Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (28 page)

Blanche was enjoying England, particularly the hunting and horse racing, but she reluctantly packed up her life there and headed back to the island with her son, Chris. There she divided her time between the Terra Nova mansion in Kingston and a cottage called Bolt on the Wentworth north-coast banana estate that she decided to rebuild.

Here she found herself a close neighbour of Noël Coward, who had bought the land for both Blue Harbour and Firefly from Blanche’s brother Roy. ‘I thought I should be polite and invite him for a drink,’ Blanche remembered. ‘I was quite sure he would put me off. When
he accepted I was frightened stiff; what do you say to a man like that?’ But when Coward came up the steps, they simply clicked: ‘there was an instant recognition; it was as though we had known each other all our lives’. Thereafter Blanche would remain one of Coward’s closest Jamaica friends.

Blanche had known Ian’s friend Ivar Bryce since the 1930s. He, like Coward, loved her combination of demureness and spirit. ‘She is joyful,’ Bryce wrote of Blanche, ‘her peals of laughter can banish any despondent thoughts.’

It was towards the end of Fleming’s 1956 stay in Jamaica that he and Blanche met at last, at a dinner party given by Charles and Mildred D’Costa, at whose lavish Kingston home Ann and Ian had stayed before picking up her father, stepmother and Lucian Freud two years previously. Blanche didn’t like Charles, but accepted the invitation as Mildred was a bridge-playing friend. She took along her current house guests, the former Governor of Jamaica, Sir Arthur Richards, and his wife.

Ian clearly found the whole thing utterly ghastly. At one point he called Richards’ wife a ‘silly bitch’, rude even for him. His first words to Blanche were little better: talk turned to the burgeoning homosexual community on the north coast – both male and female – and Blanche told Fleming that her family owned extensive land there. Fleming retorted: ‘You’re not another lesbian, are you?’

Blanche, though offended, had been warned about Fleming, and was nonetheless a little bit intrigued. Her son Chris says that his mother ‘Loved the English. She was strictly into expats.’ She was also taken by Ian’s ‘blue eyes and coal black hair’ and his ‘rugged vitality’. There was instant physical attraction on his part as well. Previously Ann had asked Ivar Bryce not to tell her what Ian got up to without her, unless he was ‘near a middle-aged Jewess’. Ian later said that his ideal woman was not the pert-bottomed Bond girl but someone who was ‘thirtyish, Jewish, a companion who wouldn’t need education in the
arts of love. She would aim to please, have firm flesh and kind eyes.’ (In
Dr No,
Honeychile Rider’s ‘behind’ is described as ‘almost as firm and rounded as a boy’s’. Noël Coward wrote to Ian, ‘I know we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of.’ Tatiana Romanov in
From Russia, with Love
had a ‘behind that jutted out like a man’s’.)

Blanche had been very exclusively raised and was impeccably polite and well-mannered, but at the same time she was not above playing up to the West Indian Creole stereotype of unashamed sensuality. At over a hundred years old, she remains today a curious mix of the expected formality of her age and class but also a lively, adventurous spirit who frequently breaks off talking with the exclamation ‘I’m very strange! I’m a wild animal, you know!’ This was an alluring combination for Fleming – the Jamaican cocktail of ‘disciplined exoticism’ that had done so much to shape the Bond novels.

After the party, Fleming sent Blanche a telegram saying he wanted to see her again. She invited him to dinner, but then had to retract when the Richardses refused to have anything to do with him. Eventually a new arrangement was made: ‘I had this party, with two friends, just the four of us,’ says Blanche. Fleming was ‘quite different’ this time, ‘completely charming’. A few days later, he stayed with her in Kingston, and she helped him buy a scooter and toy train for Caspar. In letters to Ann, he played down their time together, writing that Blanche would be ‘quite a pleasant neighbour’.

When she had returned to Jamaica, Blanche had found her old riding haunts on the north coast so built up that, as she puts it, she ‘took to the sea’. Her guide was Barrington Roper, a local fisherman who had represented Jamaica at international swimming competitions and now worked as a lifeguard at Tower Isle Hotel. He was also an expert spear fisher, catching snapper, barracuda and parrotfìsh and then selling them door to door, at Bolt and Blue Harbour among other places. He taught Blanche about the pleasures and dangers of the
ocean, including how to deter barracuda attacks by ‘showing no fear’. She became a huge enthusiast, and was delighted when Ian invited her to snorkel at Goldeneye. She had known the land when it was still a racecourse, as she and Joe Blackwell had owned a string of racehorses before the war, and it was now the nearest beach to her house at Bolt.

According to Bryce, Blanche was ‘a fine swimmer’, able ‘to plunge into the depths in search of trigger fish and octopuses with skill of a
high degree’. Of course, this was a passion she shared with Ian. She also brought Barrington Roper to meet Ian, and thereafter he too became a regular presence at Goldeneye. He remembers diving for shells with Fleming, and how he would sometimes drop by on his way back from Tower Isle, and talk for hours about ‘fish and underwater things’, a subject Ian would never tire of. Sometimes he would stay for dinner. ‘We became friends,’ he says.

Barrington Roper has been incorrectly attributed as inspiration for Fleming’s Quarrel character. In fact he did not meet Fleming until after Quarrel’s first outing in
Live and Let Die.
Nonetheless, like Quarrel with Bond, Roper now showed Ian, Blanche, Noël and all their respective guests ‘the ways of the reef’. He was such a reassuring presence that some of Ian’s ‘friends from England’, he remembers, ‘sometimes they wouldn’t go out to the reef unless I was with them’.

