Never Shaken, Never Stirred by Christopher Reindorp

Author:Christopher Reindorp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

16

IAN AND BLANCHE – ANN AND GAITSKELL

Ian and Blanche met at a dinner hosted by Charles and Mildred D’Costa at the tail end of Ian’s solitary stay at Goldeneye. Ian was instantly attracted to Blanche, who was petite with dark features and lovely legs. But he was far from his usual charming self. When the dinner conversation turned to the growing homosexual community on the north coast of Jamaica, and Blanche talked of her family-owned property in the area, Ian crassly asked if she was a lesbian.1

Despite his clumsiness, Blanche later asked Ian for drinks at her temporary home in Kingston. Ian managed to parlay this into an overnight stay – which he naturally played down in letters to Ann. In return, Blanche was invited for a swim at the beach at Goldeneye, where they discovered their mutual love of swimming and snorkelling, as well as a shared interest in exotic fish.2 Their burgeoning friendship was greatly encouraged by their mutual friend, Noël Coward. Blanche was open, warm and friendly, whereas many islanders, including Coward, felt Ann was distant and cold. As Sara Morrison confirms, ‘Because of the aunt’s ever decreasing visits to Goldeneye […] she was made to seem unkind.’3

Born in 1912 in Costa Rica, Blanche belonged to an old Jamaican family, the Lindos, who had come to the island in the seventeenth century. Returning to Kingston as a child, she was later sent to England at the age of 16 to attend Garrett Hall, a pseudo-finishing school near Manchester. In 1936, she married Joseph Blackwell, a captain in the Irish Guards and heir to the Crosse & Blackwell food fortune. The couple had a son, Christopher, in 1937, before returning to Jamaica to run the Blackwell family estate. The Blackwells separated in 1945, divorcing in 1949, and Blanche returned to England to oversee her son’s education at Harrow. In 1955, she moved permanently back to Jamaica and in early 1956 she started construction on a house at Bolt, only 4 miles from Goldeneye.4

Leaving Blanche behind, Ian returned to Victoria Square on 21 March 1956 to find Ann both ill with flu and embroiled in another Charteris family row. Guy had been admitted to hospital in Birmingham and Ann, despite her own illness, found herself in the invidious position of having to relay news of their father to all of her siblings separately – Hugo, in Scotland, Laura, who was in Paris, and Mary Rose, who was staying in Braintree.5 For Ian, the contrast could not have been starker. He had left behind the warmth and sunshine of Goldeneye, as well as an exciting new romance, for a cold, rainy London and an ill-tempered and embittered wife.

But Ian was not the only Fleming to be straying from his marriage. Ann and Ian were part of a generation and social circle which accepted infidelity with equanimity, despite the occasional flash of jealousy. An affair alone would never have threatened the Fleming marriage, but it is curious that, by some bizarre

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