by Ian Thomson
In 1988, Palomino’s sister was killed by intruders, who broke into her store in St Mary parish. The murder prompted Palomino to go to China for the first time in search of her family roots. To her surprise her father’s birthplace in Guangdong province was full of elderly ‘black’ Chinese who had been sent from Jamaica in the early 1900s to receive a Chinese education. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war had prevented their return home, and they had stayed ever since. Palomino might well have been among them. In 1937, with a suitcase full of clothes and toys, she was in a group of Jamaican Chinese children awaiting transportation to China for schooling. In straight lines the children waited in silence to board the ship moored in Kingston docks. Finally the ship’s captain strode down the gangplank with a megaphone to announce that China had been invaded by Japan and that departure was to be postponed indefinitely. In tears of relief Gloria was escorted back to her parents’ house in Kingston; her true home, she knew then, was Jamaica, and always would be.
Today, as the economy and population of the People’s Republic of China strengthens, hundreds of mainland Chinese have been allowed to set up in business in Jamaica. A rivalry has developed between the newcomers and the established Jamaican Chinese. ‘We consider the mainlanders rather common,’ Palomino explained, with a quick, deprecating laugh. Oh, she was loath to let these Mandarin-speakers get anywhere near her financial empire. ‘They wouldn’t dare interfere - I’m too much competition!’ she said, meaning it. In 2005, Jamaica opened a new embassy in Beijing, while the Chinese Embassy in Kingston, a huge modern complex off Sea View Avenue, mills at all hours with Mao-suited officials.
I returned to Father Webb for my long-held appointment to visit a cooperative farm. The farm was a short distance away by car. Rain and mist hung over the sea-coast sprawl of St Mary parish. Most of the neighbouring countryside was owned by businessmen, minor politicians and gunmen who were operated by the bigger politicians in Kingston. Little could be done locally without these men, said Webb; they had become the law. The farmers, some too poor to own even agricultural implements, were obliged to plough with machetes and use their fingers to remove stones from the earth. But, thanks to the St Mary Rural Development Project, a handful had their own land, and with this had come a sense of achievement and hope. In one field we passed, plastic pipes laid by Martin Royackers brought water down from the mountain rivers and streams. Irrigated fields and space for crops were what the farmers of St Mary needed.
By midday the sky had turned a robin’s-egg blue and the shanties east of Annotto Bay looked less forlorn. We arrived at the farm, Georgia, where a sturdily built man was wielding his hoe with slow, laboured movements. He watched us get out of the car and walked towards us. ‘Morning, Father.’ There was real enthusiasm in his greeting. Father Webb seemed to provide encouragement as he advised the farmer on what sold well in Annotto Bay market (‘Dasheen - you should plant more dasheen’), quoting market prices for pumpkin and sweet pepper. The farmer’s cassava plants were doing well (though rats kept eating the pumpkin seeds).
Georgia might have been an image of agricultural barrenness. Yet it offered hope: the dedicated Jesuit priest who was encouraging the cooperative farmer to think of irrigation and crop rotation, who patiently advised, and listened. It lifted the heart, to think that something solid and beneficial was being built here.
By 2008 the Jesuit-run farms were able to compete with the market produce in Annotto Bay, much of it controlled by the Chinese and imported from the United States. For all their continued hardship, the St Mary farmers were among the lucky ones. In Annotto Bay, at least, the liberation theology of the Jesuits had gone hand in hand with a new sympathy and respect for the poor.
18
007 (Shanty Town)
‘Tell me’, Blanche Blackwell said to me, ‘have you ever been to Jamaica?’
‘I’ve just come back from Jamaica.’
‘Oh tell me!’ she exclaimed airily. ‘What was it like?’
‘Well ...’
‘You know I could never go back to Jamaica.’ Mrs Blackwell waved her handkerchief expressively. ‘Jamaica is getting too ... pronounced. All those sex and machete fights! Dear, oh dear.’ Ever since her house in Kingston was burgled for a third time in 2003 alone she had vowed never to go back. ‘I’m going to stay put in Europe. Anyway,’ she reflected, ‘to Jamaica from Europe is really too much of a journey. Would you care for some lunch?’
She turned to one of her Jamaican maids. ‘Rosie, what’s for lunch?’
‘Roast lamb, Miss Blanche.’
‘Oh good-o.’
