Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Read Free Page A

remembered from this time ‘a series of appealing nymphs … the lady’s side followed a similar pattern composed of glamorous flirtation, abject slavery and fond nostalgia, in that order’.
    So while his elder brother Peter went from triumph to triumph – publishing in 1933 one of the most brilliant travel books of the century, Brazilian Adventure – Ian languished, gaining a reputation for a ‘cruel face’, arrogant charm and a sophisticated manner but little accomplishment outside the bedroom.
    He was rescued by the Second World War. As neurologist Sir James Maloney reflects in You Only Live Twice, ‘countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting-rooms when the last war had broken out’. Thanks to recommendations from banking and stockbroking friends, Fleming was recruited by naval intelligence to work as the personal assistant to the Director, Admiral Sir John Godfrey, with the rank of commander (which Bond would share). Although his role left him guilty that his nerves and bravery had not been tested by combat action, it was the perfect job for his character and attributes – his fantastical imagination, his love of travel and gadgets, his curiosity and attention to detail.
    ‘I couldn’t have had a more interesting war,’ Fleming told Desert Island Discs many years later. Indeed, Ivar Bryce described him during that time as ‘happy and electrically alive’. But there was family tragedy repeated: his brother Michael was taken prisoner at Dunkirk and subsequently died of his wounds. In his travelogue Thrilling Cities, published fourteen years after the end of the war, Ian wrote: ‘I left Berlin without regret. From this grim capital went forth the orders that in 1917 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother.’ He also lost a devoted girlfriend, Muriel Wright, killed by a head wound in an air raid in 1944. He was called on to identify the body, and was reportedly full of remorse that he had not treated her better.
    Fleming broke his nose playing football at Eton but most agreed this augmented his ‘piratical’ good looks.
    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