Hereward Cooke

We have just had friends on board for two weeks, who are preparing a guest blog, but our tragic news is the sudden death of my beloved uncle Hereward, last week. He was only 70, and apparently fighting fit; he had just bicycled 150 miles to Copenhagen as part of the Christian Aid delegation to the climate change conference.

He was a marvellous, kind, loving man, generous-hearted, opinionated, and determined to make the world a better place. I do admire him for not taking the easy and obvious path, but working hard all his life for what he thought was right. He had the rare ability to hold strong views – on a wide variety of subjects – but not to antagonise those who didn’t agree with him, and a fearless determination to put his Christian principles into practice on every possible occasion, while never taking himself totally seriously. He threw himself whole-heartedly into everything he did, from bullying Norwich Council into changing the paint they put on telephone junction boxes in order to make fly-posting impossible, to leading the Lib Dem group on the same Norwich Council twenty years later.

The last time we were all together was at my cousin Arthur’s wedding in Colorado this August, at which Hereward officiated. We had a lovely happy family time, helped as ever by Hereward’s easy good humour and never-failing ability to see the best in people.

He was, in short, a good man, and we shall miss him very much.

Martinique

Friday 27th November 2009, day 406, 7,477 miles. 14° 38’.66 N, 061° 08’.50 W. Case Pilote, Martinique

We scampered up to Martinique, with a lovely 15-20 knots from the south east, and gently undulating rollers that rush us along at 8 knots. The moon is new, so the stars shine brightly as we skim along. This is still one of the great pleasures of this trip – moving freely from place to place as and when we wish, using only the power of the wind. Being able to up and off when the time feels right, no searching for cheap air fares, or packing, or wondering about where to leave the car. Very nice.

For our second visit to Martinique we go into Le Marin, on the south east corner of the island. The town is at the head of a great big bay, with little mangrove-lined inlets all round. It has a reputation as one of the best hurricane holes in the Caribbean, and we can see why. The entrance to the bay is along a winding channel, not quite adequately buoyed, so Anthony is forced to suspend disbelief as I call up directions to him from the chart plotter, doglegging around unmarked reefs. To our delight, Minx, a boat we met in Grenada, is anchored just behind the spot we have chosen. We keep meeting lovely fun people everywhere, then they sail off and we sail off, and we never know when or if we shall see them again. Minx very sweetly bring us back a couple of baguettes from town – ah, la France.

The rest of the day is spent sorting out why the bilge fills up with water every time we go to sea. We first noticed this on the way up to Carriacou – I gave the bilge a few pumps for appearances’ sake, and … kept on pumping. We got to Carriacou, floated at anchor, nothing came in. Up to Bequia, the same thing. At sea, but only when we are sailing, the water comes in, at anchor it doesn’t. On the trip up to Martinique, we were pumping every half hour, 20 or so pumps, and noting the number of pumps in the log so we could see if it was increasing. Keeping at the back of our mind that we were passing the marina at Rodney Bay, where they could lift us out if necessary. At anchor in Martinique, no more water.

The diagnosis is that it must be coming in from the port side, as the harder we heel, the more water comes in. What have we repaired recently which involves water? The watermaker? The wrong side, and anyway the water in the bilge is salt-ish (as well as diesel-ish and all sorts of other things-ish beside, no doubt some swarf, a bit of engine oil …). The loo? Already checked and rechecked, and anyway, the forward part of the bilge is dry. The cockpit drains? A little damp, but no more than usual. In the end, Anthony checks the bilge pump, and, yes, that’s it. It’s non-return valve presumably failed as soon as it was installed, turning it from a bilge pump to one that works in reverse – an eglib pump. Luckily, now we know what the problem is, it’s easily fixed.

