Taking a Walk: North Norfolk’s dog-friendly coast path
Forty years ago, a teenage James Pembroke killed lizards in the blistering Caribbean heat. Now he rejoices in early colonial buildings
In 1980, a travel agent’s list of winter-sun destinations would have included Florida, the West Indies and Kenya (for a safari). And that would have been it, apart from Acapulco if you were a Goldsmith or an Elvis fan. Thailand and Goa were of interest only to stamp-collectors or backpackers, and it would be ten years before those specialists returned as hardpressed workers looking for a decent cabana.
I remember those narrow horizons well, because my mother was catatonic with envy when, 40 years ago, Giles ‘Nappy’ Knapman, my boon companion at prep school, invited me to stay in his grandfather’s hotel – not the one in Torquay, but his newly-built compound of small villas in Barbados.
In my parents’ world view, only the likes of Mick Jagger and Robert Sangster went there during those winters of discontent. Most of my contemporaries had never been abroad – not in spite of being posh, but because they were posh. Cornwall, Scotland and, at a stretch, skiing were the established repertoire.
Not for me: I was thrilled to be embalmed by that initial blast of tropical heat on exiting the aeroplane. For the first four days, Nappy and I spent 14 hours a day bodysurfing the warm bath of those enormous Caribbean waves. Back then, the protection factor of English suntan cream peaked at a wildly paranoid eight – that was the most Cornwall required. After four days, the cream’s inadequacy and my devil-may-care ignorance rapidly manifested itself in bubble-gum blisters all over my forearms, which a large nurse pierced with scissors.
We were both banned from the waves for the next few days, but we quickly found a revolting new form of entertainment: killing lizards with sticks.
After a day of slaughter, Nappy and I discovered that, beneath each villa, were colonies of ravenous cockroaches to which we could feed the lizards’ corpses.
On day three, Nappy won his master torturer’s gold medal: he realised the roaches were so absorbed with their feasting that they wouldn’t mind losing some of their number to the dripping plastic from our ignited cocktail-stirrers. Nappy’s mother decided it was safer for us to return to the water.
Forty years on (to the very week), my wife and I fled soon-to-be-locked-down Britain, clutching our invitation to the estimable Cobblers Cove hotel, famous for its eponymous cocktail, the gravitydenying Cobblers Cooler. I’d have worked our passage on a banana boat from Liverpool to revisit Nappy’s and my youthful paradise.
Owing to my self-imposed confinement in our compound 40 years ago, I wrongly assumed Barbados would be a moribund, fly-and-flop destination, enlivened only by its multicoloured
chattel houses, rum cocktails, ubiquitous calypso and bursting-with-warmth people. Many tourists are happy with those alone; its edge over the Maldives and Seychelles is its early colonial architecture. Much of it has survived, thanks to the efforts of both the 50-yearold Barbados National Trust, which has just four employees, and its latter-day colonists including Anthony Eden (Villa Nova), Sigrid Rausing (Fustic) and the Bamford family (the Palladian Heron Bay).
Its geology has helped: Barbados emerged from the Atlantic as a landmass later than the other West Indian islands. I can’t help thinking the size and appetite of its current inhabitants may well push it back under. Fortunately, it has a solid coral stone base, while all the other islands are volcanic.
Being some distance off the rest of the chain, Barbados is also far less subject to hurricanes. Hence it feels gentler, less dramatic and more benevolent.
This shows in the people, too. The understandable anger of the 1937 feudal riots is long forgotten, and independence in 1966 was achieved peacefully.
Over 350 years ago, it was Sephardic Jews who originally realised the island’s terrain and climate were ideal for sugarcane production, which they had learned in Recife, in South America. In 1654, the Portuguese took control of Brazil and continued the Iberian pogroms, forcing the Jews to move on again, to the West Indies. They brought their windmill technology and manuring techniques, which helped to make Barbados ‘the richest spote of land in the new world’.
By 1700, there were 250 Jews in Bridgetown; their original 17th-century cleansing bath, or mikvah, still stands next to the town’s 1833 synagogue.
To meet the labour demand, Cromwell deported legions of slaves or indentured labourers from Ireland and Scotland; they at first outnumbered the Africans. While staying with Eden, Churchill went in search of the descendants of these benighted Red Legs and Red Necks, who are still holed up in the remote parish of St Lucy.
Such prosperity – and the bricks used as ballast on these voyages from England – gave us the grand plantation houses. If only our own National Trust could divert the funds wasted on such erroneous schemes as their beaver-reintroduction programme, Bridgetown could be further rescued.
Except for a few 17th-century buildings such as Drax Hall, which has remained in the same family for centuries, and Dutchgabled St Nicholas Abbey in St Peter, the Georgian/palladian style of casement windows, arcades and pedimented porticoes is dominant. Its influence can be seen in the narrow single houses of Charleston, with their long side verandas, and, more locally, in the island’s numerous more humble chattel houses.
After emancipation, the former slaves rented their land but owned their highly movable houses, in readiness for the inevitable rental dispute. These wooden houses were placed on a groundsill of coral blocks or sawn stone, which helped the circulation of cooling air. The steep, gabled roofs are made of zinc sheets or ‘galvanise’, and there are high jalousie windows at the gable ends. Larger versions have several sections or units, each with a separate gable, placed one behind another. Palladio would have approved of the symmetry and grandeur of their central front door and hooded windows either side, and their front porch with its pediment on classical wooden columns along with carved tracery.
Cobblers Cove itself is no slouch in the architectural stakes. Originally known as Camelot, the Great House, complete with crenellations, was built in 1944, by Joss Haynes of the island’s planter dynasty, as a cool seashore villa. The two deeply rounded bays are in imitation of their main home, Villa Nova, where Eden lived.
Fifty years ago, the Godsal family created a hotel of two-storey villas in the grounds, which the current generation have updated, ensuring that every chair, lamp, basket and mirror is made on the island itself. Sam Godsal even commissioned the metal monkey chairs around the pool to a design by Oliver Messel, one of the island’s major postwar architects.
The elegance of this family home isn’t starchy in the least thanks to the handson manager, Will Oakley, who could run a small country without breaking into a sweat. The wit and warmth of his staff are everywhere, not least in the provision of water pistols at breakfast to deter the beautiful scaly-naped pigeons. Claudette Colbert, who lived just down the beach at Bellerive, would have approved.
Why not winter there in safety like Miss Colbert?
From just US$200 per person per night: www.cobblerscove.com/cobblers-cove-offers