fruit and herbs, which his hosts were accustomed to imbibe most ceremoniously at six o’clock. ‘Ian was delighted by the scene,’ remembered Bryce, ‘and left the great house in great good humour … he never returned, but this gracious visit acquired a romantic aura of unreality which pleased him greatly.’ Back at Goldeneye, with Bryce’s help, he did his best to recreate the cocktail.

Fleming’s favourite thing of all, though, was the reef, where he would spend hours floating, observing or hunting, enjoying the coolness of the water, his body’s natural buoyancy and the exciting other-worldliness of it all. He had been introduced to underwater swimming by his wartime boss, Admiral Godfrey, and Goldeneye soon acquired a rubber dinghy, flippers, snorkels and masks, as well as spear guns and steel tridents. The target was lobsters, or anything else that could be eaten. The hazards included sharp coral, barracudas and sharks.

For Fleming, being out in the bay was the perfect combination of action and sensuality that would become James Bond. The reef would also provide a milieu for Bond’s most vivid and exciting challenges, and fuel for Fleming’s best writing. Kingsley Amis, looking back on the Bond books, would comment: ‘All writers possessed of any energy annex some corner of the world to themselves, and the pelagic jungle roamed by ray and barracuda is Mr Fleming’s.’

Fleming’s companions were enthusiastic collaborators. ‘Every exploration and every dive results in some fresh incident worth the telling,’ remembered Bryce. ‘And even when you don’t come back with any booty for the kitchen, you have a fascinating story to recount. There are as many stories of the reef as there are fish in the sea. At Goldeneye, the doings on the reef filled the whole day with interest and pleasure.’ Soon the shelves in the house were cluttered with collected shells.

Fleming was enchanted. On 26 January he wrote to Ann that she would love it too. ‘There are so many things which would make you giggle here … The weather is beautiful and you would feel a different person and you would get small freckles under your eyes which would annoy you but which I would like. And you wouldn’t be able to dance about like a dragon-fly because there is no point in it here.’ The butterflies were wonderful, he wrote, ‘and when you bathe in the dark there are fireflies which drift about and disappear. We never wear any clothes when we bathe and it is just a question of walking out of bed and down the steps into the warm sea.’

In his accounts of the early days of Goldeneye, Fleming reported ‘small blackamore troubles which arise the whole time’, and later wrote that he spent much effort in the early years ‘coping with staff’. ‘They require exact instructions, constant reminders, exhortation and a sense of humour, which the majority appreciate,’ he noted later that year. Nonetheless, in
The Man with the Golden Gun
we are told that ‘Jamaican servants, for all their charm and willingness’, are not of very high ‘calibre’.

On this visit, however, Fleming made one tremendously successful appointment in the form of Violet Cummings. Introduced by Reggie Aquart, she was a local thirty-one-year-old woman, who had never travelled far from her home near Oracabessa. She would work for Fleming as Goldeneye’s housekeeper for the rest of his life. Frequent visitor Ivar Bryce called her ‘One of those superlative human beings who distribute comfort and well-being continuously among ordinary and lesser mortals. The whole establishment runs like clockwork with Violet as the mainspring.’ Her great-niece, Olivia Grange-Walker (a Jamaican Member of Parliament and until recently a government minister) remembers her as ‘calm, confident and self-assured … a strict no-nonsense person’. She cleaned, washed, shopped and cooked, cared for Fleming’s and his guests’ clothes, performed errands, and kept the spear-fishing equipment in trim. She could also, Bryce wrote, ‘conjure up any number from one to five of slim and jungly assistants within the hour, if needed’.

To visitors, Violet became an intrinsic part of Goldeneye, though she never read a Bond book. She and Fleming clearly had a very good relationship. After his death, Violet spoke about him in an interview with the
Gleaner:
‘The Commander was the best man I ever met, better than all the men in Jamaica, and in the rest of the world, too.’ She adored him. According to Blanche Blackwell, Ian for his part was ‘devoted’ to Violet and fiercely protective, worried all the time that she would be poached by someone else. To Violet’s delight, he was
also a fan of her Jamaican cooking, which most other English visitors considered ‘a culinary disaster’. Saltfish and ackee was her speciality, but Ian also enjoyed her shrimp, oxtail, black crab soup and liver. ‘He also like real Jamaican goat fish and not many English people like that,’ Violet told John Pearson in 1965. Very special guests were given conch gumbo and fried octopus tentacles with tartare sauce.

In his relations with Violet, Fleming made a point of never arguing or raising his voice. (In his travelogue,
Thrilling Cities,
Fleming would complain that: ‘Too many of the English and American wives had no idea how to treat good servants. They would clap their hands and shout “Boy!” to cover their lack of confidence. This sort of behaviour was out of fashion and brought the Westerner into disrepute.’) She, in turn, gave ‘the Commander’, as Fleming is still known to everybody around Goldeneye, a good reputation locally and helped with further recruitment. By the end of his first stay, he had lined up Daisy the cook, Holmes the gardener, Hall the houseboy, Stewart the fisherman, and an old lady, Ann, a cleaner. He paid them between three and four shillings a day.

Pearl Flynn, a veteran resident of Oracabessa who can remember the arrival of Fleming in the locality, admits that there was suspicion at first: ‘Some of them didn’t like him, you understand, white man come dis.’ But, she continues, ‘when they employ them and give them work, it made a difference’.

In
Dr No,
Bond’s assistant Quarrel was useful as ‘a passport into the lower strata of coloured life which would otherwise be closed to Bond’. It seems Violet did the same for Fleming. After this visit, he wrote of Goldeneye: ‘My neighbours, both coloured and white, are charming and varied.’

On 24 January, before the end of their bachelor sojourn, Fleming, Bryce and Fox-Strangways motored down to Montego Bay on the north-west coast of the island for the opening of the Sunset Lodge
Club. This is now seen as a seminal moment: the birth of what would become the ‘North Coast Jet Set’.

The hotel’s creator was Carmen Pringle, a charismatic and well-connected local figure. She was originally a de Lisser, a long-established white Jamaican family, but had married Kenneth Pringle, one of the
sons of the Sir John Pringle who had bought the Hibbert estate in St Mary and subsequently became the island’s biggest landowner, with 100,000 acres of sugar, banana, citrus and cattle lands throughout the parishes of St Ann, St Mary and Portland. The marriage had produced a son, John Pringle, born in 1925, but had ended in separation. According to Molly Huggins, Carmen ‘really preferred women to men’.

The new hotel boasted offering ‘the last word in comfort and luxury without for one moment losing the charm and simplicity which is Jamaica’. A key selling point was ‘the only private beach in Montego Bay’. Sports on offer included golf, tennis, croquet and badminton; ‘Alligator shooting and polo can be easily arranged.’