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‘an early Havelock’ by Oliver Cromwell – are in good shape, having been maintained ‘through three centuries, through earthquakes and hurricanes and through the boom and bust of cocoa, sugar, citrus and copra’. But a neighbouring estate, Belair, is in ruins, ‘a thousand acres of cattle-tick and a house the red ants’ll have down by Christmas!’
    ‘Belair used to be a fine property. It could have been brought back if anyone in the family had cared,’ complains Colonel Havelock.
    ‘It was ten thousand acres in Bill’s grandfather’s day. It used to take the busher three days to ride the boundary,’ adds his wife.
    ‘That’s one more of the old families gone,’ continues the Colonel. ‘Soon won’t be anyone left of that lot but us.’
    By Fleming’s time, however, another crop had come to the rescue. Now planted all around the site of Goldeneye were bananas. Thiswas the essential local business. Thanks to an American entrepreneur, what became known as the ‘Green Gold Era’ had started in Jamaica in the 1870s, and Oracabessa, just beyond Goldeneye’s eastern border, had grown into an important hub from which the fruit was exported. By the 1930s, banana production had become a mainstay of the entire Jamaican economy.
    In 1937, the island exported twenty-seven million stems, twice that of any other country. More than 70 per cent of the crop went to Britain. The business was particularly important for St Mary, where the landowning families – the Whites, McGregors, Marshes, Silveras, and in particular Blanche Blackwell’s family, the Lindos – had grown rich from the crop. Leonora Rickets, local resident and granddaughter of a St Mary banana pioneer, remembers the plantation owners as ‘vibrant, colourful characters’, ‘a happy-go-lucky lot, who drank a lot and had a lot of women’.
    ‘Banana day’, when the crop was loaded on to ships for export, ‘was the highlight of the week. Everything revolved around green gold day.’At the shallow port of Oracabessa, this involved the bananas being stacked on to red-painted barges, then rowed out to stocky white ships standing out in the bay. A writer on the Gleaner remembered the ‘attractive sea-weedy-cum-banana-trash smell – a smell that holds all of the lush and potent Tropics’. Paddy Marsh, a local labourer, had a less romantic memory of having to walk a long way to the port, and then ‘work night and day to make any money and the money was so small. We had to carry that banana on our head, sometimes we carry one, sometimes two, to the wharf’ At this point the ‘tallyman’ would tally the bunch as a ‘six-hand, seven-hand, eight-hand’ and so on. ‘We had to sleep on the wharf, we take our bed. People cook down there,’ recalled Marsh.
    Whites Wharf, Oracabessa. A visitor to Fleming’s house wandered down one banana-loading night to find ‘sleazy, brilliantly lit wharves… Women lay asleep among the dried leaves. There was a smell of rum, a tinny whine of music.’
    ‘You got a lot of exploitation,’ conceded Rickets, ‘but money was going round, people were employed.’ The Second World War, however, hit the industry hard. No shipping could be spared or risked to take the fruit to its market in Britain. Nevertheless, some transports still called at St Mary’s ports. Blanche Blackwell remembers that part of the local banana production was purchased by the British government, even though there was never any plan to ship the crop to England. Instead, the bananas were loaded on to the ships at Oracabessa and elsewhere on the island, everyone was paid, and then the fruit was carried out to sea and simply tipped over the side. Under this scheme, twelve million stems were purchased during the conflict at the pre-war price, but the rising cost of living and wages, as well as hurricanes and leaf-spot disease, saw many plantations abandoned nonetheless.
    In 1946, production in Jamaica was at less than a fifth of the prewar level.