Ian, on the other hand, was thrilled at the publicity he would get for his rental property, and enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger nature of the arrangement. The Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, had originally phoned Ann to ask if the house was free for himself, although he swore her to secrecy. A few days later, Lennox-Boyd summoned Fleming to the Foreign Office to tell him in person that it was to be for the Prime Minister. There was even a cover for the meeting – talking about a book project. Still not allowed to tell anyone, Fleming sent a telegram to Anthony Lahoud in Jamaica saying that ‘three important friends’ were coming to stay for three weeks. Violet should get extra staff, he instructed, and the house be prepared. When he received back a rather relaxed-sounding ‘Everything is ok Lahoud’, he telegraphed again asking that uniforms be found for the staff and that Lahoud should be ‘prepared for considerable publicity’.
Eden’s borrowing of Goldeneye made Ian Fleming front page news for the first time.
Once the news was out, Fleming sent another telegram to Violet. ‘The Commander told me someone is coming,’ she recalled, and that ‘I would be surprised. I would see a lot of excitement. But I must be calm. Because although he is Prime Minster, he is just the next man. I must not let them get me off my nerve.’
The press were intrigued by Goldeneye and its dashing owner. On 22 November, the Daily Express led its front page with two pictures, one of Ann and Ian, the other of Goldeneye. Ann, letting the side down a bit, was quoted in the accompanying article: ‘It’s a small house with a nice garden leading on to the sea … It’s no luxury place. The Edens will have to rough it.’ She then went on, rather spitefully, ‘We lent the house to Noël Coward seven years ago after he had a colossal flop in New York.’ The next day, she wrote to Waugh: ‘yesterday’s Daily Express will mean a permanent breach with Noël Coward’.
At Goldeneye itself, there was a rush of activity. Blanche Blackwell had been told about the mysterious telegrams by Lahoud, and as she happened to be back in Kingston later the same day, she asked at King’s House. Here she was given the recently received news that the Prime Minister was coming to Goldeneye. Together with Foot’s private secretary and his wife, and her Lindo sister-in-law, Blanche rushed back to Oracabessa to attempt to get the place in shape. Six extra men were quickly gathered to help gardener Felix Barriffe tidy up the outside, where, the Gleaner reported the day before Eden’s arrival, ‘the hibiscus was in full bloom and the poinsettias were adding their scarlet quota’. Blanche remembers doing what she could inside. Fleming later teased her that he had conjured up a picture of her ‘punching up my faded cushions and putting cut glass vases of flowers beside the detectives’ beds’.
Harry George, the Bahamas-born chef from King’s House, was driven over to draw up menus and organise supplies, while two telephone lines were installed in the living room and the new gazebo was commandeered as a communication centre and office, with typewriters and emergency telephones. New maids and a valet were taken on and dispatch riders lined up to buzz over the island between Kingston and Oracabessa several times a day.
Lady Foot suggested that Violet might make way for staff from King’s House, but she was having none of it, replying, ‘No, Lady, I obey my Commander.’ When Lady Foot tried to convince her that the Queen herself would want this arrangement, Violet remained adamant: ‘I respect the Queen but I obey the Commander.’
Noël, who had played and sung at the Edens’ house during the war, rushed off to Kingston to buy a huge basket of Earl Grey tea, caviar, cutlets, champagne and foie gras paté – ‘Anything I could see in fact that might mitigate the horrors I knew the poor dears were in for.’
The Edens landed on Saturday 24 November to be greeted at Kingston airport by a calypso band singing ‘Jamaica the Garden of Eden welcomes Britain’s Sir Anthony Eden’. Sir Hugh Foot and his wife Sylvia accompanied them to Goldeneye. The next day, Blanche received a telephone call from Violet: there had been some confusion over who was doing what and there was no lunch for the Edens. Blanche was eating with Coward and had to pack the food up quickly and send it over to Goldeneye. Thereafter she was the first call to sort out any small problems, to the chagrin of the agent Lahoud.
