Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (27 page)

‘Doesn’t do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this business. They hang on your gun-arm, if you know what I mean.’

M to Bond,
From Russia, with Love

The following year’s Goldeneye sojourn once again caused furious rows. Ann was determined that Caspar should accompany them, but Ian was adamant that he should stay in England: in the end, Ann herself refused to come. Instead, she used the time to check into a health farm, Enton Hall in Surrey, ostensibly for treatment for fibrosis, but also to help wean her off the barbiturates to which she had become addicted. So, for the first time since their marriage, Ian was on his own at Goldeneye.

This year’s book, in terms of reviews and sales, was his best so far.
From Russia, with Love
would remain the novel Fleming was most proud of. Here he returns with great gusto to the Cold War, loading the narrative with insider details on intelligence practices, including references to recent events. The villains are again the Soviets who, the head of SMERSH declares, ‘continue to forge everywhere stealthily ahead – revolution in Morocco, arms to Egypt … trouble in Cyprus,
riots in Turkey, strikes in England, great political gains in France’. Their leaders have been visiting ‘India and the East and blackguard [ing] the English’.

The Russians only understand the stick, Bond tells us later, but in Britain ‘the trouble today is that carrots for all are the fashion. At home and abroad. We don’t show teeth any more – only gums.’

But there is one bastion left. At the meeting of SMERSH near the beginning of the novel – in a chapter titled ‘The Moguls of Death’ – the various strengths and weaknesses of the West’s secret services are discussed in an effort to target the best with a ‘conspicuous act of terrorism’. The summary is delivered by General Vozdvishensky, to whom Fleming gives impeccable authority: he is a ‘professional spy to his fingertips’ with a fine war record against Germany and Japan. The smaller countries don’t have the resources, the General says. Italy and Spain are too focused on the Mediterranean; the French services have been thoroughly ‘penetrated’ (although Mathis from
Casino Royale
gets a good mention). The Americans ‘have the biggest and richest service among our enemies’, but ‘have no understanding of the work … [they] try to do everything with money’, But ‘England is a different matter altogether.’

‘Their agents are good,’ General Vozdvishensky says. ‘They pay them little money – only a thousand or two thousand roubles a month – but they serve with devotion. Yet these agents have no special privileges in England, no relief from taxation and no special shops such as we have, from which they can buy cheap goods. Their social standing abroad is not high, and their wives have to pass as the wives of secretaries. They are rarely awarded a decoration until they retire. And yet these men and women continue to do this dangerous work. It is curious. It is perhaps the Public School and University tradition. The love of adventure.’

It is this ‘spirit of adventure’ that has built the Empire and that is now the great hope of Britain ‘punching above its weight’. The Service
still has the global reach that used to characterise British power before the Empire started to decline; its operatives are self-reliant, piratical perhaps, but vigorous, a million miles from what Fleming calls the ‘featherbedded’ modern youth of the Welfare State era. Later in the same novel, Bond reflects that the Russians have ‘all the money and equipment in the world, while the Secret Service put against them a handful of adventurous, underpaid men’. In the non-fiction
Diamond Smugglers,
published the same year, Fleming tells us that John Blaize is one of ‘Britain’s best secret agents’ because of his ‘taste for adventure and a romantic streak’.

So it is in the Secret Services that Fleming sees preserved – perhaps uniquely – everything he cherished about his country.

John Le Carré is, of course, a very different writer from Fleming. Characters like Smiley and Leamas – the central figure in Le Carré’s 1963 breakthrough novel
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
– can even be seen as ‘anti-Bonds’, sharing none of his glamour, casual sadism, sense of purpose and self-assurance. But in a 1989 interview, Le Carré, when asked why he returned to work for the Secret Service, replied: ‘In my quest for a moral institution I believed that somewhere in the heart of the brotherhood of intelligence the key was to be found to our identity, to our collective desires and our destiny … I grew up in the decline of the tradition of the Empire, and I believe I considered our secret intelligence service to be the last church of this Empire theology.’

Indeed, in
A Perfect Spy,
Le Carré’s most autobiographical creation, we are told that Pym ‘loved the firm … He adored its rough, uncomprehending trust in him, its misuse of him, its tweedy bear-hugs, flawed romanticism and cock-eyed integrity.’ In
The Man with the Golden Gun,
Bond similarly reflects on M: ‘He’s a romantic at heart like all the silly bastards who get mixed up with the Service.’ For both very different writers, the Secret Service represents the last bastion of what used to be great about Britain.

In
From Russia, with Love,
SMERSH are looking to target someone from the ranks of the British Secret Service ‘who is admired and whose ignominious destruction would cause dismay. Myths are built on heroic deeds and heroic people. Have they no such men?’ Of course they do; Bond, who has ‘at least twice frustrated the operations of SMERSH’, is selected for assassination.

Led by the repulsive Rosa Klebb, with a plan concocted by a Russian chess master, the agent of Bond’s destruction is to be Red Grant, ‘the result of a midnight union between a German professional weight-lifter and a Southern Irish waitress’. Named after Fleming’s favourite boatman on the Rio Grande banana rafts, ‘a cheerful, voluble giant of villainous aspect’, Red Grant is ‘an advanced manic depressive’ who works for the Russians because he admires ‘their brutality, their carelessness of human life, and their guile’. Part of his extensive training has been in incitement among ‘the colonial peoples, the negroes’.

