Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Read Online Free PDF

of the tropics.’ Dexter Smythe and his wife enjoy ‘one endless round of parties … yes it was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst winter weather for thirty years’.
    But Jamaica offered more than sunshine, rum and cheap servants. In his memoir, Mitchell remembered fondly an earlier time when ‘those generously red-splashed maps which symbolized the power and influence of one small island’ were ‘a fact of life’. Others, including Fleming, shared this nostalgia for the ‘years of greatness of the British Empire’, which now seemed under threat. As Bond complains in You Only Live Twice, Britain had been ‘bled pretty thin by a couple of World Wars’. In 1946, the country was bankrupt, rationing was getting even stricter and class relations seemed in worrying flux after the social upheaval of the war and the election of a Labour government in July 1945. This had led, Bond continues, to ‘Welfare State politics[that] have made us expect too much for free’. Furthermore, in 1941, Britain had signed up to the Atlantic Charter, committing herself in theory to decolonisation. The Labour administration looked as if it would follow through on this promise. In many parts of the Empire, most notably India, there were vociferous and growing movements for independence.
    But Jamaica seemed, on the face of it, different, stuck in a comfortable time warp where imperial and social structures remained virtually unchanged from a hundred years previously. In Dr No, Bond drives with Quarrel across the island from Kingston to the north shore. On the way they see ‘an occasional man going off to his precipitous smallholding on the flank of a hill, his three-foot steel cutlass dangling from his right hand, chewing at his breakfast, a foot of raw sugar cane’. Further along, they pass ‘a woman sauntering up the road with a covered basket of fruit or vegetables for Stony Hill market, her shoes on her head, to be donned when she got near the village’. Bond reflects, with pleasure, that it ‘was a savage, peaceful scene that had hardly changed, except for the surface of the road, for two hundred years or more’. Indeed, it could have been a scene from the slavery era.
    In the same way, the people of Jamaica seemed to show the white English elite a deference that had been lost at home and elsewhere in the Empire. Ramsay Dacosta, who worked as a young man as a gardener for Fleming, says: ‘We were scared, kind of shy of going near white people. If they say something to you harsh and so forth.’ Schools taught British history and literature. Blanche Blackwell, who grew up in the Jamaica of the 1920s, remembers that they imbued people ‘with the idea that England was the only place on earth’. Only a handful of non-whites attended secondary school, where, one later complained, ‘We absorbed the doctrine that white was virtue, power, wisdom and that black was vice, weakness, stupidity.’ For empire nostalgists, then, Jamaica seemed a delicious slice of the old imperial certainties, wheretheir comparative wealth, Englishness and fair complexion gave them extra-special status.
    As a writer on Jamaica’s longest-established newspaper, the Gleaner, noted, the epicentre of ‘the social life of the upper classes who either came from England, or liked to give the impression that they did’ was King’s House, the residence of the Governor and his family. In 1946 this was Sir John Huggins, a career colonial officer, viewed by Jamaicans as ‘very reserved and even unfriendly’; ‘an unimaginative man with no special intellectual tastes, no enthusiasms’. Huggins made little impact in Jamaica, but for his wife, Molly, it was a very different story.
    Chris Blackwell, Blanche’s son, who now owns Goldeneye, remembers Molly Huggins as ‘very vivacious, a larger-than-life character. A big woman, tall, five foot ten or