`An urge to find paradise . . . comes over many Europeans, usually in the middle of winter, or a bad moment in the middle of their lives," Hunter Davies has observed. "They experience a sudden desire for the sun, for a culture and climate that they think will suit them better, where they can be themselves, find themselves."
Davies, a prolific London journalist and broadcaster, and the author of more than 30 books that slide through the mind as pleasantly as oysters through the gullet, finds the heliophilic urge annually irresistible. During the past 10 winters he has visited 27 islands in the Caribbean, and has compiled a practical and entertaining escapist guide to the 10 he considers most interesting.
They are Barbados, St Lucia, Mustique, Guadeloupe, Tobago, Bequia, St Martin, Grenada, Antigua and Cuba. Judged by the ones I know, his generally enthusiastic reporting seems honest and thorough, with few hints of the professional travel writer's gratitude for special favours. When he sees that an island's best feature is the view out to sea and that inland the landscape is flat and scruffy, he says so. His compliments are valid.
In anticipation of the wet, cold, grey days only half a year away, you may find the book inspiring. There are some alluring colour photographs (and some snapshot portraits warning that a white person's skin, exposed to prolonged sunshine, can resemble a crocodile's), clear maps, a comprehensive gazetteer of all the West Indies with statistics and recommendations, and even the name, address and telephone number of a travel agent who specialises in the Caribbean. Davies also bungs in an appendix of recycled research material from his history In Search of Columbus, whom he calls the West Indies' "First Tourist". The Columbian pages are padding, but they are good padding.
Much of the basic information about most of the islands may be common knowledge; however, Davies's approaches to them are subjectively fresh, largely through the perceptions of "ex-pats", mainly from Britain, some from Germany, France and the United States, and "returnees", West Indians who migrated to England and went home again. He made a point of meeting "active, working people, not the retired or well off".
He evidently has a slight chip on his shoulder about "aristos", especially men of what he calls "the officer class", but proletarian prejudice has not embittered his lively sense of humour. He is a sympathetic interviewer who encourages men and women of all ages to speak candidly about their private lives, their failures as well as their successes. There is plenty of colourful dialogue.
Many travellers to the West Indies share Davies's impressions that Barbados is the most English and orderly of the islands; that Trinidad and Jamaica are the most exciting - but parts of Port-of-Spain and Kingston at night can be somewhat too exciting; that the Bahamas, at least Nassau and Freeport, are touristically the most commercially over-developed; St Lucia and Grenada the most scenically beautiful; Mustique the most luxurious, and Cuba the most austere yet socially egalitarian, except, of course, for foreigners with lots of hard currency.
Hunter Davies rightly devotes more space to Cuba than to any other island. While he was there, he gratified a Cuban by telling him that "Cuba, it seemed to me, was probably the most interesting country to visit at the moment, in all the Caribbean". Davies obviously meant what he said, and his three chapters on the opening of Cuba are the most interesting in an interesting book.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic