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

eleven. Nice-looking. Strong personality.’ He doesn’t recall meeting the Governor, but confirms that ‘she was the one that really registered’. It was Molly who set the tone for the behaviour of the white society Fleming now engaged with, as well as its attitude to Jamaica and Jamaicans: in part well-meaning and affectionate, but hampered by ignorance, arrogance and double standards.
    A child of the Empire, Molly was born in Singapore in 1907, so was just a year older than Fleming. While her father worked as a colonial resident in Malaya, she attended boarding school in England. After having had ‘great fun’ helping to break the General Strike and conducting a string of affairs, she was married in 1929 in Kuala Lumpur to John Huggins, then a colonial administrator in Malaya, who at thirty-seven was sixteen years her senior.
    The couple, acquiring three daughters along the way, were posted to Trinidad, then Washington, then Jamaica in 1943, where Huggins became Governor. Here Molly’s first task was to take King’s House in hand. Apart from the central dining room, the residence had beendestroyed in the 1907 earthquake, and rebuilt as what Molly called ‘an ugly, squat, grey cement building’. Inside, ‘immediate redecoration’ was required, ‘war or no war’. Her daughters were happy, however. They had a swimming pool, and 150 acres of grounds in which to ride their horses.
    Amid a general refit, Molly had the silver from the West India Regiment polished up and displayed and the Joshua Reynolds portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte sent to England for restoration. Antique mahogany furniture was acquired locally, ‘much of it brought out from England in the old days of the great sugar barons’. Soon everything was ready for the stream of visitors and functions. In this, Molly was determined to make a decisive change: ‘We rather startled Jamaica in the early days by having coloured Jamaicans to play tennis, as this really had not been done very much in the past. But we had decided from the beginning that we would have no colour prejudices of any kind.’
    ‘Lady Molly’, as she was soon known across Jamaica, found the West Indies ‘sadly neglected’ and noted that ‘there seemed to be a great deal of poverty, especially after the wealth of Malaya’. Although ‘the Jamaican plantocracy (mostly of white background) had done a good deal in the field of social services’, she writes, ‘the sugar workers were very badly paid and, except on the very good estates, they lived under very poor conditions’. The demands from every parish, for better water and electricity supplies, housing and roads, were ‘endless’. On arrival, she was immediately swamped with letters asking her to be chairman or president of organisations, ‘and there were a great many pathetic ones asking for money, clothes, jobs, and in fact, help of any kind’. She immediately promised to be president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (a particular bugbear of hers, and a concern she shared with Fleming) ‘and of all the societies dealing with women and children … I intended to do a lot of work’. ‘After I had seen much of the poverty and need for help,’ she writes, ‘I realized very quicklythat what Jamaican women needed was leadership.’ So in 1944, Lady Huggins formed the Jamaican Federation of Women, with the motto: ‘For our Homes and our Country’. The executive committee was dominated by the great and the good – Blanche Blackwell’s sister-in-law, Pamela Lindo, as well as the wife of the editor of the Gleaner – but membership was open to all and was soon 25,000 strong, drawn from all parts of the population even if the middle classes dominated. Each member paid a penny a month, which was spent on school uniforms, books, girls’ clubs and sewing, cooking and knitting lessons.
    From an empire family, Molly Huggins was raised by maiden aunts in Tunbridge Wells, seeing her parents