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.
Fleming with Barrington Roper and a large barracuda.
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.’
Messing about in the water with Blanche Blackwell.
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,’ h
e 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.’
In the autumn, Ann and Gaitskell started an affair that would last until his death in 1963, meeting for trysts at the house of Anthony Crosland. Trade unionist figures disapproved of the way in which Ann Fleming ‘showed him the pleasures of upper class frivolity’, but for her this was part of the challenge and the fun. In November, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘Mr Gaitskell came to lunch … He had never seen cocktails with mint in them or seen a magnum of champagne, he was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper classes were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow his vermin to destroy them.’
In the meantime, Ian had been conducting an affair with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter Lady Jeanne Campbell, then in her twenties. It seems that he was the first to stray since his and Ann’s marriage, but, as Blanche Blackwell remembers, he was furious about Ann’s infidelity.
Before Ian’s next visit to Jamaica, Goldeneye, through an extraordinary and somewhat ironic set of circumstances, was to become famous.
In July that year, President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal. Britain’s government led by Sir Anthony Eden responded by planning a joint attack with Israel and France to regain control of the waterway and remove Nasser from power, at the same time, it was hoped, dealing a blow to the region’s Arab nationalism and Soviet influence.
The whole operation was dressed up as a peacemaking intervention by Britain and France to separate Israeli and Egyptian forces, though this was quickly seen as a sham. It was, as Eisenhower would comment, going to war ‘in the mid-Victorian style’, a throwback to the days of high imperialism.
A bad-tempered television debate on 31 October, featuring the popular historian A. J. P. Taylor, Lord Boothby and Michael Foot, demonstrated how divided the country was. On the same day, as British bombers hit Cairo, Hugh Gaitskell told the House of Commons that it was ‘an act of disastrous folly whose tragic consequences we shall regret for years. Yes, all of us will regret it, because it will have done irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country.’
Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express was supportive, declaring that Eden was acting ‘to safeguard the life of the British Empire’. The Prime Minister himself believed that unless they met the challenge of Nasser, ‘Britain would become another Netherlands’. But because Eden suspected that the United States was out ‘to replace the British Empire’, he made the fatal mistake of not ‘consulting the Americans’, and now President Eisenhower led the widespread condemnation of the attack, even voting with the Soviets and against Britain and France in the UN. He also blocked Britain’s access to the International Monetary Fund until she withdrew her troops, and refused to provide the oil to replace supplies interrupted from the Middle East; ministers feared a disastrous run on the pound.
With most of the Commonwealth refusing to provide support, Eden broke, calling a ceasefire on 6 November, even as troops were still landing. It was a stunning humiliation, a demonstration to the world that the British Empire was now ‘toothless, immoral and anachronistic’. The Deputy Cabinet Secretary judged the crisis ‘the psychological watershed, the moment when it became apparent that Britain was no longer capable of being a great imperial power’. Sir Anthony Nutting, who resigned from his position as Foreign Minister over the attack, called it the ‘dying convulsion of British Imperialism’. Conservative opinion also saw it as ending the hopes of the Commonwealth as a ‘military or economic bloc’ and a huge boost for anti-colonial movements all around the British Empire.
After Suez, there could be no more doubts about the way the Empire was going. Colonialism was more than ever a dirty word. ‘Empire Day’ became ‘Commonwealth Day’ in Britain, and four years later, the UN passed resolution 1514, which recognised that ‘the peoples of the world ardently desire the end of colonialism in all its manifestations’.
Noël Coward, who had now sold his homes in England and was dividing his time between Jamaica, Bermuda and Switzerland, saw Suez as the end of ‘good old imperialism’ and the ‘British Empire, a great and wonderful social, economic and even spiritual experiment’. The decision to ‘
knock Nasser for six was a good one’, he wrote to a friend at the end of November. The real mistake, he believed, was withdrawing troops from the Canal Zone in the first place. This had been due, he wrote, to ‘our usual misguided passion to prove to the Americans and the rest of the world what wonderful guys we were. We just let go our hold as we have done, with disastrous results, in so many other parts of the world.’
Coward had recently become Britain’s first high-profile tax exile, prompting a backlash, but for him, London had become as grey as Moscow, and the British beyond saving: We’ve lost our will to work, lost our sense of industry, lost our sense of pride in our heritage and above all lost our inherent conviction that we are a great race.’ Fleming was similarly appalled by the disaster. In a letter to his Jamaica friend Sir William Stephenson, he wrote: ‘In the whole of modern history I can’t think of a comparable shambles created by any single country.’
Eden himself now became erratic and apocalyptic, and his health, which had been very poor for a number of years, deteriorated rapidly. On 21 November, Downing Street announced that he was ‘suffering from the effects of severe overstrain. On the advice of his doctors he has cancelled his immediate public engagements.’ The following day, the news came out: with exquisite irony, Eden had chosen to recover at Goldeneye, the birthplace of the imperial hero Bond, the ‘one-man Suez task force’.
Predictably, there were digs about the ‘Sunshine Trip’ and accusations that the captain was deserting a sinking ship. Randolph Churchill waded in, drawing a parallel between Suez and the Battle of Stalingrad, saying that not even Hitler had wintered in Jamaica. The Daily Mirror ran a competition on how best to solve the Suez crisis, with the first prize being a three-week holiday for two in Jamaica.
Ian was delighted; Ann less so. She had told her friend Clarissa Eden about Goldeneye, which was how the idea for the trip had formed, but now she was worried that the Edens would find the house horribly uncomfortable and primitive. As she was not officially supposed to know about the Edens’ plans, it was only when Clarissa confided in her forty-eight hours before departure that she was able to warn her of Goldeneye’s drawbacks. ‘She seemed disconcerted,’ Ann wrote to Waugh, ‘to hear that if one wished a bath one had to give two days’ notice, and that I did not know if there was a dentist on the island and that all the doctors were black. I warned her that shoes must be worn while bathing, and that the reef abounded with scorpion fish, barracuda and urchins … The plumbing is not good at the moment, after plugs are pulled noises of hunting horns are heard for at least twenty minutes … I think Torquay and a sun-ray lamp would have been more peaceful and more patriotic.’
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 20