Le Marin is set up for yachts, with plenty of chandlers, repairers and welders, and we make good use of them, as well as the internet café (with boulangerie attached) where we spend hours tracking down parts and having them sent to our friends who are coming out to join us in two weeks’ time. They will get a prize if they can work out what all the assorted elbows and brushes and joints do. In the café, a tiny green gecko scampers around the table, very tame and inquisitive, but uninterested in proffered crumbs of chausson aux pommes. His tiny nostrils, and horse-like muzzle are available for close inspection. These geckos manage to appear like a small cute household pet, while showing absolutely no evidence of warmth for humans. So much for the effect of a bright enquiring eye!

Joy of joys, being in France, we can go shopping for cheeses and salami – our fridge now has the good stink of any decent delicatessen.

One day we take a break from cosseting Tomia, and rent a car and go off for a tour of the island. We take the scenic route up to Fort de France, then the N3 up through the centre of the island. In the southern part it is agricultural, much more organised than in the English (i.e. independent) islands, where it is more scrappy: little bits of cane with a few dasheen in between. This looks like “proper” fields, with somebody actually taking a rational approach to what is planted, how, when, why …

We drive up through the rain forest, around the base of the cloud-shrouded Mt Pelée, the volcano which erupted so devastatingly just over a hundred years ago. And then to the East coast, which we can never visit on Tomia, and drive down past lovely bays, with the Atlantic rollers crashing in. We lunch at Le Phare, unprepossessing from the outside, but good food inside: we eat le menu of accras de morue, poulet rôti avec frites, glace rhum raisin. Madame is most chatty and amusing, and we taste some nice banana flavoured rum. And then, get this, we find a palm-lined beach and sit on it for an hour or so. That doesn’t happen so often. On the way back, in the south, we drive through more rolling pastures, the trees are not parkland oaks or chestnuts, but still the resemblance is there.

It is all very French – it’s not like France, it is France. France with breadfruit and sugar cane, but still la France. One way to put a chill on a conversation with a friendly Martiniquais is to ask if they’ve been to France: “Vous voulez dire le métropole? [The mainland?]” they ask pointedly. Because how can you go to France when you are already in France? The France of Géant Casino, Conforama and Hyper U, of pharmacies with neon green serpents endlessly twirling down neon green staffs, the France of “sandwichs, snack, boissons”, “cédez le passage”, “chien méchant”, “ville jumelée”, of Travaux soutenus par l’Union Européenne, the France of strikes, Canal +, dual flushes and smelly cheeses. Workmen still sit by the side of the road in the shade, but here they are being lectured by someone who is visibly a foreman. Unlike the other islands, the Martiniquais see nothing essentially incongruous in the phrase “fun run”, and nothing sensible or healthy in working through your lunch hour. The cows may have the crescent horns and spiky shoulders of their African forebears, and an attendant court of egrets, but they are still destined to become steak tartare, or a cleverly butchered onglet, not an anonymous collection of gristly lumps for beef stew. This is France au bout de ses ongles, France to the shiny black tips of the boots of the blue-jodhpur’d motorbike traffic cops.

Bequia and St Vincent

Saturday 21st November 2009, day 400, 7,350 miles. 13° 07’.95 N, 061° 12’.12 W. Young’s Cut, St Vincent

And here we are, back in Bequia for a couple of days. It hasn’t changed – not surprising in six months, though to us it seems more like a year. The Rasta vegetable market is in full swing, with the nice old lady by the door with her grey plaits and floral print cotton shirt-waister, there is a terrible smell of sewage outside the post office, and the things we have had posted to us a month ago have not turned up. The vendors are spread out along the pathway by the water, with their palm leaf baskets, shell jewellery and crocheted caps in red, yellow and green, Doris’s grocery has everything you could want at prices that would make a Harrods customer tremble, and the internet café cum laundry is sprucing itself up, and has painted “LAUNDRY” in large letters on its roof so we can all see it.

On the Monday night we go to hear two friends from Grenada play their happy brand of jazz at an excellent French restaurant, and the following night they have supper with us. Stan is a gentle soul, Czech, emotional, garrulous, expressive. As supper goes on, and the beer and the wine and the whisky soak in, he moves closer and closer to Anthony, trying almost to hug him. Anthony, enjoying himself, at ease, but British, shrinks back and back, until he is squeezed into a corner of the cockpit, arms tightly folded across his chest, while Stan, Slavic and extremely drunk, looms affectionately over him. We finish the evening with a rousing chorus of When I’m Sixty Four, and wake up the 30 year olds on the charter boat moored close by.

