The Ian Fleming Miscellany by Andrew Cook

Author:Andrew Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750965774
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

• REFUGE •

Ivar got in touch, quite suddenly. Reggie Acquart thought he’d found the perfect property. Could Ian come out and see it?

Ian could. Reggie, a Jamaican by birth, took him to see what Bryce called ‘a fourteen-acre strop’ – a long narrow piece – on the island’s north coast about a quarter of a mile east of the village and harbour of Oracabessa. This was a village, a ‘free village’ founded by the famous abolitionist James Philippo in the 1830s. Nothing much ever happened there, except when banana boats called in from time to time. The locals had a jolly time then, loading green bananas onto the boats, getting paid and partying long into the night. ‘Oracabessa was fast asleep between these calls.’

There was a shack on a clifftop near the village end of the 14 acres. A garden’s length in front of it, and 40ft below, was the ocean – with a white sand beach and an underwater reef with tropical fish flashing in and out, just visible through clear water. Ian was enchanted. On a rock sticking up from the seabed grew a few wild plants: a single fragrant Portlandia, with its dancing bell-like blooms, and the local weed, Shamelady (so called because if you touch it, it shrinks away). The beach was inaccessible except by boat, but anyone who bought the land could have steps cut in the cliff.

Ian agreed the price by cable. The strip of coastline with the shack on it would cost £2,000 sterling. The future he’d imagined for himself on the plane back from the Kingston conference, in the middle of the war, had never left his thoughts. In Jamaica, in his own house, alone, he would find peace and quiet and write spy stories that would make him rich and famous.

Now all he needed was an income of some sort, and something rather better than the shack to live in.

The war had allowed him to outgrow his childhood. The RNVR was family now. The Flemings of course were still part of his life. Amaryllis, the little sister in whom he had not shown much interest until she was a teenager, had proved to be far more of a rebel than her brothers. She resented Eve, the woman she had been told was her adoptive mother. Nobody knew, said Eve, who her father was. Eve had her own half-baked reasons for telling these lies, but as a result of them Amaryllis felt lonely, rejected and defiant.

At Downe House School, which she loathed, she had spent every spare moment playing the cello and lived for her regular trips to private lessons at the Royal College of Music. She had performed on BBC radio when she was 15 and completed her education at the RCM while performing as a soloist. When the war ended she was 20, and managing her own career. It helped that she was a beautiful redhead of outstanding talent, but she still struggled to find work at first and asked both Eve and Peter for an allowance to see her through.

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