Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (3 page)

By the end of the war his romantic life had become complicated by an affair with a woman much more formidable than his usual casual conquests. He had first met Ann O’Neill, as she then was, in August 1935 by a swimming pool in the fashionable French resort of Le Touquet, subsequently the model for Royale-les-Eaux in
Casino Royale.
With her was a friend, Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, who described the twenty-seven-year-old Fleming as ‘the most attractive man I’ve ever seen’. Ann, who had recently married, found him a ‘handsome and moody creature’, ‘godlike but unapproachable’.

Ann, originally a Charteris, was five years younger than Ian, and connected through her Tennant mother to just about everyone in the British aristocracy. Her mother had died when she was eleven. She would later write that ‘None of us had any affection in our tempestuous childhood and I have only seen its necessity very late.’ Her marriage to Lord O’Neill produced two children, Raymond and Fionn, born in 1933 and 1936 respectively, but she remained a restless, bohemian spirit. A lifetime friend summed her up as ‘a slim, dark, handsome, highly strung, iconoclastic creature with a fine pair of flashpoint eyes … [she] provokes extreme reactions as a wasp provokes panic’.

Ian had played golf with Ann’s husband, who invited him to join them and their circle for bridge at the Dorchester, to which London elite society had retreated for the duration of the war. Here, among the dukes and duchesses, Ian and Ann got to know one another better. ‘I thought Ian original and entertaining,’ Ann recalled. ‘He was immensely attractive and had enormous charm.’ He was also ‘unlike anyone else I had ever met. There was something defensive and untamed about him, like a wild animal.’

When Shane O’Neill left England for active service in Africa as a major in the North Irish Horse Guards, Ann and Ian began going for meals and to the cinema together. ‘I never showed Ian I was in love with him,’ Ann later wrote. ‘I knew instinctively it would be fatal, but I did know he was becoming more and more dependent on me. He said I had the heart of a drum-majorette which off-set his melancholy.’ With her husband away, she had several men pursuing her, but found herself drawn to Fleming’s rakish insouciance and
‘very
dominant personality’. Sometime early in the war, she succumbed to his advances. In a throwaway remark to a friend, she once declared she could not understand why people took their emotions so seriously. She was attracted to ‘cads and bounders’, she declared.

O’Neill was killed in Italy in 1944, and Ann expected Ian to ask her to marry him. When this did not happen, in June 1945 she accepted the proposal of another lover, Esmond Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere, proprietor of the
Daily Mail.
He had been having an affair with her since 1936. Ann later wrote: ‘the night before I married Esmond I dined with Ian, and we walked and walked in the park. He said several times “I want to leave some kind of mark on you.” If he had suggested marriage I would have accepted.’

Ann moved into Rothermere’s lavish Warwick House on the border of Green Park, where she became London’s society hostess par excellence. Before the end of 1946, Warwick House was operating in the ‘affluent pre-War style’, the first to do so. Her dinner parties brought together famous artists, authors and cabinet ministers. They were predominantly establishment and Tory, with guests including Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill, denouncing ‘that little rat Attlee’, but Ann herself was a ‘stimulating
inspiratrice
’ who liked ‘a spirited contest, which she sometimes actively encouraged’.

Ann continued her affair with Fleming; if anything, her recent marriage added extra spice to their relationship, and she could not resist his strange combination of consideration and disdain. Fleming’s close friend and fellow naval intelligence officer William Plomer described him as ‘not a man of single aspect’, with a ‘private self, hidden or withdrawn’. To another friend he was ‘a brilliant and witty talker, with ideas on everything’, but others noticed how he ‘conveyed the sense of being alone when not alone’. He was a man then of multiple, sometimes conflicting characteristics, the product of his age and background but somehow distanced, never fully at ease with either; someone in need of a place away from it all where he could at last be himself and whole. And so, when in 1943 he found himself in Jamaica, it seemed that he might finally – and unexpectedly – have discovered that home.

1946 Oracabessa and ‘Old Jamaica’

Mr Luttrell’s house was left empty, shutters banging in the wind. Soon the black people said it was haunted, they wouldn’t go near it.

Jean Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea

When Fleming announced his intention to build a house in Jamaica, he begged Bryce to help him find the right site: ‘Ten acres or so, away from towns and on the coast … There must be cliffs of some sort and a secret bay and no roads between the house and the shore. When you’ve fixed it for me I’ll build a house and write and live there.’

Bryce returned to Jamaica at the end of the war and had an enjoyable time searching the island’s ‘by-roads and beaches’. But it was his letter to a local land agent, ‘an old gentleman … mostly of white descent called Reggie Aquart’, that delivered the longed-for retreat to Fleming. Aquart was from Martinique but lived in Highgate, near Port Maria. According to him, Bryce had listed Fleming’s requirements as ‘a little place with good swimming and an island’. Soon Aquart reported back to Bryce that he had found the right spot, if ‘the Commander’ could go to £2,000.