Blanche Blackwell was half sitting, half reclining, in her flat off Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge, west London. Known to friends as ‘Birdie’, she was, at ninety-five, legally blind, but one would not have known it. Of Jamaican Jewish ancestry, she wore her white hair bobbed round an animated face. She was the mother of Chris Blackwell, the founder and former owner of Island Records who, back in the 1970s, ‘discovered’ the rock-reggae of Bob Marley. Mrs Blackwell’s life, until she decamped to London, had been one of island entertainments and literary friendships.
Born in Kingston in 1912 as Blanche Lindo, she had married Captain Joseph Blackwell of the Irish Guards and heir to Crosse and Blackwell foods. However, she was not happy in the marriage. Errol Flynn (‘a gorgeous god’, she called him) became one of her lovers, as, later, did Ian Fleming. By the time of her divorce in 1949 she had moved to Jamaica’s north coast to a house equidistant between Noel Coward’s and Fleming’s. ‘Noel became a special pal of mine,’ Mrs Blackwell said to me, adding, ‘Of course, we all knew he had latent ... proclivities.’ Ian Fleming was to write all thirteen of his 007 novels in Jamaica, though only three (Dr No, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun) were set partly on the island.
Impishly, Fleming included sketches of his friends (and enemies) in his fiction. Blanche Blackwell was supposedly a model for the Sapphic aeroplane pilot and martial arts expert, Pussy Galore, in Goldfinger. Fleming, with his tall, alcohol-swollen frame, adored ‘Birdie’ Blackwell and her darting, kingfisher mind. And Blanche, in her turn, considered Fleming a ‘charming, handsome, gifted man’, but plagued by self-doubt and even self-hate. ‘Ian was an angel,’ she told me (though at first she had thought him the rudest of men). ‘Errol was another angel. Both lovely men - both exceptionally manly and definitely not for domesticating!’ Sightlessly she stretched out a hand towards a full-blown pink rose. ‘Not that I should complain. I’ve had a marvellous life. Do smell my pink rose.’ It was part of Mrs Blackwell’s style, I suspected, to ask men to smell her roses.
I asked her, ‘So Jamaica’s lost its charm for you?’
‘Oh absolutely. It’s not so much the violence that I object to - I’ve lived long enough not to be afraid of violence. No, it’s the change in the people. The corruption. And the lack of respect is totally dreadful.’ (Mrs Blackwell seemed inclined to faint.) A gulf of privilege separated her from other Jamaicans, yet she shared in their complaint about ‘declining standards’.
‘But surely Jamaica is a fairer society today?’ I persisted.
‘My dear young man! Jamaica is now so disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain. Independence was the worst thing that could have happened to Jamaicans - they were simply not ready for it.’
A Jamaican maid tinkled a bell to signal that lunch was ready; she was one of three, pink-aproned black women who tended to Mrs Blackwell. ‘Thank you, little dear,’ she said to the maid as she served the lamb.
I glanced round the flat. Dresden figurines and porcelain monkey musicians stood on a Georgian table by the window; it was a wellappointed property. Blanche Lindo had grown up in Jamaica in scarcely less rarefied surroundings. The Lindos, Sephardi Jews hailing from western Europe (possibly Bordeaux), had settled in Kingston in the second half of the eighteenth century. One of them, the rum merchant Alexandre Lindo, loaned £60,000 to Napoleon to help him re-instate slavery in Saint Domingue, subsequently Ha
iti. Like many European Jews of the Napoleonic era, Lindo was sympathetic to Bonaparte and the new French Republic. However, after Napoleon had been defeated by the freed Haitian slaves, the French government stinted on repayment of the loan. Lindo ended his days in poverty in a house in Finsbury Square, north London, and, in 1812, was buried in the Jewish cemetery off Mile End Road. In 1833 his grandson, Louis Lindo, married Fanny Brawne, formerly the fiancée of the poet John Keats.
‘It’s quite a saga, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Blackwell and, addressing a third maid, exquisitely reminiscent of the plantocracy, ‘Would you please bring in the toffee-treacle pudding?’