Politics is on the menu in Bequia – there are little orange signs and posters stuck all over the place with a black fist pointing down, saying “I voting No”, and the occasional blue one, with the same fist, thumb up, saying “I voting Yes”. We ask several people what this is all about. The nice Rasta girl who makes the shell necklaces isn’t quite sure, but thinks it’s to do with taking the Queen’s head off the currency. The man in the garage is certain: it’s because the prime minister is a t’ief and wants to grab everybody’s land for himself, as well as to give the whole country over to that other t’ief, Hugo Chavez.

The manageress of the bookshop gives us a more factual analysis: the constitution needs changing; it was given to the country by the British at independence, and should be brought up to date. A constitutional commission has sat, taken evidence and made recommendations, many of which have been incorporated into the proposed constitution. But – pause – some people think – here we understand that this is what she thinks, but that she prefers for many reasons not to express this opinion in the first person – that some clauses have been added which are – another pause – not so good. There is a clause which allows land to be appropriated in the national interest, but without full value being paid. There is a clause which allows parliament to appoint the president, taking the power away from the voters. The Boundaries Commission is to be outside the scope of legal challenge. The DPP is to be answerable to the Prime Minister. And – this complaint unites everybody, and angers them more than anything – the government has spent EC$ 4 million on promoting the Yes campaign.

As a background to all this, there is an undercurrent of change all over the Eastern Caribbean. The status of the Privy Council as the highest court is being challenged, both by the British, who appear (from what we read in the papers here) to feel that it is being used for relatively trivial cases that should be decided at local level, and by the governments of the Caribbean, who are toying with the idea of setting up a CCJ, a Caribbean Court of Justice, which will be the supreme court for the region.

At the same time, Latin American governments, led by Chavez of Venezuela, are seeking to extend their influence over the area, and ease it out of the American / European orbit in which it runs. So far, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Antigua and Dominica have signed up to become members of ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas), an “attempt at regional economic integration based on a vision of social welfare, bartering and mutual economic aid”, as opposed to the free trade principles of CARICOM of which all the islands are members. Iran is an observer member of ALBA, which probably explains some of the wilder rumours we heard in SVG about the purpose of the referendum.

Chavez is not the only one seeking influence: a vote in the UN general assembly, or on the International Whaling Council make you a popular new best friend for China, Taiwan or Japan. China and Taiwan in particular seem to be fighting a quiet war of influence in the islands; each will have a stadium or a hotel or a bridge “Given in a spirit of brotherly friendship” from the people of one country or (most definitely or, never and) the other.


Grenada may be particularly susceptible to ??? as a leftist government is in power, for the first time since the revolution, coup and subsequent American invasion – or peace-keeping force, depending on your point of view. One of their first acts has been to release from prison the remaining people who were involved in the coup and the murder of the leader of the first revolutionary government, Maurice Bishop. But they have also renamed the airport and main road in his honour, so are keeping their options open.

The French islands, also, are having a referendum on independence early next year, though the consensus so far is that they would be mad to vote to remove the massive financial support that France – and the European Union – give.

A time of change. It may be in places like this that the impact of the financial crisis is ultimately felt, as the over-mortgaged governments of the developed world find they have spent all their surplus on propping up the bonus schemes of poorly-managed financial institutions, and have none left to support the efforts of the truly poor to find a safe path to democracy.


We move on up to St Vincent, the largest island in the group of islands that makes up St Vincent and the Grenadines. A busy island, with a slightly dodgy reputation for crime, and not a great deal in the way of natural beauty, we want to make a quick stop to climb the Soufrière volcano. It is a couple of thousand feet up from the place we leave the car, up through dense rain forest, where we can hear the rain pattering on the canopy a hundred feet above our heads. We hear a few birds with outlandish tinny whistles and resounding squawks, but see none. The last few hundred yards the fog comes down, and we are walking up steep shale – nothing much to be seen at the top but a terrible smell of sulphur, and a vertical drop down the inside of the crater.

