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‘every three or four years.’ At Roedean boarding school she was captain of tennis, cricket and lacrosse.
    ‘I suppose I fell in love with Jamaica and its people almost as soon as I arrived,’ Molly wrote in her memoir, backing up the sentiment always expressed in the many articles she wrote about herself. ‘I gave a great deal of my heart, my mind and my energies to working forthem. Their splendid response of love and gratitude has been one of the highlights of my life.’
    Shortly after the war, Life magazine ran a profile of the Governor’s wife, which begins: ‘Nothing like Lady Molly Huggins ever happened before to Jamaica – or possibly to any other British colony.’ Lady Molly, it reports alongside a picture of adoring black children holding a welcoming banner, ‘steams about the island engaging in good works’ and ‘visits village markets, climbs onto tables and harangues her audiences on the importance of learning how to take better care of their children and homes’. We learn, however, that she still finds time for tennis – winning the Jamaica women’s doubles championship – ‘shoots golf in the low 80s’ and had just organised her daughter’s wedding, ‘the social event of Jamaica’s spring season’.
    Unlike her husband, Lady Molly was extremely sociable. She unashamedly loved parties. ‘The handsome young men simply swarm around her,’ noted one local magazine journalist. She was often out on her own, as her husband had decided that to avoid charges of favouritism he should not attend dinners in private houses. A popular destination was the Craighton Estate Great House, high above Kingston beyond Irish Town. Here Bobby and Sybil Kirkwood gave lavish black-tie dinners for twelve or more, waited on by liveried servants.
    Robert Kirkwood, an Englishman, was another pillar of elite Jamaican society and the most powerful businessman on the island. He had attended Harrow School and then taken a job at Tate & Lyle, thanks to his mother, who was a Lyle. At that time the company was involved with processing the sugar of Britain’s heavily subsidised domestic beet crop. When they looked to expand in 1936, they sent Kirkwood, now a company director, to the West Indies. He recommended investing in cane sugar estates in Trinidad and in Jamaica’s Westmoreland and Clarendon parishes. His suggestion that he take on the task of putting the largely derelict estates back into production was accepted.
    Thecompany bought cheap and then invested heavily in centralised factories: at an estate called Monymusk in Vere, Clarendon (previously owned by the Lindo family); and at Frome, Westmoreland. The latter was served by the port of Savanna-la-Mar on Jamaica’s south-west coast, visited by Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun, where he comments on the ‘drably respectable’ villas built for the ‘senior staff of the Frome sugar estates’.
    Tate & Lyle formed a new subsidiary, the West Indies Sugar Company, known as WISCO, whose estates, run by expatriate British and white Jamaicans, accounted by the end of the war for about a third of the island’s entire production.
    In 1948, the irascible Kirkwood would fall out with his bosses and resign, to be replaced by Alan Walker, another Englishman. Kirkwood became chairman of the Sugar Manufacturers Association, a body representing all sugar producers, large and small, in their dealings with the government, suppliers and labour unions. This was a key position, as sugar remained Jamaica’s biggest business and the largest employer – albeit seasonal – by a huge margin.
    In spite of this relative importance, the sugar industry was a shadow of its former self, as the landscape of Jamaica at the time of Fleming’s first visits amply testified. From almost the beginning of the eighteenth century, for a hundred years, Jamaica had been by far the richest and most important colony in the British Empire, thanks to its sugar crop. By 1774, average per capita wealth