The Ian Fleming Miscellany (9 page)

He tied up the loose ends of his naval career and considered the future. He would carry on training with the RNVR. The Cold War began soon after the hot one finished, and nobody was completely sure, for a long time, that hostilities would not break out somewhere. Godfrey still lived at No. 36 Curzon Street and gave dinners to which he invited members of Naval Intelligence – men only, of course. There they could reminisce and talk shop for as long as they liked.

Just as Ian was beginning to relax, Anne received a proposal. In 1945 she told him she would marry Esmond Rothermere. They would live at her house in Montagu Square.

Ian took a flat in Montagu Place. Anne, as Lady Rothermere, was financially secure, and returned to doing what she did best – entertaining what the French would call a salon of artists and writers, mostly witty, not particularly intellectual but good, if slightly bitchy, company for her and for one another. She invited Peter Quennell and Lucien Freud, Duff and Diana Cooper, Evelyn Waugh and Noël Coward, Stephen Spender, Barbara Skelton, Felix Topolski, Cyril Connolly and many others. She was far from happy with her husband, but she understood Ian and knew that, like a cat, he was attracted to women who didn't seem to want him. Ian was just around the corner, and since he did not appear to enjoy himself much with her crowd, he was not always invited.

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. Both refused, saying she should join an orchestra to earn her keep, but she knew she would be trapped if she did that.

She was determined to be recognised as a unique talent while she was still young, and she went on to become one of Europe's leading solo performers, partly by investing in herself. She paid for tuition from others of great merit. One of those was Pierre Fournier, with whom she had an affair. He was married with a child and the same age as Peter Fleming. She later said that the Fournier tuition had come to abrupt close when Peter discovered their love affair and visited the cellist in his London hotel room. There was a lively exchange of views, after which the white-faced lover called the whole thing off, telling Amaryllis that he would never feel safe as long as he feared that one of her brothers might come after him with a pistol. What she did not know, but Peter almost certainly did, was that during the war Fournier had earned generous fees by performing on a German-funded radio station that broadcast to Vichy France.

In 1945 Peter and Celia Fleming were living in Oxfordshire and bringing up their son, Nicholas, aged 6; they would soon have two daughters as well. Celia had reservations about Ian. In 1940, when Peter was an officer in the British Expeditionary Force in Norway, the
Daily Sketch
had reported his death in action. Eve and Celia were devastated, and Celia never got over a suspicion that Ian could have prevented Lord Kemsley from printing such an error.

Peter remained a popular author. At the start of the war he had found time to write
The Flying Visit
, a gentle satire in which Hitler floats down from the sky somewhere in the Home Counties. After much puffing and sliding and scavenging across muddy countryside he arrives at a village hall where a talent contest in full swing. When he takes the stage everyone thinks he is a comic turn and he wins a pound of butter. Much put out by being laughed at – and dismissed as a disgrace by his pre-war admirer Lord Scunner – he is captured and kept as a prisoner of war. Upon his deportation the German government, having employed a double in his absence, sends the real Hitler back.

Peter Fleming's war opened in the Grenadier Guards and ended in India and the Far East. In between, among other things, he was engaged by Lieutenant-Colonel Gubbins to help set up the Auxiliary Units, secret commando-type units of the Home Guard that would become active only in case of invasion. Members of the Auxiliaries were trained in sabotage and guerrilla warfare. They were the military predecessor of 30AU, and many of the soldiers had served in The Independent Companies in Norway.

Richard went back to the bank. It seemed that you did not need to be a financial genius to run a merchant bank after the war. If you were family, you took advice, and you sat on the Board, and you made decisions based on that advice. There were no major mergers or acquisitions, no upheaval. The City went on much as it always had, with the clearing banks doing what they did, and the Barings, Rothschilds and Flemings occupying their own niches.

Eve had become eccentric. At the start of the war she had chosen to live in an old abbey in Berkshire that was supposed to be haunted. Her companions were her crotchety maid Hilda (the one who called her ‘The Great I Am') and, in the school holidays, sulking Amaryllis. The house in Cheyne Walk was shut up, and later on it was hit by a bomb, so in 1944, when the German attacks had died down, Eve took a flat in Knightsbridge. The following year she moved to No. 21 Charles Street, a smart Mayfair Georgian terrace with four storeys and a basement. She was in her element again, overseeing its redecoration. And Ian moved quite soon to Hay's Mews, which was not only close to his mother's house but to Godfrey's convivial dinners in Curzon Street too. Amaryllis was a frequent visitor to Hay's Mews, and according to Fergus Fleming, she met plenty of girlfriends coming and going. ‘They ran his baths; they fetched his lighter off the mantelpiece; and they cooked salmon kedgeree, which he sent them to learn from his mother.'

At the end of the war Ian was offered a suitable job with a high salary: working for Lord Kemsley as head of foreign news for all thirty or so papers in the Kemsley group, including
The Sunday Times
,
which was then based in Grays Inn Road. He took it, on condition that he might spend two months of every year in Jamaica. Kemsley agreed. Ian would be a manager, information gatherer and occasional contributor. He brought glamour and connections to the post.

