Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

by Matthew Parker

  Writing about his time in Jamaica right at the end of his life, Fleming’s proudest boast was that he had ‘learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people – two very different lessons I would never have absorbed if my life had continued in its pre-Jamaican metropolitan rut’. The Gleaner journalist, and friend of Fleming, Morris Cargill, writing in the same book, Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica, set out the manifesto of the work as aiming to ‘tell about the things he saw and experienced, and to tell them from the Jamaican point of view – a point of view he had been increasingly adopting as year by year Jamaica worked her magic on him’.

  Fleming, newly-landed at Kingston airport, signs a James Bond novel for a local fan.

  But what did the ‘Jamaican point of view’ and ‘living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people’ actually mean to Fleming? Cargill, who disliked Ann, criticised her for not wanting to see anyone in Jamaica except friends from England, ‘whereas Ian was a gregarious person and liked to meet all the local tradespeople and that sort of thing’. There’s no doubt that Ian did genuinely like Jamaicans, whom he saw as ‘full of goodwill and cheerfulness and humour’. According to Violet’s great-niece Olivia, Fleming was ‘integrated’ into Oracabessa life by Violet, who in his absence allowed people onto the property and the local revivalist church to use the beach for baptisms. But, like almost all white expatriates, most white Jamaicans and certainly all tourists, Fleming did not have any real, equal-status black Jamaican friends. All his relationships were, in the end, with ‘tradespeople and that sort ofthing’. Chris Blackwell explains that this was not about racism, but class: ‘It was like the South of France, which the British pretty much invented. They would all go there and wouldn’t mix with the French. It was the same thing in Jamaica. It’s not a racial thing, it’s just you don’t have anything to say to anybody.’

  At the time of writing Live and Let Die, Fleming’s ideal black person – and the one for whom Bond has the greatest ‘natural affection’, even ‘love’ – was Quarrel.

  When Bond arrives in Jamaica from Florida, he is brought up to date by the station head Strangways about Mr Big’s Isle of Surprise, and filled in on the arrangements made for him. Strangways has organised a house opposite the island called Beau Desert (situated, it seems, very close to Coward’s Blue Harbour); there’s also a car, and ‘a good man to act as your factotum. A Cayman Islander called Quarrel. Best swimmer and fisherman in the Caribbean. Terribly keen. Nice chap.’

  When Bond and Quarrel meet the next morning, ‘Bond liked him immediately.’ Usually being mixed race is a sure sign of devilry for Fleming, but for Quarrel he makes an exception, as ‘There was the blood of Cromwellian soldiers and buccaneers in him.’ Quarrel reappears in Fleming’s second Jamaica novel, Dr No, in which we are told that he is descended from a ‘pirate of Morgan’s time’. This is of course highly commendable in the Fleming universe, and also means that only his ‘spatulate nose and the pale palms of his hands were negroid’, he is ‘brown-skinned’ and, like Aubyn Cousins, has ‘warm grey eyes’. (Writing about the Cayman Islands in 1957 in the Sunday Times, Fleming notes approvingly that Caymanians ‘have somehow managed to keep their bloodstream free of negroid strains’.)

  Quarrel ticks all the Fleming boxes. As well as having pirate and old English blood, he comes from ‘the most famous race of seamen in the world’ and, it is soon made clear, is knowledgeable and sympathetic to nature, as well as an aficionado of the reef. He calls Bond ‘Captain’, just as Fleming loved being called ‘the Commander’. He also has, to Fleming and Bond, the endearing and disarming characteristics they associated with ‘coloured people’: ‘innocence’; ‘simple lusts and desires’; ‘reverence for superstition and instincts, and childish faults’.

  When Quarrel first meets Bond, ‘there was no desire to please, or humility in his voice. He was speaking as mate of the ship and his manner was straightforward and candid. That moment defined their relationship. It remained that of a Scots laird with his head stalker; authority was unspoken and there was no room for servility.’

  So here we have Fleming’s ideal colonial relationship. There is no challenge to Bond’s superiority – rank, as on a ship, is taken as read; Quarrel is unmistakably ‘staff’. But with mutual respect established and power relations solidified by history and custom, there is no need for coercion. Quarrel will ‘follow Bond unquestioningly’. He therefore almost embodies the frustrations of Norman Manley – ‘We are still a colonial people.’ He is also the closest Bond is going to get to a real black friend.

