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For many, Barbados is the paradise island, the embodiment of the Caribbean dream. In the early 1990s an ad on London’s Capital Radio would urge listeners to ‘Reach out for blue skies, Reach out for paradise, Reach out for Barbados.’ In reality, by 1975, the year that Bob Marley released No Woman No Cry, when Typically Tropical had a massive hit with Barbados (‘Whoa, I’m goin’ to Barbados/ Whoa, spot pretty palm trees/Whoa, I’m goin’ to see my girlfriend/ In the sunny Caribbean seas’), the island, where ‘the sky is blue and the palm trees are really beautiful’, was already enshrined in the popular consciousness as a supremely desirable destination. As the song was written from the point of view of a bus driver in Brixton, who had presumably originally come from Barbados, his nostalgia for his native island was hardly surprising.

The most easterly of the Caribbean islands, Barbados lies outside the great arc of volcanic islands that sweep down a thousand miles from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad and Tobago, and is, as a result, less susceptible to hurricanes (the last time it was seriously affected by one was in 1951). This, together with the fact that it didn’t suffer through the wars and vagaries of different colonial powers (it was only ever colonised by the British), has given Barbados a degree of stability and order unprecedented in the Caribbean. It became independent in 1966, but the Queen remains Head of State.

Compared to many of the other Caribbean islands, Barbados is rich. Barbadians have one of the highest standards of living in the Caribbean and the highest quality of life among developing countries. The island’s prosperity and efficiency give it a First World rather than Third World feel. But Barbados is also one of the most densely populated places on earth with around 1,600 people per square mile. This is five times denser than India, and nearly three times denser than Britain or Japan. Family planning was introduced by the state in the Fifties and Mia Mottley, the current Minister for Education, Youth Affairs & Culture, assured me that ‘population growth is below replacement fertility’. Even so, the population today numbers around 264,000.

Sugarcane was introduced from Brazil in 1641 and until the 1960s it dominated the island’s economy. In fact, at one time Barbados was the richest of the sugar islands, and you only have to look at the early seventeenth-century Principal’s Lodge at Codrington College, which was once the great house of the Consett Plantation, and at the college itself, built as a result of the legacy left by Christopher Codrington, one of the richest planters in Barbados, to understand how much money must have been around at the time. Its topography (unlike its volcanic neighbours, Barbados is a relatively flat coral island) and political stability helped. Sugar is no longer the economic mainstay - today Barbadians are generally reluctant to work in the fields (workers come from St Vincent or Guyana) - although waving fields of sugarcane still cover much of the island. Tourism has replaced sugar.

More British people go to Barbados than to any other Caribbean island. The landscape, particularly towards the north of the island where cattle graze on soft, green, rolling hills, reminds them of southern Britain - Devon or Somerset, say. Some of the towns on the south coast have English names - Brighton, Hastings and Worthing, though there is also a Miami Beach. English people like to think of Barbados as ‘Little England’ (Bridgetown even has a Trafalgar Square, the subject of some controversy at present), a nickname which derives from a telegram that Grantley Adams, at the time leader of the Barbados Labour Party, sent to George VI during World War II: ‘Go on, England, Little England is behind you.’ This nickname is regarded by Barbadians as a mixed blessing: describing the telegram that gave rise to it in his memoir, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, Austin Clarke wrote ‘…from that day on we were known with pride or embarrassment as “Little England”.’ And, in his poetic autobiographical novel, In the Castle of My Skin, which describes his childhood on the island, Barbados’ greatest novelist, George Lamming, wrote, “Barbados or Little England was the oldest and purest of England’s children and may it always be so.”

But a local saying has it that ‘Anyone who goes to England and stays for more than a month is mad.’

An Antiguan friend, hearing I was going to Barbados, said, ‘You’ll find it very different; you’re not used to big islands.’ Barbados is, in fact, just 166 square miles, about the size of the Isle of Wight, 21 miles long and 14 miles wide at its widest point (roughly between Kitridge Point on the east coast and Batts Rock Bay on the west). Not so very big after all, though, as you drive from one end of the island to the other, from Indian Ground in the north down to Oistins in the south, you can be forgiven for thinking it larger than it is. A modern highway runs almost its entire length, theoretically enabling the driver to move around faster than he could on the minor roads. In reality, the sheer volume of traffic tends to make the highway, particularly in rush hour, just as slow. Most journeys rarely take less than an hour.

‘Barbados is the most civilised of the islands.’ (When black non-Barbadians talk about Barbados, they often say it is the most ‘white’ of the Caribbean islands). The speaker was a rich, white foreigner who owned a house in Sandy Lane. We were having a drink in the bar at Cobbler’s Cove, a hotel that long-term foreign residents of Barbados like to describe as ‘old Barbados’. What they mean by that it is comfortable, expensive, exclusive, and chintzy and the only place to stay since Sandy Lane closed for redevelopment in 1998 (another interpretation is that, because of the advanced age of most of the guests at Cobbler’s Cove, the hotel is known locally as Jurassic Park). Sandy Lane is currently set to reopen at the end of this year.

Ah, Sandy Lane. The story of how Barbados became the place it is today is inextricably entwined with the story of Sandy Lane. In 1945, Ronald Tree, an American-born Brit who became a Conservative MP and advisor to Winston Churchill, lost his seat in Parliament and decided to build a house in Barbados. The result was Heron Bay, modelled on Palladio’s Villa Maser in the Veneto and still one of the most fabulous houses on an island, which boasts many fabulous houses. But he missed the company of like-minded people and so, in 1961, he opened the Sandy Lane Hotel, and invited his friends to come down and try it out.

Ronald Tree’s friends were so impressed, they rented or bought or built houses on Barbados, many of them on the Sandy Lane estate at St James. The stage designer Oliver Messel went there on holiday, fell in love with the island and decided to go and live (and, as it turned out, die) there. The rich got Messel to design their houses, which he did with wit and flair, expanding on the local vernacular, itself a hybrid of Georgian and Caribbean building traditions. A particular shade of sage green is still known on the island as ‘Messel Green’. Princess Margaret’s husband, Tony Snowdon, was Messel’s nephew and the royal connection did Barbados’ reputation nothing but good.

The island had always had a certain cachet, but during the Sixties and Seventies it seemed that everyone who was anyone holidayed in Barbados: Anthony and Clarissa Eden (who owned Villa Nova, set to open as a luxury hotel sometime next year); Claudette Colbert (whose house, Bellerive, was bought and sold by David Geffen); Averell and Pamela Harriman (who bought the Messel-designed Mango Bay from the Aalls in 1984); Jack and Drue Heinz; Bill and Pat Packard, to name just a few. They lived in one another’s pockets, seeing each other all the time, giving parties, parties, parties, leading the kind of life you would expect to find in a novel by Scott Fitzgerald. ‘It was such fun,’ says Mrs. Packard, whose beautiful house, Queen’s Fort, was one of those designed by Messel.

These days are gone, along with the old Sandy Lane. Many of the key players are dead and the new arrivals are not quite the same. When Martine (EastEnders’ Tiffany) McCutcheon’s mother got married on Barbados, the wedding was covered by OK magazine. Bob Monkhouse has a house on the island; Cilla Black a penthouse. As Peter Morgan, a former captain in the Ghurkhas who came to Barbados in 1951, put it: ‘Mrs. Packard’s generation were gracious people.’ There are, of course, still parties in Barbados. Big, lavish parties during the season, which runs from December to April. When the Countess Carla Cavalli, whose house, Casa di Pablo, is on the Sandy Lane estate, realised that everyone’s cook had Sunday evening off, she volunteered to feed ‘everyone’ on Sundays. In addition every day during the season, she holds open house from 5-7pm for tea, drinks and canapés.

Up to the early Sixties, the bulk of the tourist development had been on the south coast, while the west remained relatively untouched: the beaches are easily eroded and they tend be strewn with broken coral after storms; before World War II, local Barbadians had regarded the west coast, which was little more than a mosquito-ridden swamp, as unhealthy. In the early days, there were just a few stone buildings and numerous chattel houses, the little painted wooden buildings which are unique to Barbados.