Ian Fleming died of a heart attack in 1964, at the age of fifty-six. The new Labour government under Harold Wilson (anathema to the Tory Fleming) had been sworn in and Bond mania was about to take off with the premiere of the film of Goldfinger. Although the novels have been praised for their style and wit - in 1960 Fleming had met an admiring John F. Kennedy in Washington - the films would become ever more gadget-ridden and fantastic. Yet four decades on, Ian Fleming’s endearingly absurd creation, James Bond, shows no sign of flagging. The centenary of Fleming’s birth in 2008 saw a pastiche Bond novel and an 007 exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. Surprisingly, little attention was paid to Jamaica, yet to understand the birth of Agent 007 one has to look at the country which Fleming made his home for over eighteen years. Without Jamaica, it is safe to say, there would have been no James Bond.
Fleming’s Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye (named after the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye and dubbed ‘Goldeneye, nose and throat’ by Noel Coward), stands above the old banana port of Oracabessa, due east of Annotto Bay. The visitors’ book reads like a who’s who of English letters and privilege in the post-war years. Evelyn Waugh, Stephen Spender, Cecil Beaton, the London Magazine editor Alan Ross (Commander Ross of The Man with the Golden Gun), Anthony Eden and Graham Greene all stayed. Chris Blackwell and his mother Blanche now own Goldeneye as part of a prohibitively expensive ‘007’ hotel complex frequented by Sting and other dreary rock ‘ristos’ (as they say in Jamaica).
In that sun-warmed pocket of the British Empire, Fleming could savour his remoteness from cold, drab Britain and delude himself that he had risen above the ignominy of his country’s imperial demise. He had long wanted to be a writer but felt that he lived in the shadow of his older brother, Peter, a successful travel journalist. Jamaica seems to have provided the space, time and leisure for the novelist in him to flourish. In pre-independence Jamaica, moreover, the Britain of Fleming’s youth, with its class-bound social order, was better preserved than in austere post-war Britain, where, as we read in Dr No, ‘people streamed miserably to work, their legs whipped by the wet hems of their macintoshes’.
What Fleming loved about Jamaica, apart from its antique social hierarchy, was its physical beauty. The fireflies and the melancholy of the tropical dusk seduced him. Fleming married Ann Charteris (previously the wife of Viscount Rothermere) in Jamaica in 1952, with Coward as his witness. In January of that year he had begun his first 007 novel, Casino Royale. The name for his action hero was taken from an ornithological classic dear to Fleming, Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, a standard reference published in 1947, by James Bond.
Fleming wrote his 007 extravaganzas with the jalousies at Goldeneye closed so that he would not be disturbed by the sunlight and birdlife. Even so, Jamaica is a presence in virtually all the Bond plots. In Casino Royale, Bond passes himself off as a ‘Jamaican plantocrat’. Dr No, the sixth in the 007 series, alludes to the Jamaican Governor General Sir Hugh Foot. Some of the stories in For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy have Jamaican locales, but after the first five incomparably stylish novels, the prose became tired; and then came the disappointment of The Man with the Golden Gun, published posthumously in 1965. At Goldeneye, Fleming’s creativity had become enfeebled though vodka and cigarettes - like 007, he smoked seventy a day; unlike 007, they took a toll on him.
One cannot imagine Fleming dancing to ‘Lively Up Yourself’ by Bob Marley (his long-suffering wife Ann Fleming complained of Jamaica’s ‘ganja-happy Negroes’); but Blanche Blackwell did, frequently, after her son Chris had helped to transform Bob into a semi-divine rock star for a (mostly white) international audience.
Mrs Blackwell, sweetly, will not hear a bad word about her son. ‘His career has been an exquisite example to Jamaicans everywhere,’ she told me, her tone suddenly stern. Actually Chris Blackwell is greatly admired in Jamaica as a businessman, if not as a reggae studio man. Mrs Blackwell became more amenable when the pudding arrived. ‘Now come on, Mrs B!’ she said to herself. ‘None of this crossness!’ The ‘most silly things’ amused her now, bingo, for instance. Each week her chauffeur takes her to the Cricklewood Mecca to play bingo. In Kingston she had liked to bet on the horses, but London bingo (even played in braille) was not without its thrills. ‘Cricklewood might seem a little dull to you,’ Mrs Blackwell smiled. ‘It isn’t really. I could sit for hours in the Mecca. The tension as your number comes up. Bing-bing-bingo!’
It was late afternoon when I left Lowndes Square. ‘I’m afraid the sunset will be a failure,’ Mrs Blackwell said to me as she asked a maid to draw the curtains over the Knightsbridge view. ‘It always is in London.’ Only in 007’s Jamaica is the sun such a bright ‘bloodorange’ red, as Ian Fleming would put it.