The volcano is known as much for its residents as for its eruptions: the impenetrable bush around its slopes is the home of many Rastas, all self-sufficiently growing vegetables, most peacefully tending little plots of ganja on the side, and a few growing industrial quantities for dealing, which is where the crime problem is believed to stem from. One of the guys who lives up in the bush, and had been down for provisions, laid down his laden sack and stopped to chat, with the mist swirling around. What provisions do they bring, I wonder? Tobacco, of course … oil for cooking and lighting? Surely no one would lug a gas bottle all the way up there? Coconut cream, perhaps. A little piece of dried ham, to nibble on when vegetarianism pales? We make our way back down again, collecting a bag-full of sweet- and biscuit-wrappers and jettisoned plastic bottles.

That night, we have a break-in. I wake, as so often, to a sound … a slight clattering, is it just one of the normal noises Tomia makes in the night when the wind or the tide turns? No, this is different. I switch the light on, and the next thing is a quiet footstep over our heads. Then it all happened very quickly, Anthony went on deck and saw our intruder trying to keep out of sight on the side deck – it was an almost moonless night – and shouted and the thief slipped over the rails into the water and swam off with one of our phones, the one that’s good for people calling from England. And that’s it really. Not very serious in itself, but a nasty shock.

So now we go to bed with the washboards in, and my blackest, most clattery baking tray on the companionway steps. And I am able to sleep soundly again.

Tobago Cays

Sunday 15th November 2009, day 394, 7,321 miles. 12° 37’.88 N, 061° 21’.40 W. Tobago Cays

Everybody should see the Tobago Cays at least once in their life, so they get some idea of what it is like to visit paradise. It’s an aquarium writ large, with turtles, rays, tens of thousands of brightly coloured fish, clear blue water protected by the offshore reefs, tiny islands with white sandy beaches …

The water is swimming pool blue, though I hate to use such a suburban comparison for so pure and natural a phenomenon. What else in nature is that colour? Hyacinth and larkspur have more purple, while the bluest of skies never has that tinge of green. The robes of the Madonna are more subdued, less vibrant. Cornflower blue? No. It’s an almost electric, neon blue, but constantly changing, filled with light and liquid. And the waters, being protected, are teeming with fish. It makes you realise the impact fishing is having everywhere else. Turtles, rays, groupers. A flying gurnard, that looks as if it’s walking on its front fins – perhaps the timid cousin of that first fish that climbed from the sea to the land all those generations ago? A 5ft long barracuda, with its vicious gangster stare. Something large and thuggish, staring out from a hole in the rocks, burping patiently while it waited for something toothsome to pass within reach. A flat round fish, at least 12” diameter, circling us with, as far as is possible, an evil look on his face. What was he protecting from us? Once he opened his mouth to reveal five or six tiny but sharp teeth. Many of the black and white splodged, rectangular trunk fish, their tiny little fins fluttering constantly to stay in place – including one quite close to the surface, which, when I pursue it, turns its ugly face on me as if to say “Yeah? Do you want to make something of it?”

And all the “pretties”: wrasse and damsel fish, sergeant majors, goatfish with their whiskers churning up the sand, butterfly fish, fairy basslets, the rock beauty and the barred hamlet. Shoals of purplish blue tang, the size of an upturned dinner plate, with their smiling gills and surprisingly yellow offspring. The squirrel fish, russet with puppy dog big brown eyes. The multicoloured parrot fish: stoplight, redband and midnight, and the most colourful of them all, the queen triggerfish, gaudily made up with turquoise and yellow lipstick over bright green foundation.