Over the next few days, Coward, Brownlow and Bryce all offered hospitality, but it was declined. The extent of the Edens’ sociability was hosting a lunch for the Foots and Blanche. ‘A complete inertia has overcome us,’ Clarissa Eden wrote to Ann after a week. ‘We are blissfully happy and it is everything we had hoped for but far more beautiful. We haven’t been outside the gates so far.’ There was a trip to Antonio’s emporium in Falmouth, where Eden bought a pair of willow-pattern shorts, but for almost all of their three-week stay, the large white Cadillac, lent by Prime Minister Norman Manley, remained unused as they kept to the house and beach. Eden did not take to the snorkelling. As Clarissa reported to Ann, After one claustrophobic splash, Anthony had absolutely refused to put his head under water, so he swims up and down in the deep bit, occasionally crashing himself into a reef of coral. I am obsessed by the fishes, and now swim about with a wet towel tied to my back on account of bad sunburn.’
One reason for the seclusion was that the property was soon surrounded by journalists and photographers from the English press. They even rented boats to capture shots of the Edens on the beach. The tiniest rumours were published, including the news that a doctor had visited during the night. (In fact, the local doctor Lenworth Jacobs was only giving some aspirin to Clarissa.) The finger of blame for this leak was pointed at Anthony Lahoud, who then had his police pass rescinded. When Ian heard about this, he immediately contacted Downing Street and King’s House to have his man’s honour restored.
Coward had his ear to the ground for information about the ailing Prime Minister. For his part, he thought it very curious that Eden was at Goldeneye while ‘the Egyptians and the Arabs and the Israelis and the Iranians and the Syrians and the Russians are frigging away in the Middle East’. In a letter to a friend, he reported ‘fairly well authenticated rumours that [Eden] has wakened in the night screaming several times and sent for the guard. This of course might be accounted for by the acute discomfort of Ian’s bed and the coloured prints of snakes and octopuses that festoon the peeling walls.’
Eden at Goldeneye, with Sir Hugh Foot on his left, bids farewell to the great and good of Oracabessa. He is shaking hands with W. E. White, owner of the local bakery.
Towards the end of the three weeks, Coward received a note from Clarissa thanking him for the ‘goodies’ and saying she was feeling much better, although her husband was ‘rather fretting at being out of England!’ And well he might. During Eden’s absence, Macmillan and Butler were plotting his downfall, while the Spectator commented on 7 December, ‘Jamaica has done more damage than Suez to Sir Anthony’s standing in his party at Westminster.’ So the Edens returned to London ‘to find everyone looking at us with very thoughtful eyes’, as Clarissa wrote in her diary. Three weeks later, Sir Anthony Eden was ousted, with poor health given as the excuse. For Eden, Goldeneye had been a political and public relations disaster.
Not so for Ian Fleming. The use of his house had brought him to the attention of a much larger public than his books had hitherto done, and it was the beginning of a run of good fortune for both him and his Bond creation.
There was a more oblique and subtle benefit as well. The Suez disaster had ended Britain’s imperial pretensions. Even the thickest-skinned nostalgist could no longer deny the country’s second-class status. But this would make the escapism of Fleming’s stories, in which, behind the scenes, Britain in the figure of super-agent 007 still bestrides the globe, more popular than ever. The world of Bond was rapidly becoming a place where the nation could congregate around a vision that denied Britain’s disappointing new reality.
1957 Jamaica Under Threat – Dr No
I feel horribly insecure, like this house when the mountain rumbles and the walls tremble, scared of what might happen next.
Adela,
in Volcano
Before Ian returned to Jamaica at the beginning of 1957, Coward had completed his play Volcano.
An unflinching examination of marital breakdown, it is set on Coward’s Jamaica stand-in, Samolo, where Melissa Littleton arrives suddenly, having been alerted that her husband Guy is having an affair with a local widow and plantation owner called Adela Shelley. Several people recur from Coward’s other Samolo stories, and, as in the novel Pomp and Circumstance, there are two very obvious Ian and Ann characters. There’s also a similarly obvious new arrival: Blanche.
The jealous wife Melissa shares Ann’s fear of flying, her renown as a society hostess and her difficulty with getting on with other women. She doesn’t like the rigours of the tropics and is described by various others as ‘hectic’, ‘brittle’ and ‘scratchy’.