The south coast is now massively developed and crowded with restaurants, bars, hotels and clubs - though it is rather funkier than and, in my view, preferable to the now up market west, which has become known as ‘the platinum coast’. After the opening of the Sandy Lane Hotel, land prices there began to soar. They are still soaring. Real estate on the platinum coast costs $100 a square foot. Hamptons, the British estate agent, is offering ‘Plantation Homes’ along the strip. Angus Edgehill, the white Barbadian owner of the Casuarina Beach Club, told me that, in 1950, an uncle of his bought land on the west coast for $1 a square foot; Edgehill also told me that he had heard of someone who gave away land in the Sandy Lane area in the Twenties because it was deemed so worthless. Not any more.

There’s something about Barbados, the air perhaps, which makes people want to leave their mark. The way foreigners do that is by building what in certain American circles is now referred to as a “McMansion”. Something big. Something expensive. The house which the “young” Rausings (heirs to the Tetra-Pac fortune) have just completed is rumoured to have cost $30m. Hans and Eva Rausing already owned Nelson Gay, the house next door to Cobbler’s Cove, which they had bought in the mid-Nineties after the death of its owner, Eric Estorick, the art dealer whose collection of modern Italian art is housed at the Estorick Collection in London. But the Rausings wanted their own place, something they had created, so they bought some land near Sandy Lane where an old hotel called Greensleeves and some other buildings stood. They demolished the old buildings and built a mansion, which, by all accounts, has to be seen to be believed. You can’t, in fact, see it at all from the road - a narrow, congested, accident-strewn strip that winds up the coast from Bridgetown to Speighstown - because it is hidden behind a high wall. Millionaires always want high walls; they want privacy.

But high walls are not part of the Barbados tradition.

One Sunday I went to see Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Cave, chairman of the Barbados Sugar Industry, who owns St Nicholas Abbey in St Peter, a parish in the north of the island. Barbados is full of lovely old houses, but St Nicholas Abbey is perhaps the most beautiful. It’s certainly the most anachronistic and must have always have seemed so, even when it was first built in the seventeenth century. A Jacobean manor house with Dutch gables, it wouldn’t look out of place in a Devon valley and is one of only three such houses in the Western hemisphere. It has been in Colonel Cave’s family for 150 years and it stands on what is still a working sugar plantation.

On weekdays the house is open to the public (through a scheme organised by the National Trust of Barbados which Ronnie Tree founded), but the day I visited the shutters were down. By electric light Colonel Cave talked about the way Barbados (which he pronounced in the old way ‘Barbadoes’) had changed. He hated the new rich and the big, fancy houses they were building, the high walls they were erecting. ‘Barbadoes never used to be gated; there were never fences between properties, you could walk anywhere.’

I heard his views echoed the next day by Sir Frederick Smith. Sir Frederick, who is known locally as ‘Sleepy’ because he has one lazy eye, is a former Attorney General. As a QC, he acted (successfully) for Ronnie Biggs in 1980 when attempts were being made to extradite him to Britain; as a judge, he heard the appeal of Bernard Coard and his fellow conspirators who had murdered Grenada’s charismatic Marxist-Leninist Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop and five of his closest associates, including his pregnant mistress, Jacqueline Creft, on 19th October 1983, thereby triggering the United States’ invasion of Grenada.

‘I love Barbados 100 per cent”, says Smith, “but I am very worried about giving away or selling our heritage. As a native Barbadian, I think buying houses for millions of dollars, knocking them down and putting up monstrosities sets a bad example. What kind of example is it to a maid who works for $90 a month? Barbados has become the playground of the rich and famous and I am not happy about it. And Barbados is becoming a gated society. You can’t get to the beach. I can’t pick up my wife and grandchildren on a Sunday and take them to see a development! This government is going to sell its soul for a mess of pottage.’