And why aren’t there photos of all these amazingly coloured fish? Our expensive, supposedly waterproof camera is discovered to be leaking. It has waited till the day before we get to the clearest, most fish-filled place in the whole Caribbean to give up. Another irritation is that, for the second time, Anthony’s front tooth pops out while he is snorkelling, and disappears to the bottom where it vanishes into the sand before he has time to see where it went. So he is back to a piratical grin.

We told Tomia before we left Grenada that she would be well advised to throw up any further little problems while we were there, within (relatively) easy reach of two (relatively) well stocked chandleries. Either she wasn’t listening, or has a warped sense of humour (or she can read, a frightening thought) because Anthony spent most of Wednesday dismantling and reassembling the watermaker, having replaced a shower pump the day before, and sorted a loose wire on the engine the day before that. Now we just have to mend a switch for the other shower pump, fix an occasionally leaking seal round a hatch, and find out a way of retrieving a drill bit which fell into the shower drain and remains obstinately out of reach. If we were Danish, she would be in danger of being renamed Jødtaa – Just One Damn Thing After Another. But she has brought us to this beautiful spot, and for that we are grateful.

Carriacou

Monday 9th November 2009, day 388, 7,298 miles. 12° 29’.04 N, 061° 27’.66 W. Hillsborough, Carriacou.


Carriacou and Petite Martinique. Two tiny islands, with a combined surface area of 6 square miles, meriting just a few column inches in the Lonely Planet guide,. How long can it take us to visit them? We feel short changed and rushed leaving eight days after we arrived.

Carriacou is by far the larger of the two. We anchor in the pleasant Tyrrel Bay, and tie up our dinghy watched patiently by a bus driver. No danger of his driving off while potential passengers are around!

The capital, Hillsborough, is a friendly little place, where the Bullen family seem to hold the reins of commerce, owning the pharmacy, the largest supermarket, and the Industrious Stores. The two streets have the usual shops, all selling the same mix of clothes, shoes, kitchen goods, plastic flowers and chairs, ornaments, and whatever else has taken the owner’s eye. The banks, in a civilised way, have a special fast track queue for senior citizens. A tiny museum shows some Amerindian and Carib relics, and traces some history of the tribal areas from where the original slaves were brought.

We travel out by bus to the village of Windward, the centre of local boatbuilding. Three boats are under construction – or rather, have been and will be, but are “resting” just now. The boats are wooden, built without obvious plans into a solid traditional workboat design, with the look of being able to sail into a whale and not notice. Grenada was pretty laid back, but we notice the change of pace coming to Carriacou, and then down another gear in Petite Martinique. In Grenada, the bus stops for you wherever you want. On Carriacou, it takes you on a free sight-seeing tour, or detours to a passenger’s (I almost said guest’s) office to pick up papers. On Petite Martinique, there is no bus at all…

On an island like Carriacou, where people are so very friendly and apparently content and at ease with their lives, the contrast with the poverty of many is thought-provoking. At first, dazzled by the sunshine, the fruits and flowers, the bright colours, the natural beauty, and lulled by the warmth and directness of every one we meet, the tumbledown houses by the roadside seem just part of the overall picturesqueness and general difference. But then it starts to come into focus: that beautiful slim girl, with the brightly coloured top and intricately braided hair, has just walked out of a two room house, whose windows are rotting, whose corrugated iron roof is patched and rusting, which probably houses a family of six or eight people, all of whom share that unthinkable lopsided privy down by the mango tree.

By any of the material standards of the West: housing, education, health care, sanitation, pensions, possessions, these people are deprived. They are not living in some Rousseauesque natural idyll, they are living in poverty. And yet, there is no sense, or at least none that we ever pick up, of complaint, or bitterness or resentment, or even unhappiness. My American friend, Bart, says that all we see is the friendly smiles for the tourists, and that a simmering cauldron of anger lies beneath this. I am not so sure. There is a tourist smile, of course, and we see it when somebody is trying to hassle us onto a bus we don’t want to board, or circling the boat with a load of T shirts. But it is hard to fake the open warmth of the greetings all round the islands, hard to fake the ease with which people talk about their homes and families, hard to fake the welcome you get as soon as you show an interest in everyday life and talk about your own.

Which is not to say that you can’t offend people. Starting to talk to someone without first wishing them good day and asking how they are is rude. Losing your temper is a sign of poor manners. Not living up to the local standards of community and sharing is an offence - one which we are guilty of every day, as we glide over the surface in our cocooned luxury.

Then we get a counter-picture to our overall impression of harmony when reading the autobiography of the only person in recent history to have received a VC that was not posthumous: Johnson Beharry, a Grenadian. If you see the book, Barefoot Soldier, it’s strongly recommended. He writes of the difficulties of growing up with an alcoholic father and no income, in the Grenadian countryside. He describes how many young men take the pleasure principle to such an extent that they spend their days sitting on a wall drinking rum. He tells how hard it is for someone with drive and ambition to succeed with the blessings of their community, and how many people there are who want to extend the concept of sharing to simply letting somebody else work, and then pass the proceeds around.

The longer we stay here, the less I realise we know about islanders’ lives and what they think about them. And the more I realise that applying my own language to their experience and expectations will not necessarily lead to understanding.

So back to what we do know about: Our second pair of lobsters this trip is sold to us in Petite Martinique. The advice this time is to eat them fresh fresh fresh, which means keeping them in a bucket of seawater for the afternoon. They are an active and curious couple – or simply find the bucket a little constraining – so we put the bucket in the cockpit when we go ashore. Surely, even standing on each others’ backs, they won’t be able to scale 18” of sheer fibreglass.

Petite Martinique is tiny, perhaps a mile long. We walk the road in one direction, admiring the view north over the Grenadines, picking out Tobago Cays, Canouan, Mustique, and hazy in the distance the outlines of Bequia. Then turn around and walk to the other end of the road, ending up having described a letter C which leaves out the eastern side of the island.

The dogs on this island are different to the standard multi-breed Dogg that populates everywhere else: sandy brown, lightly built, pointy head, ears folded over in neat or lopsided triangles, curly tail held at a jaunty angle. The dogs of Petite Martinique are shorter, whiter, hairier, yappier … we imagine, not so long ago, a visiting West Highland Terrier having a testosterone-fuelled field day in the island’s canine gene pool.

From the island we take the dinghy out to a reef with two tiny islets of pure white sand, one called Punaise (drawing pin) which suits it well. We swim, snorkel, sit on the sand and look at the sea, plan our trip to the Tobago Cays … a Friday evening in November … sitting in the office, darkness has fallen already, streetlights shining on damp pavements, thinking about packing up, but dreading the crowded Central Line, the hordes at Liverpool Street, is it worth staying half an hour longer to have a chance of getting a seat on the train …

On Sunday, in our cleanest [only presentable pair of ] navy blue shorts, we went to the church in Hillsborough back on Carriacou. The church itself is in fine shape, but the attendant buildings next door are still ruined, a legacy of Hurricane Ivan. Although all the windows are open, there is no wind and the heat is stifling. The congregation is celebrating the 90th birthday of Tanty (Aunt) Rose, whose children, grand-children and great-grand-children fill the pews. The tiniest ones presented in a bunch of brightly coloured frills, like sugared almonds, the six year olds best-frocked and simmering with barely repressed mischief. Tanty Rose is wheeled in, frail, bent and cloudy-eyed, and parked, after two or three false starts, at the front, from where a low muttering is heard during pauses in the service. Poor old thing, we think. Not a bit of it. After the sermon, the priest says: “Well, I know you always like to have the last word, Tan Rose” and hands her the microphone. And off she goes. Parents! You should be bringing your children up better, teaching them respect. Children! You should listen to your parents and do your homework. Everybody should be cleaner, on time, more polite, sitting up straight, respecting their elders and betters, working harder, not fidgeting in the Lord’s house. And that, in case we hadn’t realised, means us. It is with some difficulty that the priest regains control of the service.

