Spend your winter in Barbados

The breeze on Barbados blow fresh from Africa, giving the island the perfect climate for a life of lazy enjoyment. The sugar-cane plantations and the flying-fish fleet belong to the Caribbean, but the harbour police in bell bottoms, the undulating roads and the Sunday formality call to mind the England of a century ago.

Letters to Barbados often take a long time to arrive. Eventually they turn up having been wrongly directed to Bermuda or the Bahamas. Letters even arrive by way of Barbuda, which, one would have thought, even post office had never heard of.  Still, there are indeed smaller islands in the West Indies, Barbados, a little larger than the Isle of Wight – roughly the size of the ideal state defines by the Greeks as being not much more land than can be seen from the top of the hill – is sufficiently remote and inconsequential to be missed unless you look carefully.

The most easterly of the West Indian island, Barbados has a subtropical climate tempered by trade wind breezes for the better part of the year. There is no land between it and the coast of Africa, 3,000 miles away, so the air arrives rejuvenated and unused. It is eleven flying hours from England, or nine days by banana boat; five hours by air from New York, or week if you take one of those ever-stopping Caribbean tour ships.

The island was named by the Portuguese, possibly after the bearded fig trees which covered the island when they visited in 1536. It was a waterless, uninhibited coral plague spot, and the Portuguese, considerately leaving a heard of pigs behind, went on to more profitable islands. The British, not so particular, took possession of the figs, pigs and mosquitoes in 1625, and the island remained a British colony until independence in November, 1966. It still raises excellent pork, although the fig tree and mosquitoes are almost extinct.

The Britishness of Barbados, bougainvillea-smothered and surmounted by royal palm, is perhaps one of the neatest anachronisms to be found in the world today. The immaculately kept Victorian Gothic Church of England, with orchids around the door, is crammed to capacity every Sunday with devout Afro American Christians heavily intoning ‘Rock of Ages’ – about as un-English a scene as one could find. In England the churches are largely in bad repair and appealing for restoration fund to spare congregations who take their Christianity as timidly as they sing their hymns. But Barbados, with its memories of Nelson and Trafalgar, its Dover Hastings and Brighton, its pudding and mince tarts under faded Canadian Christmas trees in the blazing sun of Christmas Eve, is so traditionally Anglo-Saxon that it hurts.

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