Introduction
Eating Old Jamaica at the Tunbridge Wells Odeon
I am ten years old, sitting in a suburban English cinema. On the screen a man with a large
chin and black roll-neck sweater pushes through jungle foliage. He crouches behind a
gravestone and takes out an enormous pistol. A white woman has been tied to a post and
a black man dressed in animal skins is laughing crazily and wielding a massive poisonous
snake. Around them hundreds of voodoo worshippers are screaming and convulsing. The
man with the large chin starts shooting the black people, who are too busy rolling their
eyes and waving old cutlasses to offer proper resistance.
To be honest my memory goes a bit hazy at this point. In a moment of bravado
before the film I had bought a jumbo Old Jamaica, a weird 1970s chocolate bar filled
with rum essence and raisins. It had struck me as a sophisticated treat, little realizing that
its only target market was in fact aspirational ten-year-old boys. Anyway, the reality of
feeling sick, the perception of being drunk, and the confusion of the notionally West
Indian flavour of the treat and the loosely West Indian setting of the film conspired to
overwhelm me. Leaving the voodoo worshippers to their fate I staggered to the toilets.
Thirty years later, rum essence still flings me back-like some reduced-to-clear Proust-to
that cinema and what proved to be a transformative encounter with a man with a large
chin.
Writing this is peculiarly painful. The film in question was Live and Let Die, and
its hero, James Bond, has since that moment deeply affected my life. For me that film
pushed open the Golden Doors of sex and death, revealing a world of sophistication and
cruelty previously unimagined. Sheltered by a prior movie diet of such duff material as
Tales of Beatrix Potter, a ballet film featuring a dancing frog, I suddenly had discovered a
film packed with steel-clawed black giants, alligators, speedboats and girls whimpering,
“Oh, James.” The Two Bad Mice prancing about hitting a little plaster fish (which of
course, at the time, I had absolutely loved) became overnight something thought of
always but spoken of never.
I went to see Live and Let Die again a week later, this time spurning the siren
song of the Old Jamaica: it was a flawless gem. Every scene conveyed so much-the
brutal cunning of the villains, the decency and wit of Bond, the glamorous American and
West Indian locations, the miraculous music. Happy years followed of reading and
reading again all the Bond books, tracking down the older Bond films, preparing myself
spiritually for the next one, The Man with the Golden Gun.
The painfulness in all this is of course that Live and Let Die is dreadful. In a
moment of lunatic parental outreach I recently bought the DVD to watch with my own
twelve- and ten-year-old sons. I had not seen the movie in many years and this planned
piece of quality nurturing left me mute with grief. The film was a mean-spirited and
offensive shambles, too stupid really even to be racist, too chaotic to be camp. Worse, the
film was the first to feature Roger Moore-a faintly louche manikin, famous as the Saint
and, with Tony Curtis (then going through one of his cyclical career low-points), one of
the Persuaders. Moore was to spearhead the progressive degeneration of Bond over a
further seven films. Now I can see that I encountered and fell for Bond at the precise
point, 1973, when he was spiralling out of control.
And yet for many years he had been important-important to millions of people
in all kinds of ways, a uniquely powerful, strange presence in British life since his
invention by Ian Fleming in the early 1950s. Wholly oblivious, I had as a ten-year-old
bumped into his most embarrassing avatar, but my entire upbringing had been in effect
soaked in the world in which Bond had thrived and in which he was understood. In this
time-before Bond films were ever shown on television-double bills of old ones would
tour cinemas, playing to vast steaming audiences, seeing the films, like myself, over and
over again almost as a religious undertaking. I was simply then the latest among whole
populations of men and women (well, mainly men to be honest) who had stood in line for
the Bond experience. Our school games were soaked in Bond, our talk was endlessly
about the films and about the cruelty and sex in the books: Bond was a sort of currency,
albeit, and quite unknown to me, one in steep decline on the open market.
This book is an attempt to get to grips with Bond’s legacy and with the worlds in
which Bond really mattered-not to a helpless ten-year-old ding-a-ling in the early
seventies but to the generation who had fought in the Second World War and who in vast
numbers read the Bond books in the 1950s and saw the Bond films in the 1960s.