This complaint is not unique to Barbados. Throughout the English-speaking Caribbean, wherever there has been massive tourist development, the local people complain that the beaches are no longer theirs. On all the islands (except perhaps Mustique which is a law unto itself and where the only black residents are servants, the beaches are public. But, if you can’t actually get to the beaches; if you have negotiate a gate or a wall or a guard who wants to know your business, then they might as well be private property, because, unless you have a boat, you can’t reach the beach from the water, and, along the west coast, the reefs would make that nigh impossible. Margaret Deutsch, a British political scientist who lives in Indian Ground with a white Barbadian called Richard Goddard, said, ‘These super-rich enclaves are creating a problem. People are getting very angry. Ordinary little people cannot buy a piece of land in Barbados.’

The government is, however, at present turning a blind eye to whatever problems gated communities may present. Just over the road and up the hill from Sandy Lane, there are several new developments. One, Royal Westmoreland, which specialises in golf, advertises itself as soon as you get through immigration at the airport, even before you get to pick up your bags; Cliff Richard has already bought one of the wedding-cake villas at Sugar Hill, the new tennis village.

I asked Luther Miller, director of Finance and Resource Management at the Caribbean Tourism Organisation, how he felt about all the very wealthy foreigners coming to Barbados and buying up land. ‘We love them,’ he said. Miller’s sister, Billy, is Deputy Prime Minister.

The message you get from everyone is that Barbados is changing. One white woman told me somewhat wistfully, ‘Barbados is changing from a chattel-house-and-bicycle society to a stone-box-and-car society’. The changes perceived by Sleepy Smith are for the better. He said, ‘When I was growing up in the Thirties and Forties, even in the Fifties, this was one of the most prejudiced countries to live in, but now relations are quite good.’

Peter Morgan, who was Minister of Tourism, Information and Public Relations from 1971-76 under Errol Barrow, Barbados’ first Prime Minister after Independence, agrees. ‘In the 1950s there was effectively apartheid,’ he said, then added that he remembered a discussion during the mid-Fifties with Grantley Adams, then premier, about how they should go about increasing tourism. Adams’ worry was that, because of the social climate in the United States at the time, a big influx of American tourists would retard the breakdown of the unofficial colour bar which then existed in Barbados. Morgan convinced Adams that tourism would benefit Barbados, but he now says, ‘Development brings headaches. Undoubtedly the enormous amounts of money being spent on the west coast bring trouble. Barbadians are very quiescent people, but there is trouble brewing.’

Before I left London, I had telephoned Penelope Tree, Ronald Tree’s daughter, to ask her about Barbados. She painted an idyllic picture of her childhood there, but told me that she hadn’t been back for 20 years. She said that she didn’t dare, because she was so worried that the island would have changed out of all recognition. It seems she was right to be worried.

Only Bathsheba and the wild, brooding, east coast, with its steep hills where the Barbados black-bellied sheep graze unconcernedly, seems to have retained the spirit of the past. Unwittingly, perhaps. I was reassured though when I asked the manageress of the old Atlantis Hotel whether there were any plans for renovation and she said, ‘No.’

The Atlantis stands boldly above a wind-swept shore, exposed to anything and everything that the weather dare bring. Between this coast and the Cape Verde islands, which lie off Africa’s west coast, there is nothing but sea.

There are some places where you feel immediately at home. This was one of them. All night long the sound and fury of the waves kept me from ever sinking into a proper sleep. As I tossed and turned, I dreamt about my first boss, the editor of a literary magazine which I had worked for 25 years ago. I had been terrified of this man then. In the dream, everything was wonderful between us.

Almost the first thing I had done when I got to Barbados was to try to track down George Lamming. He was off island, away lecturing and teaching. He wouldn’t be back until after I had left. As I checked into the Atlantis, I saw a large brown envelope addressed to George Lamming lying on the counter. The manageress told me that, when he was on the island, he lived at the Atlantis. Of course. It made perfect sense, and I took it as a sign that I had done the right thing in coming there. My dream, which had wiped out the fear and unhappiness of many years, confirmed it.

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