Waiting at a country bus stop in a downpour. Not sure if I’ve just missed one. No raincoat. No phone signal. Two o’clock in the afternoon and already too dark to write a will. No wonder everyone that can do leaves the country at this time of the year. There isn’t a bus shelter so I insinuate myself backwards into the hedge. A passing car sends a spray of rainwater up my legs. A motionless row of Devons, fetlock-deep in mud beside the five-bar gate opposite, contemplate me miserably.
I try to remember what sunshine is like. I close my eyes and try to imagine hot sun on my face. I can’t. It’s impossible. A month ago I stepped off a plane in Antigua. Here, at least, I have success recalling the shock of the heat radiating from the tarmac as we marched from the plane to the arrivals terminal. I remembered, too, the bright and efficient young woman who met us and expedited our transfer.
‘Welcome to Antigua,’ she said. ‘Anyone been to the Caribbean before?’ Of course she was only teasing. Of course we’d all been to the bloody Caribbean before. Some of us had been so many times, we affected to be sick of it. But your Low life correspondent rose naively to the bait. ‘I have,’ I volunteered. ‘Ten years ago. Dominican Republic. On an all-inclusive,’ I added modestly, in case it was a boast too far. But she was totally impressed. She clasped her lovely slender brown hands together and exclaimed, ‘Rivers!’
‘Rivers?’ I said. ‘Oh, yes. Beautiful rivers,’ she said, almost swooning at the thought. ‘You people go to Dominica for the sea and the beach. But we locals go to sit beside the rivers. To us a river is the most beautiful thing on God’s earth.’ It hadn’t occurred to me before that, for some people, rivers are an amazing novelty. I assumed they ran all over the place: even those poor benighted countries on the fringes of the Sahara desert had huge ones. Broadens the mind, travel, I said to myself, smugly and without originality, as they crammed us all into the ten-seater aircraft that was to take us across the Caribbean sea to the tiny French-run island of St Barth’s.
In spite of the smallness of the plane, there were two white Frenchmen sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the pilots’ seats: one of them exuding professional calmness, the other palpable nervousness. The calm one said the flight would take about half an hour and that the landing was a notoriously alarming one. And without further ado we bumped across the tarmac and rose into the air.
As the rain lashed at me and the dripping blackthorn hedge, and the muddy cars splashed past with their headlights on, I remembered the wonderful blueness of the sea and of the Caribbean sky, and the crisp whiteness of the Frenchmen’s short-sleeved shirts. Also the anxious fidgeting of the nervous pilot prior to the thrilling and sudden drop then sharp-right turn on to the snug little airstrip concealed between St Barth’s steep hills.
I’d never even heard of St Barth’s before. A white teenager was standing by with a luggage trolley. White faces in the neat airstrip terminal building. Another white teenager was checking the spotless airport lavatory. The hand dryer was a Dyson blade dryer. The taxi was a luxurious Toyota minibus. I sat up front beside the driver, who was such a dead ringer for Jack Nicholson that we all laughed. He was even wearing tortoiseshell brown Ray Ban Wayfarers. I asked him if he was aware how closely he resembled the famous actor.
Even in his laugh and frank geniality he resembled him. He had that Dustin Hoffman in his cab a couple of years ago, he said. Hoffman was so taken with the likeness he took a photograph of him and said, ‘You wait till I get home and show Jack.’ He did a parody of a Hollywood accent. Then he had Jack himself in his cab. Jack took a photo too.
On the steep and winding road, I noticed, every two out of three cars was a Mini Cooper convertible and all the drivers and their passengers were white. And in the three days I spent on St Barth’s, the only black face I saw belonged to the muscly woman modelling bikinis at the beach shack restaurant while we ate lunch. Amazing. Who else but the idealistic, pragmatic French? The only all-white island in the Caribbean and it’s theirs. Eight thousand residents, six gendarmes, no crime, and the highest property prices in the Caribbean.
I looked across at the row of rain-sodden, bovine faces on the other side of the road, and thought of those lovely beaches, and of that muscly bikini model, and wished I was there.
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