Ian Fleming on his Jamaican villa
By Ian Fleming (House & Garden, April 1959)
Poets and solitaries and crooks love islands. They are for the adventurer rather than the homebody. They are for people who want to put a moat between themselves and the rest of the world. They are for the escapee rather than the rut-dweller. They are not for the solid core of citizens. They are for the froth.
There are too many ‘theys’ in all that, and other signs of hasty and indolent thinking, but it is eighty in the shade and out of my left eye I can see waves crashing quietly on the reef, and out of my right a pair of doctor humming birds going the rounds of a small jungle of hibiscus. This is too much distraction for proper writing and I shall be too lazy to rewrite what I have written, so it must just go as the sort of planchette-writing this place is apt to engender in one.
My eyes glimpse different things even while they are more or less focusing on my typewriter, despite the fact that I write in a corner of the room with the sole object of avoiding these distractions. But just within my wide-angled vision on both sides are the slats of jalousies and beyond are the brilliant primary colours and the summery sounds and movements that insist on being seen, or at least half seen, all through the day. These things–the blue sea and the hibiscus–mean as little to a Jamaican as green fields and Old Man’s Beard mean to an English countryman. They are the permanent background to his ‘winter’ and even when the trees begin to flame with orchids in April he wouldn’t think of bothering himself to reach up and cut one down with his cutlass for a girl friend, any more than the Englishman would give his girl a dandelion.
But to me, and of course to you, the tropical scene is an endless delight and to escape here, as I do, for two months (and the worst ones) of every English year is a fabulous refreshment for all the senses.
I was lucky. I came to Jamaica for three days during the war. It was July, and brown rain fell in thick rods between periods when everything sweated and steamed. I adored it all. I came back in 1946, found thirty acres of field above a pirates’ cove, built a house of large airy rooms and began to plant flowers and trees. Today the garden is a jungle round an acre of lawn and I and all the birds of Jamaica applaud my brilliant gardening. Nothing has changed. My housekeeper, the irreplaceable Violet, can cook about three more dishes than she could twelve years ago. There are not so many fish and lobsters inside the reef because, foolishly, I gave one of the local fishermen a spare mask and spear, and American prices and the hideosity of American shorts have made it almost impossible to visit the hotels.
But here the waves still crash quietly on the reef and the humming birds go their rounds of their hibiscus. I have only one worry at the moment. It is the time of the full moon and the smell of the night-scented jasmine is quite overpowering. Oh yes, I knew there was something else. The grapefruit and oranges and limes are simply weighing down the trees. I must remember to send a cartload to the school to get rid of them. Ah me!