Her errant husband Guy speaks in nautical metaphors and spends all his time in Samolo spearing fish. He has a spartan house with uncomfortable furniture and a ‘vast living-room that throws the whole house out of balance’. His wife complains that he considers the island ‘his own private bachelor paradise’. He is immensely attractive, but has a ‘sex ego too strongly developed, too greedy; it demands constant attention like a child banging its spoon on the table’.
The Adela/Blanche character is the most sympathetically portrayed of the three. A widow in her forties who runs a profitable plantation – bananas, coconuts, sugar – she is well liked by her friends, self-reliant, ‘steady’ and dignified, but with a heart as ‘lively as a cricket’. We learn that she had become accustomed to being on her own but the previous year had met Guy and they had fallen in love while swimming and snorkelling together. Guy’s wife Melissa is used to her husband’s casual indiscretions but flies out to Samolo to check out Adela, who ‘might have been just that exception’.
At their meeting, tensions are high, with everyone drinking strong spirits heavily, as they do relentlessly throughout the play. Melissa thanks Adela for ‘how kind’ she was ‘to him when he was out here on his own last year’. Adela now feels guilty and foolish.
The atmosphere gets even heavier as the volcano in the background – seen by some as the characters’ buried anger, by others as the coming of independence – gets louder and threatens their night-time outing to see the dawn from its summit. Guy then seduces a much younger married woman who is also part of the group. This sidesteps the stand-off between the Ann and Blanche characters and turns both of them against him.
Melissa responds by threatening divorce, clearly not for the first time. Guy replies: ‘You knew perfectly well when you married me what I was like. You knew that I was temperamentally incapable of remaining faithful for long to any one person. I never tried to deceive you about it, in fact I told you so myself, and you settled for it … I am what I am and I’m too old a dog to change my ways … Are you going to pretend that you’ve been strictly faithful to me in the last few years?’ he adds. ‘No. I’m not going to pretend anything,’ says Melissa. ‘I’m not even going to pretend that there’s any hope.’
The fault is laid at the failure of the ‘physical passion we had for each other when we were first married’. This, Guy says, ‘never lasts, you know that as well as I do, we’ve often discussed it’. Now they only stay together, ‘jog along’, for the sake of their child, a young, rather difficult son. At the same time, Melissa admits that she is tied to Guy, whatever his behaviour. ‘Yes. I do love him,’ she says. ‘And I accept I always shall. I can’t help myself. I have no illusions about him. I don’t admire him or even respect him. But there it is. He was my choice and I’m stuck with it. Nobody can explain that sort of thing can they. It’s far beyond reason and common sense.’
For Adela, the arrival of Melissa together with Guy’s latest escapade on the volcano turns her against her former lover. ‘You have an exaggerated view of your own personal charm,’ she tells him witheringly. Earlier she announces that she no longer loves him: ‘I thought I did for a little – but not any more.’ When, right at the end of the play, he brings her shells as a peace offering, she smashes them on the stage as the final curtain comes down.
Before the end of 1956, Coward approached his Jamaica friend Katharine Hepburn to play the lead, Adela, and sent the play to his long-time theatrical producer ‘Binkie’ Beaumont. Both rejected it. Beaumont may well have considered that the drama’s very overt discussion of sex might have gone down badly with Coward’s now middle-aged audience, or even fallen foul of the censors of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. In addition, although a dissection of marriage every bit as probing and ruthless as Private Lives, Volcano was far from Coward’s best work.
The play remained unperformed until 2012, when after a brief regional tour it arrived in London. But the production struggled with the material: the colonial setting was jarring, with the locals portrayed, if at all, as unreliable, untruthful and hysterical. The only humour was at the expense of the servants and their ‘funny’ way of speaking English. Reviews were unkind and the run was short.
Blanche Blackwell and Ann’s daughter Fionn, now good friends, both saw the play soon after it opened. Fionn found it ‘not terribly good’, but Blanche insists she enjoyed it, although she claims that the Adela character is nothing like her: much more articulate and forceful.