In Fleet Street at the Rothermere group's
Daily Mail
, Anne was directing Esmond, according to
Time
magazine. Esmond had managed to quell the pre-war appeasement stance of that paper – these days it supported Churchill – but his new wife was often called ‘imperious'. She acted like a newspaper magnate
manquée
but had no idea of financial or other considerations. ‘Annie's boys', who included Peter Quennell, were, on the whole, good journalists. They got an extremely generous salary and expenses.

Ian commuted by car from Hay's Mews to
The Sunday Times
offices. Weekly editorial conferences were held at the start of the journalistic week on Tuesdays. They were chaired by Lord Kemsley, who besides being the owner was also editor in chief. Ian's job meant appointing foreign correspondents and making sure that their articles were syndicated to papers all over Britain. All his reporters would have a few pieces on the back burner, and he would be in touch with key players before the weekly meeting to get a precis of breaking news in capitals across the world. He would have a rough outline, always subject to change, of the following Sunday's foreign coverage, and Kemsley and the other editors would indicate approval or otherwise.

On the wall of his office at Grays Inn Road there was a map of the world with all eighty correspondents pinpointed by flashing lights. The whole room had a military, battle command centre look to it. Some of the Kemsley journalists would have felt quite at home, because they were still being paid by MI6. Ian wanted gripping reports written with economy and vim. He didn't want fluff. His reporters must be likeable, good companions who were genuinely interested in all sorts of things. He would have no alcoholics, no blabbermouths and no invalids.

And yet he was low on self-discipline. There were certain rules that he could never apply to himself. At 38 he was already subject to chest pains. He reportedly drank a bottle of gin every day and smoked seventy cigarettes. This was 1946; research that linked cigarettes to cancer was largely ignored even by doctors, and the link between smoking and heart disease would not emerge for a couple of decades. At Hay's Mews he had what were called ‘kidney problems' and possible ‘heart weakness'. Doctors were consulted, but nothing much seems to have been done about either condition.

Most of his enthusiasms lost their appeal to Ian in the end. The affair with Anne remained exciting because they could arrange clandestine meetings in exotic places. (She had been with him in New York in 1946 when he complained of chest pains.) They could visit Ivar and Jo in Vermont or stay together in Paris, where she'd got her brother a job on the
Daily Mail
. There was passionate correspondence about his sadism and how much she loved his beatings.

At work, he was nobody's darling. After a few years other staff began to mutter that his foreign news reports were tired – just copies of wire stories. Ian did not put himself out to be one of the boys; chumminess had worked well for him in 1933 in Moscow, but now his focus was elsewhere. He was not to be found with Scotch eggs and a pint at the Yorkshire Grey but preferred lunch at his club. He sometimes wore, caddishly, a polka-dot bow tie. He felt somewhat detached from
The Sunday Times
. He thought Kemsley was allowing standards of journalism to slip. He preferred to involve himself with
The Book Collector
, an academic journal that Kemsley had bought, as a distraction.

Most of all, he was glad of the annual chance to get away.

Ian had his mother's confidence in her own taste but his Scots grandparents' asceticism (in matters other than tobacco and spirits). Old Robert and Granny Kathleen, and their sons including Val, had been forever striding miles across moors in the teeth of a gale. According to Andrew Lycett, ‘when one Englishman dined with them in Scotland, he likened the experience to eating alongside muscle-bound bolts of tweed'. Ian wasn't a great walker – he liked cars too much for that – but there was certainly something of the hair shirt in his attitude to comfort. For alongside the Flemings' hardiness ran parsimony. Granny Kathleen did not simply inhabit a series of under-heated houses. She did not allow guests' sheets to be washed between their visits, but had them left on the bed. There were three taps on the baths: hot, cold and – for economy – rainwater. As to her husband, who gave Val a quarter of a million on his marriage, he spent – in the same year – just £6,500 on wages for the 150 staff at their various homes.

So when Ian designed a house for the plot in Jamaica, which he did – without an architect – he designed his own Brutalist vision exactly as he wanted it, with no nonsense about hot water. Or, indeed, glass in the windows. Or carpets. Or a fridge. Or even floor paint; the concrete floors were blackened with boot polish that came off on the soles of your feet. Somebody suggested he call the place Rum Cove.

Others liked ‘Shamelady'. He called it, of course, Goldeneye. He had constructed something that sounds rather like a concrete blockhouse, which since he had recently spent five years staring across Horse Guards Parade at the Citadel is not surprising. Goldeneye had a sloping roof above one big reception room, several small bedrooms, cold showers and a small kitchen. It was all on one level. Instead of glass there were slatted blinds – jalousies, which rattled in the wind. It must have been a beastly shock to stay in, especially if you were Loelia Duchess of Westminster and didn't like huge flying insects. Chilly nights, which do happen in Jamaica, the wind and the rain off the ocean, must have made the indoors bleak, and as for the outside elevation, Noël Coward – who lived further along the coast – declared that it looked like a National Health Clinic. He called it Golden Eye, Nose and Throat.