Read Online Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica by Matthew Parker - Free Book Online

parents’ wedding. Joseph was given a job on one of the St Mary estates, but the family lived in a lavish mansion in Kingston, Terra Nova.
    Shortly before the end of the war, Blanche travelled to England to put Chris into a boarding school. At first based at the Grosvenor Hotel, she then lived at a house in a village outside Newbury, Berkshire. Trips back to Jamaica continued but she looked to make her life in England. She would divorce Joe in 1949 and it would be another six years before she returned to Jamaica and met Ian.
    In spite of their shared enthusiasms for drinking and womanising, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming never got on, and they avoided each other as much as possible in the goldfish-bowl social life of Jamaica’s north coast. According to Flynn’s widow Patrice, Errol found Ian ‘pretentious and full of himself’. For Ian, perhaps Flynn was just too Hollywood. In From Russia, with Love, Bond is offended when Tatiana says he looks like an American film star: ‘For God’s sake! That’s the worst insult you can pay a man.’
    Ian was fast coming to rival Flynn as Jamaica’s most noted expatriate lothario, even though Ann had promised fidelity to him, apart from what was strictly necessary with her husband. During both the 1947 visit and his first extended trip the year before, Fleming was carrying out a high-profile affair with Millicent Huttleston Rogers, a wealthy socialite who was heiress to part of the immense Standard Oil fortune and a regular visitor to Jamaica. A dark-haired beauty in her mid forties, Rogers was energetic, outgoing and an exhibitionist, with a penchant for appearing in fancy dress costumes. She was also even more obsessed with sex than Ian. Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett tells the story of how she once turned up to a party in Jamaica withtwo Navajo Indians, informing anyone who asked, and even those who didn’t: ‘Yes, I’m fucking them both.’
    Ian ended the relationship before he left Jamaica, and wrote to Ann that he had been having a ‘botched affair’, where ‘everything starts wrong and goes on wrong and getting wronger’. But still, other women had been invited back to Goldeneye to sample the snorkelling on the reef, including ‘an admiring sugar planter’s daughter’, who repaid the favour by donating two smart chairs to the house’s meagre and uncomfortable furniture collection.
    Ian also acquired a canasta table for Goldeneye from Molly Huggins, the wife of the Governor, who was still in the process of upgrading King’s House. Molly and Ian had met through Bill Stephenson on his visit the year before. ‘His days of fame … were still to come,’ she later wrote of Ian. ‘But even then, what a brilliant, clever person he was! He was so good-looking in a rugged way.’ Visiting him at Goldeneye, she found the house ‘rather austere’, but the beach ‘beautiful’. The two became ‘firm friends’. Ian taught her to ‘swim under water and spear fish’, which she enjoyed in spite of cutting her foot so badly on a piece of coral that she almost had to miss the finals of the Montego Bay tennis tournament the next day. The following summer, Ian lent her Goldeneye for her mother and two eldest daughters to stay in.
    Molly now had a spectacular new project. To blame for Jamaica’s poverty and its attendant family breakdown, she had decided, was the high proportion of children born illegitimate. ‘If the moral standard of the women can be raised,’ she declared, ‘the whole island will benefit.’ The answer was to encourage marriage. But no Jamaican, she was told, would marry without a gold ring to hand over, which most could not afford. So Molly did a deal to buy wholesale from a London jeweller 2,000 gold rings, to be passed on at five shillings each, rather than the two or three pounds’ going rate in Kingston. She then organised a string of mass weddings, with fifteen couples at a time, who ‘came in cars, on mules, donkeys and horses’. These