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

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intelligence officer William Plomer described him as ‘not a man of single aspect’, with a ‘private self, hidden or withdrawn’.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