Nowhere on earth is more tightly bound up in the James Bond story than
Goldeneye, the beautiful Jamaican villa where Ian Fleming wrote all of the
original 007 adventures.
It stands by the side of a former donkey racetrack on an overgrown plot of
land that Fleming bought in 1946.
Six years later, badgered by his friend and neighbour Noel Coward and
desperate to take his mind off his impending marriage to Ann Rothermere, he
started work on Casino Royale.
He was deep into hangdog middle age and after stints in the City, in
journalism and in naval intelligence, apparently becalmed in a career
notable for overindulgence and underachievement.
But “007”, as his sea-facing bedroom at Goldeneye is now known, became the
scene for an extraordinary late outpouring of creativity.
In the last 12 years of his life Fleming bashed out 12 Bond novels and two
collections of short stories in this room, typing fast with the shutters on
the enormous windows closed “so that I would not be distracted by the birds
and the flowers and the sunshine outside.”
There are few spaces anywhere in the world more intimately associated with a
literary character and even fewer that you can spend the night in.
Today Goldeneye is an idyllic 12 bedroom hotel, and the sort of celebrity bolt
hole where the local staff can’t decide whether their favourite guest is
Bill Clinton or Scarlett Johansson “because she likes to go out and party
with us whenever she comes to stay”.
It is on the fringes of the village of Oracabessa on the north coast of the
island, two and a half hours from the capital Kingston on a good day and
approached via a potholed road that climbs through a creeper-strewn forest
of African Tulips, coconut and banana palms before gliding the last mile
downhill to the turn off.
A small wrought iron gate with no sign leads through more tropical trees to
Fleming’s villa, perched on a cliff above a discreet coral beach.
In a tradition begun by Anthony Eden when he spent three weeks at Goldeneye
after the Suez Crisis, labels at the foot of the trees record which famous
guest planted them. Contributors range from Jonny Depp, the Clintons and
Naomi Campbell to Dawn French and Lenny Henry.
The simple pace of life and the understated feel of the place were what
Fleming loved about Goldeneye. He spent his days here writing, swilling
Martinis and snorkelling in his private lagoon.
Well stirred and no tonic for me.
Ian Payne, WALSALL,