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We leave you with this advertisement from the Grenadian New Today paper:

“Don’t be caught saying ‘If only I had known!’ Join the La Qua & Sons funeral club today.”

Grenada

Saturday 31st October 2009, day 379, 7,213 miles. 12° 02’.46 N, 061° 45’.36 W. St George’s, Grenada

Heavens, we are finally breaking loose from Grenada. What on earth have we been doing? The short answer is that we went back to a version of real life; we did work, we had a routine, made friends, got to know shopkeepers and bar staff (that last not quite so much like our previous lives) ... even started bumping into people we knew on the street. After so much rootless wandering, and brief encounters, it was very satisfying and solid to settle into a community of sorts. But after a while, as we got to know more people, it became clear that if we didn’t leave soon, we never would: last weekend we’d planned to leave on Friday, but were invited out to lunch on Saturday, and then there was a Hallowe’en party, and if we’d stayed for that there would have been a friend playing in a jazz club on Tuesday, and a walk organised for the Wednesday – so we had a delicious lunch of tuna steak and hot chocolate brownie with toffee sauce and ice cream (some things never change) at the University Club, and raised our anchor in a rush before we got too tempted to turn bin liners and sheets into costumes for the Hallowe’en party.

We’ve met some lovely people here, people who are interesting, warm, witty, informed, connected, opinionated, musical, out-going. It really is a wrench leaving some of them behind, not knowing when we shall meet again.

We got lured into staying in Grenada by Tomia making a persuasive case for having some of her teak decking replaced. This effectively tied us to a dock for three weeks – ample time for weed and barnacles to start growing on her hull, and for our own social pseudopods to find plenty of people and happenings to latch on to. Tomia also took the opportunity of throwing up a large number of little problems to fix, from a loose wire on an engine solenoid, to a corroded generator start panel, to a broken inlet to the loo.



All small stuff, but each taking a day to fix, by the time we’ve rowed across the bay, walked up to Nimrod’s rum shop (motto “Don’t drink and drive, smoke and fly”) to catch a bus, rummaged through one chandler’s, taken a further bus to the other chandler’s, finally tracked down the right size jubilee clip or cable in a hardware store in town, walked up the hill to the Shell garage to catch the bus back to Woburn, radioed home for the dinghy to come and fetch us, then collapsed in the shade for an hour to recover.

I say “to catch a bus” but the reality is more like a bus catching us. Buses here, like all the other islands, are minibuses, crammed to capacity and then just one more. They are all free market enthusiasts – he who gets to the bus stop first wins the passengers, and their EC$2.50 (60p) a head – so anybody walking, particularly a white person walking, effectively carries their own bus stop around with them. The drivers’ assistants have eyes like hawks for potential customers, however far down a side road they might be, and you get adept, if you are really trying to get from A to B on your own two feet, at hearing the screech of a rapidly decelerating minibus behind you, and, almost without looking round, making the horizontal wave of the hand that means “No thank you”.

We have been awash in limes and passion fruit: bags and bags of them at the road-side, the vendors almost as hard to avoid as the buses. Limes with everything: with tonic water, in coconut curries, with black tea, in rum punches, pickled in oil with salt, garlic and cloves and incorporated into Moroccan dishes with cinnamon and saffron. The passion fruit we just eat by themselves, one after another, scooping out the insides and savouring each pip wrapped in yellow juicy flesh, one by one. It’s lobster season too (well, they are really large crayfish, with feelers not claws) – we see them under rocks when we are snorkelling, but rely on local boys to lure them into traps and present them, at the boat-side, ready for the pot.

And on the theme of pleasures of the senses, another of the attractions of Grenada has been the music. There hasn’t been a lot in previous blogs about music, mainly because there hasn’t been a lot to write about. Whether it’s our own poor knack of sniffing out the right places, or just a lack of what we like, the choice seems to have been between steel pans cranking out yet another cover version of Bob Marley’s greatest hits, or ear-blasting rap in the scruffier bars.