Bryce accompanied Aquart to the site, a fourteen-acre strip on the north coast in St Mary, about 500 yards long and 200 deep, alongside the village and harbour of Oracabessa. There was a sprinkling of big trees – banyan and silk cotton – but mostly rough grass, weeds and bush. There had been a racecourse here some years before, but now all that remained were a few fence posts and the ruins of a shack that had once been a kiosk selling banana dumplings to the racegoers. Out to sea lay a stunning view of a tranquil aquamarine bay protected by a broad and tangled reef some twenty yards from the coast. But here the land was high above the water, which lay at the bottom of a forty-foot cliff Bryce and Aquart crawled forward carefully to look over the edge. Below, they discovered a strip of silver sand ‘the length of a cricket pitch’. Bryce immediately envisaged stone steps descending to this private idyll. About ten feet out from the beach was a small rock, supporting a single
Portlandia grandiflora,
a Jamaican native with large bell-like white flowers. Presumably this qualified as Fleming’s desired island. Tied to the plant was a dugout canoe, and swimming lazily towards the boat was a young naked girl. ‘He will adore this place,’ said Bryce. ‘Tie it up tomorrow, Reggie.’

Bryce cabled Fleming in England and received a prompt and direct reply: ‘Pray pause not Ian.’ Fleming transferred £2,000 into the account of the land’s owner, an Irish Jamaican called Christie Cousins, and the deal was done. Straight away Fleming started planning the house he would build in this idyllic-sounding spot, reading the area’s history and poring over naval maps of his new domain.

There was something innocent and prelapsarian, magical even, in the location found by Bryce and Aquart. Of course, it was along this coast that Columbus first sailed when he ‘discovered’ Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, reporting it to be ‘a paradise’, ‘the fairest island that eyes have beheld; mountainous and the land seems to touch the sky’.

Jamaica was at that time the most heavily populated of the Greater Antilles, the coastline thickly dotted with villages. The Taínos, whom Columbus called Arawaks, had been there for about 2,500 years, and what became Fleming’s parish of St Mary was one of their first settlements. They had spread over the whole of the island – which they called ‘Hamaika’, ‘land of wood and streams’ – but most of their settlements were near the coast. There may have been as many as 50,000 Taínos at the time of European contact.

A peaceful, ‘uncovetous’ and gentle people, the Taíno ‘Indians’ were wiped out within two generations of Columbus landing on the island. The rigours and indignities of slavery, as the Spanish sent them mining in search of non-existent gold, together with the newly imported diseases, in particular smallpox, saw all but a handful perish. They left behind only a sprinkling of pottery and artefacts, and a ‘handful of heartbreakingly relaxed sounding words’ – hammock, barbecue, savannah, canoe.

The parish was also one of the first sections of the island to be occupied by the Spaniards. Port Maria, the capital of St Mary, just east
of Oracabessa, was first recorded in world history in 1516, when the Spaniards built their second town on the north coast. (According to Bond’s cover story in
Casino Royale
, this is where he lives.) It was close to here, too, that Spanish rule was finally ended 150 years later. The Spanish in Jamaica were few and weak; most had moved on in search of Eldorado, the fantastical city of gold. Nevertheless, following the invasion of Jamaica by a Cromwellian English force in 1655, the Spanish and their slaves took to the hills, fighting a bitter guerrilla war and landing occasional raiding parties on the north coast. In 1658 came the greatest effort at reconquest when nearly a thousand men from Cuba were put ashore just east of Oracabessa, where they quickly established a fort in a strong position on high ground protected by the deep Rio Nuevo.

Edward D’Oyley, the English governor of Jamaica at this time, was on the other side of the island. Rather than brave the guerrillas of the interior, he took a force of 750 by sea, landing a short distance from the Spanish position. By circling round through thick woods behind the fort, he managed to find a weak spot. With his vanguard throwing crude grenades into the palisade, scaling ladders were rushed up and the fort was breached. As D’Oyley reported, ‘many of them made shift to run out of their Works, and ours followed their chase about three or four miles, doing execution’. Three hundred Spanish soldiers were killed, against some fifty English. Others fled down the cliff into the sea, where the offshore current carried them away. The English victory at Rio Nuevo saw the end of Spanish hopes of regaining the island. So, uniquely among the Greater Antilles, Jamaica would be British.

When Fleming touched down at the Palisadoes airport in early January 1946, the rain that had blighted his first visit two and a half years before was mercifully absent, and the drive from the airport, along the ‘cactus-fringed road’ in the darkness, was a pleasure. In
Dr No,
Fleming describes the same journey, with its ‘steady zing of the crickets, the rush of warm, scented air … the necklace of yellow lights shimmering across the harbour’.

He was delighted with the site acquired for him by Bryce, and straight away set the construction in motion, securing the services of Reggie Aquart to manage the project, and appointing local architects Scovell and Barber to bring to life the sketches he had made back in London. For Fleming it was essential that the building should be ‘simple’ and that there should be ‘no glass in the windows, only good old Jamaica jalousies’. He wanted it, he later wrote, ‘so that the birds could fly through and so he could live as much inside as outside’. The cost of the build, which included a garage nearby with staff quarters, was another £2,000.

The design that emerged was indeed simple, even utilitarian, like Grant’s villa in
From Russia, with Love
: ‘modern – a squat elongated box without ornament’. Unusually for Jamaica, there were to be thick walls of local limestone rubble, unreinforced, with cut limestone facing. Another expatriate, American artist Marion Simmons, who had a house, Glory Be, built nearby soon after, described a typical construction scene: the ‘native crew’ is ‘a small army of men, women, children, and donkeys. The men break big pieces of rock with sledge hammers, the children carry the pieces to the women, who sit with little hammers, breaking them into smaller pieces. The general effect is like a gypsy camp and very picturesque too. They build little fires and cook their meals, and the sun filters through the trees touching their bright clothing. They sing and laugh and fight and seem very much at home.’