I hope to explore with reasonable seriousness the trauma faced by Britain in the
1940s and after-a far smaller trauma than that of mainland Europe, but profound
nonetheless and one that could have been terminal. The link between Bond’s invention
and his overwhelming success and the horrors faced by Britain from 1939 onwards are
close and interesting. Ian Fleming, a cynical upper-class waster galvanized by and briefly
endorsed by the emergency of the War, reacted to the gradual, but sometimes vertiginous,
implosion of Britain when the fighting had ended by creating the Bond books. These
proceeded to find their vast niche as part of a general right-wing reaction to the
humiliations and failures of British life. I want to re-create some of the stifling British
obsession with the Second World War, which still cannot be shaken even today, but
which once permeated all aspects of life and was dominant throughout my own
childhood. Toys, film, novels, memoirs about the War were everywhere, and through
them strode James Bond, the secret hero who calmly carried the values of that war
through a treacherous and ungrateful Cold War world.
Inevitably this book must lean heavily on a sort of ancient archaeology-here are
the remains of a door post, here a possible site of cult ritual. So much has changed and so
rapidly that it is hard to get right inside the original impact of the books or the films.
Morals have changed, movie gun noises are much more reverberant, sex has got sexier.
The Cold War has, weirdly, completely vanished, leaving behind such peculiar debris as
From Russia with Love, a book and a film which will appear as strange to future
generations as abandoned Kazakhstan rocket silos or fallout shelters.
As a memoir, this book is fragmentary and scraped together from very slightly interesting
bits and bobs. My life has just not been melodramatic enough to take up more than a few
pages. I had a cheerful childhood packed with affection, no specific features to incite
sympathy and no adventures to speak of. As history it will anger many, filled as it is with
shocking generalizations and lack of documentation. I share that anger. This book was
written in large part because I want to convey, perhaps in an overdrawn form, some of the
ways in which Britain has changed-and by following James Bond show some of a
vanished world which he in various ways pulled together.
The eight chapters are roughly chronological, pursuing Fleming’s, Britain’s and
Bond’s lives from the 1930s to the 1970s with occasional comfort-breaks to deal with
specific themes. I have tried to give just enough background on Britain and its empire to
make events around and after the War intelligible. While carefully researched, this
material is breathtakingly selective and loaded with no doubt facetious and callow
interpretation of a kind that will have historians shrieking to heaven for vengeance. I
should really emphasize that I am not a professional historian and that anyone who has
devoted their life to a serious study of this period should probably see about swapping
this for something else.
A further obvious point is that this is a book only about some people some of the
time: for every individual concerned about Britain’s international prestige or the global
nuclear threat there were countless more simply getting on with their lives. It is a simile
used before, but it is like Brueghel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: a
shepherd stares at the clouds, a ploughman ploughs a field, a merchant ship hurries by,
and down in the corner Icarus crashes-with a tiny ploof! of water-completely
unremarked into the sea. Clearly the end of the British Empire was for very many people
an unremarked and tiny ploof! but for many others, continuously or intermittently, it was
much more.
Devoted contemporary fans will be driven to distraction by this book. Going to a
premiere of the last Bond film, Die Another Day, at the Empire Leicester Square, I had to
say that I was unmoved by what happened on the screen. Tiny voices whispered that Die
Hard did this better, that Face/Off did this better, that even Vin Diesel’s xXx did this
better. I’m afraid that some years back I parted from the Way and feel relieved at having
done so. But Bond’s later abasement should not cloud what he used to be and movies
featuring John Cleese as Q and an invisible car cannot sully the immense pleasures of the
books and the early films.
This then is part memoir, part history, part a meditation on being a fan/not being a
fan. The little telltale phrase, though, in the last paragraph, “going to a premiere,” will of
course tell you all you need to know. I am not exactly cured. Like a hopeless modern
version of Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, I lie slumped at my desk
with disturbingly well-thumbed copies of Diamonds Are Forever and DVDs of
Octopussy (for God’s sake) flapping about my head. But that I think still applies to
British men in general-if diminishingly so-who still walk a little differently, dream
certain dreams, and are somewhat comforted and sexually a little odder than would have
been the case without the imagination of a man born into a very different sort of Britain.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Man Who Saved Britain
by Simon Winder
Copyright © 2006 by Simon Winder.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC
Copyright © 2006
Simon Winder
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-29938-2