Grenada’s south coast, full of little bays, each with its own restaurant cum bar, has a thriving music scene, fuelled by a mix of islanders and visitors. One band has a “guest artist” – a visiting professor of business studies at the university; short, tubby, balding, utterly unmemorable until he starts enthralling the audience with his virtuoso blues harmonica playing. Another group is fronted by a veteran Czech, with a voice matured into a husky growl by years of cigarettes and rum. Last night we went ashore to hear Carriacou’s “leading band” the Country Boys – dancing away in an open-air dance hall, thankful for the darkness which covered up our caucasian rigidity set against the multi-jointed, jelly-hipped ripplings of the locals. And we’ve been playing ourselves – quietly in the cabin – me on clarinet, dug out after 30 years gathering dust, and Anthony has taken up the recorder, and surprised himself by learning to read music and produce tunes very quickly. He’s also tried the clarinet, and a harmonica. This may sound like the most frightful cacophony, but we’re enjoying ourselves, and it’s led us to other “musicians” and fun evenings of singing and shared music making.

So now, fully provisioned with the rare delicacies like sour cream and mung beans that the presence of the American-studented medical school supports in the supermarkets, we are off on our travels again. Up to the Tobago Cays and Bequia, then on to Martinique and Guadeloupe, meeting up with friends old and new along the way.

Reading

Saturday 26th September 2009, day 344, 7,196 miles. 11° 59’.86 N, 061° 45’.71 W. Prickly Bay, Grenada.


Westley and Tyrell are a pair of jumping beans in human form. Around seven years old, they come along to the Mount Ayrie young readers’ programme every Saturday morning, to suffer the dubious pleasure of having their reading skills forwarded by a group of yachties. There are about thirty children, and around half that number of adults, so we settle down in little groups of three or four to work our way through the sterile adventures of Jane, Spot and Peter. I don’t remember learning to read (apart from sitting on the loo one day, and spelling out with a delighted thrill of recognition “ant-i-septic”), but was it always as insipid as this? Nothing in these books would make any child think reading is fun. Faced with page after page of not a lot, my reaction now would be: “Tell you what. Let’s go outside and find a real ball and a couple of real trees and run around and have some fun. And if you’re so keen that the words should be read, why don’t you do it?” Perhaps it just belongs in that vast collection of unfathomable activities that adults attach great store to and children unquestioningly comply with.

Anyway, the children turn up every week, of their own free will, to get even more of this than they had in school. The first 10 minutes or so are pure chaos, with everyone trotting round putting out tables, ferreting out chairs from the basement, the children scuffling to find their workbooks and get the best pencils (none of them have their own). Then it’s down to work. Westley and Tyrell are at the stage where they can genuinely read some words, can work out others, but the rest are a combination of guess-work and luck – and memory. We quickly come up short on “in” and “on”, and use this as an excuse to leave Peter and Jane and find lists of things that you can be in or on. Back to the task in hand. Spot has stolen the ball. Stop, Spot, stop. Tyrell is momentarily distracted by the book, and now Westley has stolen his pencil. Give it back, Westley, give it back. Much grinning. Peter is pushing Jane on the swing. Westley is kicking Tyrell under the table. More grinning. Jane has fallen out of the boat. Come back Jane. Tyrell is running across the room. Come back, Tyrell. Peter asks his mother for some cake. Westley asks Miss if he can draw a picture. Jane is tired. Westley wants to demonstrate the scars on his knees from the last time he fell out of a tree. Spot is tired. Tyrell is bouncing with unused energy. Peter is tired. Miss is exhausted.

How do real, full time teachers do it?

Meanwhile I (Anthony) had two six year old girls and we had a go at Peter and Jane as well, 3A in the Ladybird series. The trouble with Celia is that she did not learn to read, she just woke up one morning when she was ready and read!! I find the books ideal for this age group with a lot of repertition of key words on each page. But half an hour is more than enough time for their brains to concentrate and we moved onto pelmanism with some lovely coloured cards. Somehow they cannot grasp that you can only turn over two cards every time it is your go unless you turn up a pair.