Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica by Matthew Parker

Author:Matthew Parker [Parker, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2015-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

Messing about in the water with Blanche Blackwell.

In 1945, Chris had been taken to England and put into a Catholic school, where he spent most of his time in the sanatorium. After that, he attended Harrow School, but left before completing his A levels.

He always considered himself Jamaican, and that his future was to be in Jamaica. Before he left England, he had secured himself a job as an ADC to Sir Hugh Foot. So he was now living at King’s House, which he loved. He adored Sir Hugh, and enjoyed the excitement of the time when ‘Bustamante and Manley and all the top politicians and people, who were going to take over Jamaica, were coming to King’s House all the time. He was very good with them. They all really loved Hugh Foot.’ Chris remembers also the excitement of visiting Goldeneye and hearing Fleming and Coward in mid verbal joust. Fleming made a good impression on him. ‘In those days children were seen and not heard,’ he says, ‘but Fleming always talked to me as an adult. There was a coldness to him, but he would open up and talk to me.’

After a short trip with Ivar Bryce to Inagua in the Bahamas, Fleming returned to England on 22 March to find Ann in much better health. At Enton Hall she had lost nearly five pounds and was now ‘free from pain’. Fleming, however, was suffering from sciatica and a heavy cold, and checked himself in to the same sanatorium. Though it would provide useful material for the scenes at ‘Shrublands’ in Thunderball, it was of little use for his health, partly because he would not stick to the regime. He went to see Dr Beal soon afterwards, who noted that ‘He complains of greater exhaustion than is natural in a man of his age.’ Beal suggested a better diet and advised against any cigarettes or alcohol. Fleming cut down to fifty Morlands a day, and switched to bourbon, but his stepson Raymond remembers noticing that he was still ‘drinking a great deal’. There then followed a return of his agonising kidney stones, which necessitated a stay in the London Clinic and large quantities of morphine.

Almost all Fleming’s efforts to make Bond a more rounded character involved putting more of himself into his creation. And so, for the first time, readers would begin to see Fleming’s declining health and vitality leaking into Bond. In the first four books, he is fit and vigorous: in Casino Royale, the doctor treating his torture injuries tells him that few men could have survived them; in Live and Let Die, he is ‘strong and compact and confident’; in Moonraker, he is the best shot in the service; in Diamonds are Forever, his medical shows ‘he is in pretty good shape’. But in From Russia, with Love, Bond has a new physical and mental ennui. The chapter ‘The Soft Life’, originally titled ‘The Boredom of Bond’, begins, ‘The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him.

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