Mrs Blackwell rose as I made to leave.
‘Don’t forget to send me a copy of your book, will you?’
Tough and good-humoured, Blanche Blackwell disliked what had happened to Jamaica today. She hoarded her memories of old Jamaica like a squirrel, taking them out as she needed.
Ocho Rios, a cruise-ship destination near Goldeneye, is dominated by the ‘Island Village’ shopping mall owned by Chris Blackwell, where tourists can buy Bob Marley CDs and bottles of ‘reggae’ skin moisturiser extracted from ‘Bob Marley’ cannabis fibre oil. According to the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a kind of political correctness dictates that one should not be too unkind to Bob Marley, who died of cancer in 1981 aged thirty-six. Yet much of his loping, mid-tempo music (with the exception of the early Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry productions: ‘Duppy Conqueror’, ‘Soul Rebel’) sounds slightly vapid to my ears. For many non-Jamaicans, Bob Marley is reggae; he remains an international Rasta celebrity, honoured with a waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s as well as a Jamaican Order of Merit (the third-highest honour in the Jamaican honours system), an induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Bob Marley restaurant at Disney World in Orlando. Each year the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston attracts thousands of cruise-ship tourists, among them dreadlocked Japanese.
Oddly, during the 1970s when Marley’s was the best-known name in Jamaican music, he was actually very much removed from the music scene. The first Bob Marley and the Wailers album to be produced by Chris Blackwell, Catch a Fire (1972), was an accomplished Jamaican-American hybrid, whose hard-driving Kingston rhythms were overlaid in London with rock guitar solos and even the brittle clavinet sound made famous by Stevie Wonder on ‘Superstition’. (The original drum-and-bass mixes completed by the Wailers in Kingston - released for the first time in 2002 - have a raw simplicity and directness that even Blackwell, years later, said he preferred.)
It was Blackwell’s, not Marley’s, idea to aim the music at a rock audience. The end product, while it was a great rock-reggae album, seemed quite detached from Jamaican ghetto culture with its paraphernalia of sound systems and deejay-toasters. Catch a Fire was largely ignored by Britain’s black reggae crowd (to whom the Harrow-educated Chris Blackwell was Chris ‘Whiteworst’). The album sounded too much like ‘reggae for people who don’t really like reggae’. The sequel Wailers album, Burnin’, released within twelve months of its predecessor, offered a less adulterated, more dread-heavy sound, but still it bore the imprint of session rock musicians, and was directed mainly at the white middle classes, for whom Marley was now the King of Reggae.
Marley’s do
mestic influence was at its peak in 1978 when he brought (if only for a moment) Michael Manley and Edward Seaga together onstage in a symbolic act of reconciliation during the famous ‘One Love’ peace concert in Kingston on 22 April (the date was chosen to coincide with the twelfth anniversary of Haile Selassie’s visit to Kingston). Blanche Blackwell watched the concert on television. Bob Marley’s international success may have been due, at least in part, to his mixed parentage. With a Caucasian father (Captain Norval Marley, a quartermaster attached to the British West Indian Regiment), he would have found it easier to deal with the world at large - that is, white people. Marley’s fair complexion and aquiline features lent him an acceptable ‘uptown’ look.
Today, Bob Marley is the reason why so many tourists come to Jamaica. In Ocho Rios the wealthier among them stay at Jamaica Inn, reckoned to be among the most stylish hotels in the West Indies, whose manicured lawns and planter’s punch ambience have attracted, among others, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, John Major and, latterly, Mick Jagger (‘Mick Jaguar’ to my taxi driver). Guests are offered indulgently soporific beachside massages and then bussed to an equestrian farm which specialises in Bob Marleybranded ‘jungle treks’. Afterwards, to the accompaniment of canned Marley, a candle-lit dinner is served by a waiter who claims to remember both Noel Coward and Ian Fleming.
My publisher’s advance would not stretch to such an establishment, so I checked into a guest house with plastic poolside chairs and (inevitably) framed photographs of Bob Marley.
The house belonged to Leeroy James Campbell, since 1990 a selfappointed ‘Scientific Ganja Researcher’ to the Jamaican nation. At seventy-five, Brother Leeroy (as he insisted I address him) looked well preserved in his swimming briefs and silver arm-bracelets. He was a dreadlocked Reborn Christian for whom marijuana and the rituals of smoking it were holy.