Ian Fleming found that Blanche was petite, with shapely legs, and the dramatic, dark features of a Velazquez beauty. Although strictly brought up by her mother, who remained a powerful influence, she had none of the self-importance and stodginess which Ian associated with frustrated colonial wives. Blanche managed to be both reserved and ladylike on the one hand, and lively and spontaneous on the other.

Firmly ensconced in society circles it was not long before Blanche would meet the philandering, but very much married, Fleming.

Indeed, she was 44 and he was 48 when they encountered each other.

“I remember I sat next to him at dinner and he said: ‘Why haven’t I seen you before?’” she says sitting elegantly in her Knightsbridge apartment, beautifully dressed and wearing a slash of vibrant coral lipstick.

“I told him I was just over from England and he said: ‘Oh good God, you’re not a lesbian, are you?’ And I laughed.”

Blanche, Fleming and Coward made a trio everyone wanted to be seen with. While Blanche and Fleming were close, she was aware of his failings.

“Don’t forget I met him when he was 48,” she says. “In his early life I believe he did not behave terribly well. I knew an Ian Fleming that I don’t think a lot of people had the good fortune to know. I didn’t fawn over him and I think he liked that. I just happened to be happy in both Ian and Noel’s company.”

As Fleming and Blanche became friends so gossip spread that they were having an affair, although Blanche insists that it was only after a year that they became close.

“One morning I got on my horse and rode over to Noel’s house,” she recalls. “I said: ‘Noel, I know what you think and it isn’t true.’”...

Indeed, it was this romance which was to inspire one of Coward’s most controversial and darkest plays, Volcano, which was completed in 1957. The play, never performed in Coward’s lifetime and not published, offers a peek into the simmering passion and tensions of this exclusive community.

The free-spirited Blanche became Fleming’s muse and her presence seriously worried the author’s wife Ann, who was often in the UK. She was aware of her husband’s philandering (Ann, too, was unfaithful) but she realised his relationship with Blanche was different. On one occasion when Ann returned to their Jamaica home Goldeneye she ripped up the garden Blanche had lovingly planted.

“She disliked me but I can’t blame her,” Blanche says. “When I got to know Ian better I found a man in serious depression. I was able to give him a certain amount of happiness. I felt terribly sorry for him.”

Their relationship would last until shortly before his death.

The Flemings' marriage deteriorated into bickering, and Ann stopped coming to Jamaica. Our hero's attentions turned to his "Jamaican wife", Blanche. She was herself married, to Joseph Blackwell, an heir to the Crosse & Blackwell food family, but that only added spice to the love affair. A lover of the sea, Blanche became the inspiration for Dr. No's Honeychile Ryder, whom Bond first sees emerging from the waves – naked in the book, bikini-clad in the movie. Blanche was also the basis for Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. In real life, she gave Fleming a romantic gift of a coracle with which to explore the surrounding coves. The name she gave the boat, Octopussy, would become the title of the fourteenth and final Bond tale, a short story published posthumously in 1966.

Think of Noel Coward and you tend to think of his light, frothy society comedies of the 20s and 30s. But a new play opening in Windsor this week before embarking on a national tour tells a different story.

Volcano was written in 1956 but never performed in Coward’s lifetime – in fact, this is its first major production. So why’s it taken so long?

Firstly, by the mid-50s Coward’s plays had fallen woefully out of fashion. Perceived as representing the pre-war Britain of the 20s and 30s, he’d been outmoded by the Angry Young Men such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter. And in the face of the social alienation explored in their work, his class snobbery seemed outdated. Confronted by his diminishing reputation, Coward retreated to his island paradise of Jamaica.

But the vagaries of fashion weren’t the only obstacle to getting this play staged. This was an era when theatre was still heavily censored by the Lord Chamberlain – a man familiar with the work of Coward through previous run-ins.

And not only does Volcano offer up a more overt exploration of sexuality and sexual activity than Coward’s earlier work, it deals with the theme of adultery. His producer Binkie Beaumont reportedly turned down the play on the grounds that it wouldn’t make it past the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.

But perhaps the most significant factor in the play’s non-performance was the identity of the adulterers themselves.

The play is a thinly veiled fictionalisation of the extra-marital affair between two of Coward’s neighbours in Jamaica – the James Bond creator Ian Fleming, and Blanche Blackwell, the heir to the vast Lindo banana plantations and former wife of Joseph Blackwell of the Crosse and Blackwell dynasty. It’s rumoured that she became the inspiration for his character Pussy Galore. What’s known beyond any doubt is that she wasn’t amused at the prospect of her love-life being splashed all over the international stage.

So Volcano went into Coward’s bottom drawer and was never performed – until now.

Other men might have sought a divorce at this stage. But one of Ian's many paradoxes was that, for all his licentiousness in print and his apparent nonchalance about discarding women in the past, he had an enduring commitment to the state of matrimony, both in general and in the particular. This was largely for reasons of social etiquette: as a family, the Flemings simply did not get divorced. In addition, he realized that Ann provided the companionship and intellectual ballast which enabled him to write and do virtually what he wanted.

As a result, when he settled into Goldeneye, he was even more unhappy than his letters suggested. He could not understand how the marriage in which he had invested so heavily could have deteriorated so badly. When Blanche Blackwell came to visit him, she was seriously concerned that he might commit suicide. Initially she tried, against her will, to encourage him to patch up his relationship with Ann. But when she asked, "Is there anything you can do which will make her love you again?", Ian answered forlornly, "I don't think so." So instead Blanche herself rallied to his side emotionally, and a tropical dalliance developed into a deep love affair. The circumstances were just right for it. Work on her new house had started, and she was on the north coast much more frequently. From Bolt it was just four miles along the coast to Goldeneye and what she considered the best beach in the neighbourhood. But she never pushed herself on Ian, part of her attraction for him being her respect for his routine. She realized from the start that he was a man who kept to a strict timetable. It was no use her turning up at any time in the morning. But around twelve o'clock, he liked to stop working and to swim. She would join him and often stay for lunch. Afterwards she would leave him to rest, returning after he had done another hour's work in the late afternoon.

Outwardly vivacious and amusing, Blanche had a canny Caribbean intuition when it came to the contradictions in Ian's character. She realized that he "was a very private person because he was so many people". Although she admired him as an "intellectual athlete", she did not require him to explain himself. "By the time I met him he'd done his communicating." Instead she encouraged him to relax and enjoy himself. She realized that she could never compete with Ann intellectually, but her strict upbringing coupled with her failed marriage had given her an amusingly detached outlook on life, and she found she could make Ian laugh with tales of life on the estate or encounters with fishes in the sea. Later she described herself as his "safety-valve", but she was rather more than that. Hitherto a friendly, if peripheral presence, she gave Ian the selfless adoration and respect that he needed.