Blanche’s version of the story told in Volcano is not so different from the play, apart from the ending. (In fact, Coward also wrote a different ending, in which the Blanche character accepted Guy’s advances.) Ian and Blanche had indeed become very close that first winter in 1956 while swimming, hunting and dodging barracudas on Goldeneye’s reef, but Blanche denies that they became lovers that year.
In January 1957, however, Ian arrived in Jamaica alone with the news that Ann, in a burst of post-health-club positivity, had ‘renewed her marriage vows’, but then within days had started her affair with Gaitskell, to Fleming’s fury. Blanche says this made her less inclined to continue to resist Ian’s persistent advances, and to suppress her own attraction to him. By this time, she had another suitor in Jamaica, and marriage had been discussed, but Ian now insisted she drop him and Blanche agreed.
Two days later, Ann and her party arrived. Ian had come by air, but because of Ann’s fear of flying, she had taken the boat, along with four-year-old Caspar, his nanny, Joan Sillick, and Ann’s twenty-four-year-old son Raymond O’Neill.
It was a ‘horrific’ journey, Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh from Goldeneye. For eight of the eleven days at sea, there had been a ‘full gale’. Nanny Sillick suffered from ‘seasickness, rheumatism and neuralgia’, meaning that Ann had to entertain her sons. Caspar woke at six each morning, while Raymond insisted on being taken to the nightclub each evening. ‘I remained mobile on Dramamine and gin … in a stupor of fear and dope,’ Ann wrote. Everyone on the boat was ‘old and ugly’.
It was Raymond’s first visit to the tropics, and he was enchanted by Jamaica and Goldeneye. Time magazine the following year would describe it as Fleming’s ‘luxurious Jamaican residence’, but Raymond remembers it from that time as being still ‘extremely primitive, the simplest house I’d ever been in. But it didn’t matter – you spent all your time in bathing trunks. I love nature so I spent most of the time in the sea.’ Everyone had a swim in the morning, ‘then spent a lot of time in the sunken garden reading. Hummingbirds were buzzing all around you, and the doctor birds with their long tails – it was an absolute paradise.’
The snorkelling was a highlight, and they often went out further afield in the little inflatable boat and would eat for supper the fish they had caught that day. An octopus found living very near the beach was befriended and christened ‘Pussy’. Ann had one setback: she thought she saw a shark and in a panic put her foot on to a rock, which ‘happened to be the home of a moray eel. Grabbed her by the ankle. Her whole leg swelled up.’
At night, Raymond remembers, because there was no glass in the windows, ‘the most amazing wildlife flew in. Enormous moths flapped in, landed on the wall and then
were consumed by lizards, also on the wall. I loved it because you were really in the bush.’
Caspar had inherited his father’s interest in nature, and was wildly excited when he saw a scorpion, but most of the time, while Ann painted, wrote letters or read, Raymond swam and Ian hammered out Dr No in his new gazebo, the little boy was looked after by the nanny. On a couple of occasions, Ann took him to the Tower Isle Hotel swimming pool, where Barrington Roper gave him swimming lessons. When he was not writing, Fleming undertook to teach his son the Latin names for the fish on the reef. Housekeeper Violet, who at this time had two maids working under her at the house, adored Caspar. ‘He’s a fine little boy and I hope his mother brings him to Jamaica again,’ she said. ‘He and I got along just fine.’
There was a certain amount of social life, Raymond remembers, but it really only ‘revolved around Blanche and Noël Coward and Noël Coward’s friends, of which there were a large number around’. On one occasion, Ian sent Raymond to Blue Harbour in the Austin saloon car kept at Goldeneye to collect ‘Noël-y and Coley, Binkie and Perry’ (John Perry, ‘Binkie’ Beaumont’s partner). He also ran errands into Port Maria, and stayed a night in Kingston with Blanche at Terra Nova. On another occasion, he was sent to visit Bolt and shown round the banana estate by Blanche and the plantation manager. But ‘real’ Jamaica, or Jamaicans other than staff, was largely ignored. It was, he says looking back, life ‘in a little bubble’.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 21