Parker - Goldeneye

GOLDENEYE

WHERE BOND WAS BORN:
IAN FLEMINGS JAMAICA

MATTHEW PARKER

For Anne and Paul Swain, with love and thanks
for the ever-generous enthusiasm

My own life has been turned upside down at, or perhaps even by, the small house named Goldeneye I built on the north shore, and by my life in Jamaica.

Ian Fleming, 1963

Contents

July 1943: a high-level Anglo-American naval conference in Kingston, Jamaica. German U-boats are causing havoc in the Caribbean, sinking vital shipping.

Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence Ian Fleming is sent to the island to help deal with the pressing problem. There are wild rumours that Axel Wenner-Gren, the millionaire Swede supposedly linked to Hermann Goering, has built a secret submarine base on Hog Island, his private paradise isle near Nassau. Urgent action is needed to prevent threats to the vital shipping route from the Gulf of Mexico to Europe and Africa.

Fleming brings along his boyhood friend Ivar Bryce, who also works in intelligence. Bryce is keen to show Fleming Jamaica, where his current wife has recently purchased a famous plantation Great House, Bellevue, perched 1,500 feet above Kingston. This is where the two men will stay.

Fleming and Bryce meet in New York and take the Silver Meteor to Miami the very same journey that will one day be replicated by Bond and Solitaire in Live and Let Die. From there they fly to Kingston, to find Jamaica pelting with rain as well as quivering with the heat of a Turkish bath. The five-day conference takes place at Kingstons waterside Myrtle Bank, one of the islands largest and best hotels. But thanks to Bryce, Fleming retreats each night from the sticky heat of the city up to the serenity of Bellevue.

It is at Bellevue that the story of Fleming in Jamaica begins. It is here that Fleming falls in love with the island that will give birth to his iconic creation: British intelligence officer James Bond.

Borrowing a car, Fleming and Bryce headed through the growing darkness and relentless downpour to Half Way Tree (then a village outside Kingston), before leaving the main road to climb a zigzagging track, the surface of which resembled a river bed. After endless hairpin bends, requiring very careful driving, they reached Bellevue at last. It was dark, locked and had clearly seen better days. Shouting and knocking eventually produced Elizabeth, the old Jamaican caretaker, who let them in and rustled up a stringy, tasteless chicken and some unaccustomed yams for them to eat. There was no alcohol; only a bottle of grenadine, so that was what they drank that first night. Holding the pink glass, Fleming took a chair out on to the veranda, edging it as near the falling curtain of rain as possible. There he sat staring out into the streaming darkness, lost in thought.

For two hundred years, the Great House had served for visiting dignitaries and high-ranking colonial officials as a getaway from the heat and humidity of the city below. Nelson himself a hero of Fleming had lodged there. Bellevue had been through a large number of owners since Nelsons visits, and had operated as a small plantation, growing in different periods coffee, pimento, ginger, avocados and bananas. In Flemings time it looked out over a huge green expanse of sugar cane at the feet of the red hills to the west. Around the house lay a rich tropical garden, including a nutmeg walk. Behind the estate to the east the mountains rose to their Blue Peak, 7,000 feet above sea level, and in front stretched an arresting view all the way across Kingston, the bay and the azure sea beyond.

J. B. Kidds lithograph of Bellevue from 1835. Kidd specialised in idealised views of plantation life.

Blanche Blackwell (ne Lindo), who would become Flemings lover and closest companion in Jamaica, visited Bellevue as a teenager in the late 1920s. For her, it was a special place, but menacing. She remembers lovely grounds around it, but also that the house had a very bad history. The story went that a young woman had thrown herself off the cliff at the front of the property. It was definitely haunted, says Blanche. She and her brothers had gone there with a Ouija board to make contact with the ghost.

Today, little of the original house remains, beside those bits made of stone the kitchen, water butt, foundations and an outhouse. A house-sitter squats in a couple of the remaining rooms, and keeps the bush down immediately beside the heavily barred building. A dog patrols the overgrown grounds, where fruits of all descriptions drip off the trees ackee, jackfruit, cocoa, custard apple, naseberry. Few are collected and the fallen fruits are a riot of wasps, flies and crawling insects. The baking hot air carries a sweet, rotting smell. To the back of the property there is an ugly straggle of houses, some unfinished, as well as uncleared bush. The view across to Kingston is still there at the front, though. The current occupier, a scruffy-looking blue-eyed but black-skinned Jamaican, knows the story of the haunting, but declares he does not believe in ghosts, before adding, archly, How do you know I am not a ghost?

For the next five days, Fleming and Bryce followed a routine of an early start down the mountain, the suppurating heat of the conference in the city, then the arduous climb in the dark back up to Bellevue, now equipped with the essential gin, foods with more variety, and baskets of gorgeous, unknown fruits. But the weather never relented; Fleming wrote that it rained in rods. Bryce remembered that little toadstools appeared in our leather shoes during the night. He was depressed that Fleming had not been able to see the beauties of Bellevue or the islands other romantic attractions, which he had described at length to his friend. I had hoped that Ian would love Jamaica and perhaps come and stay with us if the war ever ended, he wrote. Sadly, Jamaica had been really dreadful.

But as their plane climbed above Kingston, Fleming suddenly snapped his briefcase closed and turned to Bryce, announcing, Ivar, I have made a great decision. When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica. Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.

The successful opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games presented for the consumption of a huge worldwide television audience a tableau of Britains past, present and future. It was overwhelmingly positive no mention was made of empire or slavery and was clearly aimed at projecting an idea of Britishness quirky, creative, tolerant that we could all celebrate.

The undisputed climax of the show was, of course, the Queen and James Bond. The two great British anachronisms. Bond has an audience with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and then together they appear to parachute into the Olympic stadium to the accompaniment of what must be the most recognisable theme tune in movie history.

It was very funny, and very surprising, that the Queen would agree to appear with this particular fictional character in a scene that poked fun at her age, with her stunt double parachuting in clutching a handbag. When the laughter had died down, though, hastened on its way by the frowning expression of the real Queen, who now appeared in the stands, there was another double-take head-scratching moment: how on earth had Ian Flemings James Bond ascended to such heights of national iconography?