  Part of Quarrel’s job as ‘factotum’, or servant to Bond, is to get him in shape for his underwater adventures to come. For almost all the novel’s duration, Bond is in jeopardy, his whereabouts known to his enemies. This is, of course, a big part of the excitement of the book. But two-thirds of the way through, Fleming gives Bond and the reader a wonderful moment of stillness when he and Quarrel retreat to Negril on the far western coast of Jamaica.

  Here Fleming relishes taking his readers to the idyllic, touristic Jamaica, where ‘nothing has happened since Columbus’. It is, for Bond, ‘the most beautiful beach he had ever seen, five miles of white sand sloping easily into the breakers and, behind, the palm trees marching in graceful disarray to the horizon’. Jamaican fishermen with ‘grey canoes pulled up beside pink mounds of discarded conch shells’ have taken the place of the ‘Arawak Indians’, but otherwise ‘there is the impression that time has stood still’.

  Here Bond runs, swims and sails and is taught the ways of the reef by Quarrel (although his knowledge of the dangerous West Indian fish in the tanks in Florida, and the attack habits of sharks and barracuda, indicates that he already has substantial underwater expertise). In the evenings they enjoy the ‘quick melancholy’ of the tropical twilight, then hear the ‘zing and tinkle’ of the crickets and tree frogs. Bond’s Man Friday, Quarrel, gives him a massage, then cooks for him ‘succulent meals of fish and eggs and vegetables’.

  A village by the shore at Negril. Unspoilt in Fleming’s day, it is now home to a number of hotels, nightclubs and a golf course.

  By the end of the week, ‘Bond was sunburned and hard. He had cut his cigarettes down to ten a day and had not had a single drink … all the scales of big city life had fallen away from him.’ Quarrel deems him ready for the challenge ahead.

  Fleming’s love of his version of Jamaica is unmissable; and the contrast with the United States Bond had recently left could not be clearer. Arriving on the island, Bond had been immensely ‘glad to be back’ amongst its ‘staunch, humorous people’, its ‘beautiful old plantations’ with ‘romantic’ names and its old-fashioned imperial culture. As well as feeling a long way from the troubles besetting the Empire – the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, or the ‘emergency’ in Malaya – there is nothing here of America’s ‘women at the wheel, their menfolk docilely beside them’, the shouty notices and ‘the thick rash of television aerials and the impact of TV on hoardings and shop windows’. In the place of the ‘grim suburbs of Philadelphia showing their sores, like beggars’ and the ‘gloomy silent withered forests of Florida’ there are the ‘gleaming moonlit foothills of the Blue Mountains’, the ‘beautiful little banana port of Oracabessa’ and the ‘soft green flanks’ of Jamaica. Instead of ‘melted butterscotch’ and ‘Ham-n-Eggs’, Bond enjoys ‘paw-paw with a slice of green lime, a dish piled with red bananas, purple star-apples and tangerines, scrambled eggs and bacon, Blue Mountain coffee – the most delicious in the world – Jamaican marmalade, almost black, and guava jelly’. Surveying the view of Kingston and Port Royal from Strangways’ veranda up on Stony Hill, ‘he thought how lucky he was and what wonderful moments of consolation there were for the darkness and danger of his profession’. The result is that Bond, like Fleming, is at his most relaxed and warm in Jamaica.

  With the successful completion of his mission, Bond clears the American/Soviet Mr Big out of British Jamaica at the same time as doing the United States a huge favo
ur by closing down the funding of an enemy spy network on their territory and allowing them to move at last against the Harlem gangsters on gold-smuggling charges. American Leiter is a fine friend for Bond, but he is little help. The only time he tries to take the initiative, when he goes off to investigate the worm factory in Florida, he ends up badly injured with an arm and a leg missing and a note attached: ‘He disagreed with something that ate him.’ (Fleming’s original intention was to kill Leiter off, but protests from his literary agent in New York saved him.) There may be plenty of Anglo-American snarls to disentangle’ at the end, but there is no doubt that it is Bond, Britain’s imperial hero, who has triumphed.

  Live and Let Die was published on 5 April 1954, with a first printing of 7,500 quickly followed by a 2,000-copy reprint. As with Casino Royale, it carried an austere, type-led cover designed by Fleming. Because of the book’s sexual content, it was banned in Ireland, which gave it some welcome extra publicity.

  Reviews were favourable again, with Fleming’s Sunday Times exclaiming, ‘How wincingly well Mr Fleming writes.’ The TLS was largely supportive, calling Fleming ‘the most interesting recent recruit among thriller-writers’, but warning that ‘Mr Fleming works often on the edge of flippancy, rather in the spirit of a highbrow having fun writing a parody of “Sapper”.’ In contrast, the Daily Telegraph considered this a strength, that the book ‘is more entertaining because Mr Fleming does not take it all too seriously himself’.

  Perhaps in the hope that it would evoke fond memories of his trip to Jamaica, on publication Fleming sent a copy of Live and Let Die to Winston Churchill. He attached a note: ‘It is an unashamed thriller and its only merit is that it makes no demands on the minds of the reader.’

  1954–5 Moonraker; Diamonds are Forever

  ‘Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other.’

  Bond to Tiffany Case, Diamonds are Forever

  Only two years after their wedding at Port Maria, Ian and Ann’s marriage was showing signs of strain. The sexual side of the relationship had diminished after Ann was left with great scars after her second Caesarean, and fears that they had both expressed of their incompatibility – with her sociable and him not – had been realised. On their return to London from Jamaica in March 1953, they had moved into a house in Victoria Square, near the station, and here Ann continued her role as society hostess. According to Cecil Beaton, a regular visitor, ‘She now corrals the people she finds interesting in her small but congenial house … This she has made into an oasis for people who are creative in some field … all her friends agree that her parties are more amusing than they were at Warwick House.’

  But Ian hated the parties. He found the seemingly ever-present ‘creative people’ – including Lucian Freud, Alastair Forbes, Malcolm Muggeridge, Stephen Spender, Frederick Ashton and James Lee-Milne – gossipy and full of themselves. He started calling Ann’s soirees ‘gab-fests’. Mary Crickmere, who lived in the basement and cooked the meals – her husband lived there too, and worked as valet, driver and waiter – remembered the racket the intellectuals made: ‘The noise in there! They all talked, nobody listened.’ Ann’s daughter Fionn, who was fifteen when her mother married Ian, remembers how stuffy and claustrophobic the house became when full to the brim. She called Victoria Square Ian’s ‘gilded cage’. Loelia Westminster, much more a friend of Ann than Ian, later wrote that ‘The Flemings’ life together deteriorated … Ann’s friends did not listen to him and he grew sulky. Finally he refused to go to her parties.’ Indeed, few of Ann’s friends thought much of Ian. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in his diary after one evening at Victoria Square that he couldn’t understand why Ann had fallen for him.

  Each weekend Ann and Ian would drive down to their cottage at St Margaret’s Bay, where Caspar lived full time with his nanny, Joan Sillick. Now in her forties, she had performed the same role for Raymond and Fionn O’Neill. Yet even at St Margaret’s, Caspar would see little of his parents, only being brought down from his playroom to meet them for a brief moment before dinner and then taken back upstairs. At times, Ian would get a bee in his bonnet about his son – on one occasion he became obsessed with Spock’s book, Baby and Childcare; on another he was appalled when Sillick took Caspar on a bus. But generally he tried to make up for his absence by being overprotective. Sillick told Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett that, like many men of his generation and class, Ian wasn’t much of a father. ‘He couldn’t cope at all,’ she remembered.

  Before Ann and Ian’s next trip to Goldeneye, Jamaica paid host to the new Queen, Elizabeth II, and her consort Prince Philip, who were on their first Commonwealth tour. The visit, in November 1953, was of great importance to the Governor, Sir Hugh Foot: the monarch was key to his vision of Jamaica’s future. Although, as he wrote to London the following year, he believed ‘whole-heartedly in West Indian self-government’ (within a federation), he did not see this as an inevitable jettisoning of British interest and influence in the region.

