'I was too much of a Marxist to appreciate the beauty of Anguilla'
In a way that now seems borderline incomprehensible I did not fly on a plane until I was 23, in 1981 – my parents both died without ever having flown on one. Rather conveniently for the purposes of this personal A-Z of the world, the destination of my first flight was Anguilla. I flew there with a former student from the Lucie Clayton Secretarial College where I had been teaching two days a week.
My girlfriend, who went by a nickname I’ll abbreviate to W, had a rather confusing international background. She was Irish but her mother, who had a house in the Cotswolds, lived for most of the year in the Caribbean. We flew to Antigua (I think) and then took a small plane to the island of Anguilla – about 16 miles by three – where I seemed to be the only tourist. W’s mum was in the process of changing that, laying the foundations for developing tourism on the island.
The house where we stayed had a flat roof with a view of the sea which could be reached by scrambling down a cliff to the beach. We also drove round the island to other beaches in a car so eaten up by rust that you could see the road rushing beneath the floor. What else? There was a laid-back reggae outfit called Bankie Banx and his Roots & Herbs but we only listened to their records, never saw them play live. There was also marijuana but I had never smoked a cigarette so this was wasted on me.
There can’t be many places like this left in the world now. Places get overrun so that they resemble franchises of Camden Market or they become exclusive resorts for the fabulously rich. My guess is that Anguilla has tended towards the billionaire end of the spectrum. If so, I’d happily go back (on a free trip) but mainly I’d like to go back in time even though, at the time, I didn’t like it much because I was such an idiot.
W’s mum was an excellent cook but it was a point of principle for me, as an intellectual, not to care about good food. What I cared about was books, Marxist theory and going to pubs, gigs and Bergman triple-bills at the Scala in London. I should have realised there was no need to do anything on Anguilla. Just being there was enough, obviously.
Why did I have so little appreciation of this idyllic place? It takes a certain amount of preparation to enjoy Beethoven or Henry James. Could it be that I needed a bit of an apprenticeship to appreciate the natural beauty of Anguilla? I’d been to Crete and Greece but couldn’t have known that, 40 years later, I’d only ever see more beautiful beaches in the Bahamas and the Maldives.
Here’s another bit of stupidity. W had told me that there was no theft on the island and so, when we went swimming at a deserted cove, I left my Pentax camera in the car with the windows down. When we returned the camera, naturally, was gone.
Later, W wrote to tell me that she had met the guy who had helped himself to the camera – you could hardly call it theft when it was there for the taking (of pictures). So even though my camera had in fact been stolen her point about the lack of theft sort of held good.
If I’d had any sense I would have stayed on the island for as long as I could have done but after three weeks I flew back to London. I was brown as a conker, impatient to resume my life as an unemployed intellectual. W remained in Anguilla; it was years before I saw her again.