With Blanche now spending so much time at Goldeneye (and offering to keep an eye on it in Ian’s absence in return for swimming rights on the beach), there were inevitable rumours that they were having an affair. Blanche was horrified, and rode up to Firefly to berate Coward for spreading the incorrect gossip. Ian had tried it on, she told Noël, but she had rejected his advances. Coward as ever was intrigued by his friends’ romances, and was already writing a play,
Volcano,
about Ian, Blanche and Ann.

Also returned to Jamaica with Blanche was her eighteen-year-old son Chris, who would have an important role to play in the story of Bond and Goldeneye. He had been born in England, but grew up in Jamaica. Partly because he was sickly – suffering very badly from asthma – his childhood was almost as isolated and solitary as that of his mother in the 1920s. At one point he had an English nanny, remembered by Chris as ‘kinda cruel’, and a tutor flown out from England (who was so ineffectual that Chris could hardly read or write at seven). He ‘never saw anyone’, and the only friends he remembers are the Kirkwoods’ daughter Roberta, and the Foot children. ‘The only
people I spent any time with were the black staff,’ he says. ‘There were more than twenty for the huge house, with land, horses, gardens … All the pictures I have of that time are of them. There are no pictures with other children. I’d line them up, like school photos and take their picture. I was still the little Lord Fauntleroy but I really got to know them, and became friends with them. I cared for them, and I think they cared for me a bit, although there was still a huge natural divide.’

In 1945, Chris had been taken to England and put into a Catholic school, where he spent most of his time in the sanatorium. After that, he attended Harrow School, but left before completing his A levels.

He always considered himself Jamaican, and that his future was to be in Jamaica. Before he left England, he had secured himself a job as an ADC to Sir Hugh Foot. So he was now living at King’s House, which he loved. He adored Sir Hugh, and enjoyed the excitement of the time when ‘Bustamante and Manley and all the top politicians and people, who were going to take over Jamaica, were coming to King’s House all the time. He was very good with them. They all really loved Hugh Foot.’ Chris remembers also the excitement of visiting
Goldeneye and hearing Fleming and Coward in mid verbal joust. Fleming made a good impression on him. ‘In those days children were seen and not heard,’ he says, ‘but Fleming always talked to me as an adult. There was a coldness to him, but he would open up and talk to me.’

After a short trip with Ivar Bryce to Inagua in the Bahamas, Fleming returned to England on 22 March to find Ann in much better health. At Enton Hall she had lost nearly five pounds and was now ‘free from pain’. Fleming, however, was suffering from sciatica and a heavy cold, and checked himself in to the same sanatorium. Though it would provide useful material for the scenes at ‘Shrublands’ in
Thunderball,
it was of little use for his health, partly because he would not stick to the regime. He went to see Dr Beal soon afterwards, who noted that ‘He complains of greater exhaustion than is natural in a man of his age.’ Beal suggested a better diet and advised against any cigarettes or alcohol. Fleming cut down to fifty Morlands a day, and switched to bourbon, but his stepson Raymond remembers noticing that he was still ‘drinking a great deal’. There then followed a return of his agonising kidney stones, which necessitated a stay in the London Clinic and large quantities of morphine.

Almost all Fleming’s efforts to make Bond a more rounded character involved putting more of himself into his creation. And so, for the first time, readers would begin to see Fleming’s declining health and vitality leaking into Bond. In the first four books, he is fit and vigorous: in
Casino Royale,
the doctor treating his torture injuries tells him that few men could have survived them; in
Live and Let Die
, he is ‘strong and compact and confident’; in
Moonraker,
he is the best shot in the service; in
Diamonds are Forever,
his medical shows ‘he is in pretty good shape’. But in
From Russia, with Love,
Bond has a new physical and mental ennui. The chapter ‘The Soft Life’, originally titled ‘The Boredom of Bond’, begins, ‘The blubbery arms of the
soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him. He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into decline.’ Now he is ‘restless and indecisive’. Action, however, has its own dangers, and we hear that, for assassins like Bond, eventually ‘The soul sickens of it… A germ of death enters his body and eats into him like a canker. Melancholy and drink take him, and a dreadful lassitude which brings a glaze to the eyes and slows up movements.’

An antidote for this lethargy is found in the character of Kerim. ‘I drink and smoke too much,’ he tells Bond. ‘I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone “This Man Died from Living Too Much”.’ For Fleming, this had also become the thinking behind his refusal to stop smoking or meaningfully reduce his alcohol intake. Copying a phrase from another writer, he wrote in his notebook: ‘Death is like any untamed animal. He respects a scornful eye.’

Fleming was also suffering from The Boredom of Bond. That summer he wrote to Raymond Chandler, ‘My muse is in a bad way … I am getting fed up with Bond and it has been very difficult to make him go through his tawdry tricks.’ He decided to add a final twist to the very end of the new book – Rosa Klebb kicks Bond with her poisoned shoe dagger.
From Russia, with Love
thus ends: ‘Bond pivoted slowly on his heel and crashed headlong to the wine-red floor.’ Fleming leaves us hanging, not knowing whether Bond is dead or alive.

While Fleming moped, Ann was becoming ever more social, and her dinners more. frequent and high-powered. One boasted the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, Randolph Churchill and Robert Boothby, an influential Tory politician and broadcaster. She had a strong rapport with the ‘gentle and loving’ Labour leader, and soon afterwards
the two of them began going dancing together at the Café Royal, nightclubbing with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon or staying with Ann’s aristocratic friends in the country. ‘Gaitskell is a changed man,’ Ann wrote to Beaverbrook. ‘All he wants is wine, women and song.’