  The Whig historian Thomas Macaulay famously declared that the day the Raj ended would be ‘the proudest day in English history’, not because the Empire had failed, but because it had given way to a new transcendent realm: ‘the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws’, just as the civilisation of ancient Rome had survived the passing of the Caesars. Like other liberals and progressives, Foot hoped that the end of empire would not really be the end at all, that people would still willingly embrace British institutions of government under self-rule. In 1955, he made a broadcast to the Jamaican people, declaring: ‘I as an Englishman know very well how many faults and failures there have been in England’s long history. But some of the finest things that the world has ever known have come from England. We see them here in our religious life and our judicial processes and our education and our form of government.’ (Foot later wrote: We may have been accused of having been paternalistic. Perhaps in a sense we were.’)

  The key to this was the idea of the Commonwealth, seen by optimists not as a ‘mere afterglow following sunset, ending in night’, but ‘a rebirth, an empire transforming itself into a free Commonwealth family’. In this family, the strong would help the weak, and British influence would be sustained without the ‘mother country’ having to ‘bear the burdens of command’. Of course, this could not be maintained through loyalty to the government of Great Britain. Instead, it would be the ‘apolitical’ monarch who would unite the Commonwealth through an emotional bond. Churchill was fond of quoting the old aphorism: ‘There are two ways to rule men – by bamboozle or bamboo.’ The cult of the royals, with its costumes, march-pasts and salutes, would, it was hoped, fascinate the former subject peoples.

  In the West Indies, there was fertile ground, thanks in part to the popular but entirely incorrect impression that Queen Victoria had been personally responsible for Emancipation. In fact, emotional loyalty to the British monarch was one of the very few things that almost all sections of the Jamaican population could agree on. Bustamante, who had been sent to meet George VI in London in 1948 and come back ‘a most loyal supporter of the Crown’, welcomed the Queen’s visit as the ‘occasion when theories of Majesty and Royalty become real and alive’. Pearl Flynn, then a young woman living in Oracabessa, remembers, ‘The Queen was like Lord you know. We would line up for hours.’ Another black Jamaican recalled that ‘There was total respect for the head of state. We stood up in Montego Bay and cheered. It was fun.’

  Every second of the Queen’s schedule was accounted for: opening roads, greeting endless parish officials and parochial boards, with everyone wearing ‘all Orders and Decorations’. Villages in which the royal cavalcade was to slow down were listed so that the crowds could be prepared. Guards of honour and military parades were frequent. It was all a very untropical rush, and with no space or time given to spontaneity, the young Queen struggled to project any sort of personality.

  Norman Manley was ill, so his place at official ev
ents was taken by his wife Edna, sparking rumours that he was snubbing the British monarch. Edna found that the young Queen had ‘the character and stability to carry the role she was born into, and that is saying a great deal. But there is no sparkle, as indeed there never could be.’ ‘How odd and unreal the Royal procedure is,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘You curtsey here, you curtsey there – in fact you curtsey everywhere. Give me the new democracies, where a friendly handshake is all that is necessary, with or without gloves.’ But even years later she had to concede that British royalty could ‘rouse a storm of loyalty and excitement, exactly the same way that Queen Victoria would have been felt to be the repository of all wisdom, all power’.

  The Queen and Prince Philip greeted at Sabina Park cricket ground by 20,000 Jamaican schoolchildren.

  Ann and Ian’s trip out to the island in early 1954 began badly: Ian was ill and they suffered twelve days of guests they had tired of after two. They also found themselves less enamoured with the north-coast party scene they had once so energetically been a part of.

  The seventh of January had seen the opening of Round Hill, a milestone in the history of Jamaica tourism. It was the brainchild of John Pringle, the son of Carmen Pringle who ran Sunset Lodge. His idea was to set up a ‘cottage colony for the very rich or beautiful’. Individual villas would be sold to those who wanted a house in Jamaica but without the trouble of absentee ownership. They could also have a share in hotel profits if their cottage was rented out. It was an entirely new way of running a resort.

  The year before, on a flight to New York to raise money for the venture, Pringle had found himself sitting next to Noël Coward. ‘He was a great friend of my mother’s but I’d never met him before,’ remembered Pringle. ‘I started to tell him about Round Hill and went into a lot of detail and showed him some photographs I had. And with his hand tightly clasping my knee, he said, “If you stop boring me, I’ll buy one of your fucking cottages!’” Coward introduced Pringle to Adele Astaire, who also bought a cottage, as well as five or six other people. Coward also performed at the launch party in January 1954.