Honesty island

Rachel Johnson

hoah! I'm going to Jamaica! Whoah! In the sunny Caribbean sea!' I hummed, as I sat in the lounge waiting to board my Air Jamaica flight, in the company of several distinguished hacks and both Mary Killen and Toby Young of this parish. -Whoah! I'm gonna see my girlfriend.'

Can you just shut up for a sec? Er, do any of you guys have travel insurance?' asked Tobes.

We all shook our heads. 'Well, don't you think we should?' he continued. 'I mean, almost all the murders in London are committed by Yardies and here we are flying to the murder capital of the Caribbean.'

So we all dialled up insurance, and what a complete waste of £35 it was. I'd have done better spending the money on a wide-brimmed hat and some matching flipflops with sparkly bits at the Accessorize concession in Terminal Three, because it is now my firm belief that you are probably safer roaming the streets of Trenchtown than you are in your own home. Probably.

Admittedly, we were not exactly slumming it, and mostly floated around in the jet-set bubble that screens off the outside world and its general unpleasantness, for we were the guests — I should come right Out with it, yup, we were on a freebie — of Gordon 'Butch' Stewart.

Butch, as the few people in Jamaica who are not his employees are encouraged to call him, is either the buccaneer of the Caribbean, the Captain Morgan of his day, or the real PM of the island (take your pick, he's called all three). He owns Air Jamaica, the Observer newspaper, the Sandals and Beaches chains of hotels all over the Caribbean, and a whopping electronic goods company, and is thought not to be short of a bob or two. Butch generously put us up in a hotel on the north coast, near Ocho Rios, called the Royal Plantation Spa and Golf Resort.

Please bear with me a sec while I describe the place. It is a lushly converted colonial mansion set in eight landscaped acres of tropical gardens, filled with fruit and blooms, birds and peacocks, leading down to two private beaches where I lay for many hours breathing the soft air and dipping in and out of the warm turquoise sea to calm my sunburnt limbs, in a state of such relaxation and indolence that it could take a whole morning to summon up the energy to go back to my suite (with direct view over the bay) to fetch my book.

This is the jewel in Butch's crown in Jamaica, a judgment that I can confirm after a late-night whistle-stop tour of some of the other Sandals hostelries on the island. These are on a more industrial scale, replete with honeymooning couples wandering around hand-in-hand among the hibiscus and sipping margaritas in their bathers at one of the `swim-up' bars. As we trailed in Butch's wake — he is a big man in every sense — joyful 'repeat' guests (one. Pat from Epping Forest, told him that she comes every year) rushed up to hug him. People love Butch because he looks out for Jamaica like a daddy bear: he spends millions on good causes and bails out the island with his own dollars when the going gets rough. And, of course, he invites journalists like me to come and inspect his empire, which is also nice.

So there we were, a bunch of spoilt hacks on a jolly, and as soon as we stepped off the plane at Montego Bay and into the sultry night, we were hooked. We hugged the coast road, passing through Falmouth — where the slaves were once lined up in the middle of town and made to race each other sothat masters could pick off the fittest — to Ocho Rios. After a morning's lazing around the hotel eating shrimp in coconut batter and sucking down fruit punch, we were taken up into the White River valley by Oliver Foot (the founder, among much else, of the Orbis flying eye hospitals and charity), whom we were lucky to have as our guide and nanny. A native Jamaican, and son of the former governor-general Sir Hugh Foot, Oliver knows his stuff, speaks patois and is an allround good egg. As we toured around, folks would approach the van, and 0. Foot would wind down his window and introduce us.

'This is my friend Pretty, called Pretty because he once wore a pretty shirt, yeah mon Pretty?' he would explain. Or, 'Here's Corner. He's called Corner because he's in charge of this corner, you see?'

We did see. With Oliver Foot, nothing was frightening except his driving (let's face it, when the rest of the world is facing al Qa'eda, beautiful, friendly places like Jamaica seem much less menacing than they once did). He took us to Firefly, where Noel Coward lived and died and is buried. Firefly is a modest stone structure among the breadfruit and ackee trees, with a panorama of cerulean sea and green hills, with just one bedroom and a sitting-room (the original Room With a View). It is a les son in simplicity. Visitors can see and touch the eau-de-nil piped green pyjamas from Fortnums in the wardrobe, sniff the talc in the bathroom cabinet (That Man by Revlon) and see the outside dining-table set exactly as it was when the Queen Mother came for lunch (she had three bullshots and fish mousse). It is redolent of its owner, which one cannot exactly say of Goldeneye.

Coward called Ian Fleming's house, below his on the beach, `Goldeneye nose and throat', and complained that the Commander's food tasted like old tennis balls, but it has been transformed into a deluxey spread by Chris Blackwell. Though one can sit at the fan-shaped desk where Fleming wrote all the Bond thrillers, that sense of connection to the past has been dulled by the sumptuous makeover into a rental villa (about $3,600 a night in high season) for the Kate Mosses of this world.

And he took us to Kingston, to his boyhood home (Kings House, the residence of the governor-general or gee-gee), and to see the slums of Trenchtown and Majestic Gardens, which Christian educators are transforming from no-go areas into places where -whiteman' can wander freely, chatting to rastas in the shower blocks and visiting schools. As we parked alongside a terrace of shacks made of beaten-out steel drums, daubed with lines from the psalms (-My Lord is my shepred,' one read), I asked Oliver if he would be locking the van, because it was hot and I wanted to leave my bag. I dumped it on the front seat, full of dollars, a mobile and a digital camera. One hour later, on our return, I got back to the van first. It was unlocked. But my bag and belongings, which had been in plain view of some of the poorest people in the Caribbean, were untouched. (Readers whose cars have been broken into in the swishest parts of London will share my humbled sense of amazement.)

Later the same day we toured a Christian primary school, where 90 per cent of the children come from broken homes, junkie homes or no homes. The children, in their blue and gold uniforms, were smiling and disciplined, with shining faces, and for the second time that day I wondered why dirt-poor parts of Jamaica could manage things that Middle England seems incapable of mastering.

But I cast these ponderous thoughts aside as we left Kingston to drive over the mist-wreathed Blue Mountains back to Ocho Rios, one of those drives that finds you sitting in the back of the minibus with your eyes shut, praying that as long as you get home in one piece you will be His servant for ever.

And we did — get home in one piece, that is — and already what Fleming called the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday is fading faster than my tan. When I reached my final destination in Notting Hill, I discovered a burglar had buzzed a paving stone through our front window in the night and nicked a laptop — a nastiness I can't imagine happening on my island in the sun. You need your insurance in London, that's for sure.