Thanks to a visit Fleming had made in June 1955 to Istanbul to cover a meeting of Interpol for the
Sunday Times,
Bond has a well-observed and exciting new setting. And in Istanbul he meets the ‘shrewd pirate’ Darko Kerim, who runs Station T brilliantly on a shoestring and shares Bond’s nostalgia for the Second World War – ‘the excitement and turmoil of the hot war’. (Kerim’s office has a portrait of the Queen and borrowed, it seems, from Fleming’s wedding: ‘Cecil Beaton’s war-time photograph of Winston Churchill looking up from his desk in the Cabinet Offices like a contemptuous bulldog’.)

Typically, the plot of
From Russia, with Love
has some cracks, but Fleming keeps the action moving fast enough for the reader to skim over them. The climax takes place on the Orient Express, where Bond faces what seems like certain death at the hands of Grant, who warns him: ‘Careful, old man. No tricks. No Bulldog Drummond stuff will get you out of this one.’ Of course, Bond and Fleming have the last laugh because the Bulldog Drummond stuff with Grant’s bullet hitting Bond’s cigarette case works just fine.

The distant separation during the time of writing
From Russia, with Love
caused both Ann and Ian to write fondly to each other and, for Ann, a change in heart about Goldeneye. ‘I love scratching away with my paintbrush while Ian hammers out pornography next door,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Very sad without you,’ Ian wrote to Ann soon after his arrival. ‘Today started book. Got two conches but no fun as you weren’t there and sea
crawling
with lobster … It’s a wonderful place and I can’t sell it but you must be here. It belongs to you and you’re stupid not to come here. You must get rid ofyour fear of things. Your fears of things are as bad as my fears of people. (5th gin and tonic and goodnight my love and come if you possibly can) I love you only in the world,’ he finished the letter.

Ann replied that she was missing ‘our wonderful lives at Goldeneye’. ‘I have thought of the bean soup and the clucking bird and of your typewriter and the drunken Scrabble, and I don’t believe you realized how much I wanted to come and how much I mind you being alone there. I hope you won’t learn to be happy there without me.’ Ian replied: ‘I wish I could start again and wipe out the black patches in these four years but you can never know how desperately difficult I found it all.’

Ian relented and decided that next year Caspar should come out at last to the house. So down on his beach he built a mini-rock pool where the child could safely play, and also directed the construction of a gazebo on a spot at the extreme end of his property overlooking Oracabessa. Here, he planned to escape from his family to write.

On the aeroplane over from New York, Ian had met Truman Capote, who fascinated him with stories of his recent trip to the Soviet Union. Two weeks later, Capote, having telegrammed, turned up at Goldeneye ‘hustling and twittering along with his tiny face crushed under a Russian Commissar’s uniform hat’. He had hated Round Hill where he was staying, and he needed somewhere to write his series
of articles for the
New Yorker
about Russia — which would become his first book-length work of non-fiction,
The Muses Are Heard,
published that same year.

‘Can you imagine a more incongruous playmate for me?’ Ian wrote to Ann, but ‘he’s a fascinating character and we really get on very well’. Ann was most amused, writing back: ‘I do love the thought of you and Truman resting together. Goldeneye was the last heterosexual household. What will its reputation be now!’

Ian took Capote to meet Noël Coward at Firefly, his recently completed house up on Look-Out Hill. This was to be Coward’s writing retreat when the guests at Blue Harbour became too much of a disruption. It was a modest, 1930s-style one-storey, one-bedroom construction, with a large slit window similar to those at Goldeneye. Morris Cargill called it ‘another ugly house … I thought it was dreadful, but funnily enough, Noël … didn’t seem to have much in the way of taste either in his furniture or in his houses … He shared this with Ian Fleming. Neither of them had any good taste at all.’ The house was later improved with the removal of the crazy-paving-style cladding on the exterior, and still boasts a sensational view over Port Maria harbour.

According to Fleming, who was used to Coward ribbing him about the downsides of Goldeneye, the heavy rain had been hard on Coward’s new abode: ‘His Firefly house is near-disaster,’ he reported to Ann. ‘The rain pours into it from every angle and even through the stone walls so that the rooms are running with damp.’ Coward was living there on his own, which necessitated his secretary Cole Lesley spending ‘half the day running up and down in the car with ice and hot dishes of quiche Lorraine! A crazy set-up.’

Ian had other guests, including his American publisher, but most social time was spent with Coward and his circle. On one occasion, Noël, Ian and Graham Payn stayed at an old, falling-down villa on Negril beach for a few days: ‘nothing but buggers all around me’, Ian
wrote to Ann. For Ian, it was research for a series of articles about Jamaica for the
Sunday Times.
He described the bay at Negril as ‘the most beautiful I have seen in the world … the classic back-drop of Stevenson and Stacpoole [authors of
Robinson Crusoe
and
The Blue Lagoon
respectively]’. A large part of the attraction was the unspoilt, undeveloped nature of the spot. But he predicted, accurately as it turned out, that ‘one dreadful day this remote corner of Jamaica will be as famous a sunshine holiday-resort as any in the world’.

Also to gather material for his articles, there was a trip with Payn, Cole Lesley and Cargill’s wife Barbara to the Blue Mountains looking for rare birds. Fleming described it as being dragged somewhat unwillingly from ‘the soft enchantments of the tropic reed and the sun-baked sand of my pirate’s cove’ to ride uncomfortably on donkeys up the mountain.

Most importantly for his life in Jamaica, however, it was on this stay that Fleming met Blanche Blackwell. The previous year, she had received a summons from her family. Her father had died in 1946
and now her mother was finding running the family businesses overly onerous. Unless Blanche could come back to Jamaica and help out, they would have to sell the St Mary banana plantations.