Idling

I needed to go somewhere to work on the third draft of a book, A Man Walking His Dog. I have a workroom at home and an office two miles away from home, but I find it increasingly difficult to work in either of these places (people tend to drop in for a chat). I need to go alone, to a place where nobody knows me, where I can sit outside and work crazy hours. Which is why I ended up in Barbados recently.

I went to a travel agent and said I needed to go somewhere hot for fourteen days. He pressed a couple of buttons on his computer and Barbados came up straight away. The cost of a return ticket was £300. ‘I'll take it,’ I said. It was a record transaction.

Days before I'd been slagging the place off. My husband and I had been trapped in transit in Barbados airport on the way back from Tobago. Other passengers spent their time buying emeralds and queuing for food and drink. I spent mine wanting a cigarette (a thousand curses on airports that won't give us smokers our own small, smoky corner).

I wasn't too impressed by the English visitors to Barbados. True, I only saw them from behind glass, but there seemed to be a high percentage of colonel and the colonel's lady types. One couple, he in a blazer despite the searing heat, she in a Laura Ashley frock and hat, actually did walk with their noses in the air. They may have both suffered from a rare medical condition that necessitated keeping their nostrils uplifted – if so I'm sorry for them – but the impression they gave as they walked behind their porter, who was pushing their enormous pile of luggage, was of the snooty English abroad.

I vowed never to go. I have a horror of places where such types congregate. I imagine being trapped with them: him in the hotel bar telling his interminable army stories and her confessing to me on the beach that he's a callous brute and she longs to leave him. None of this could happen in reality, of course, because when I go on holiday I never speak to anybody apart from bar staff and waiters (and, of course, my husband, if he's with me).

Anyroad up, as they say in Leicester, I went to Barbados to work. On my return, people asked me what it was like. ‘I don't know,’ I had to reply. I saw the immediate environs of my hotel, the Shangri-La, and perhaps a mile of exquisite beach, and that was it. I was in my room by half past six each night, cowering from the mosquitoes and preparing a meal of corned beef, vegetable rice and pineapple. I spent the rest of the evening sitting up in bed rewriting my book.

Each morning I went shopping for more corned beef, vegetables etc., at the poorly stocked supermarket, which was in sight of the hotel. However, although it was not far, this was not a simple journey – there were obstacles on the way. On the opposite side of the road was a huge tree with a thick trunk on which was written in white paint, ‘No idlers’. In the shade of the tree on a low wall sat a collection of idlers, youngish good-looking men. The wall was stony, so they had brought along bum-sized pieces of foam to make idling more comfortable. On spying a woman walking alone, they would invite her to sit next to them and whip out another piece of foam. If you declined the foam and carried on walking, they would run after you and entreat you to ‘chill out, woman’.

They would wave the piece of foam intended for you in the air enticingly, as though it were a priceless piece of gold cloth. I have to tell you that many single British women ‘took the foam' and were later to be seen buying the various idlers drinks and meals in the hotels on the sea shore. I can only speculate on what happened at night because, as I've said, I was in my room, eating my corned beef and rice and my tinned pineapple. (Yes, all on the same plate; the conventions tend to break down when you're on your own.)

It was a damned nuisance at the time, running the gauntlet of the idlers, but they were never offensive and I must admit that some of their shouted remarks were quite nice.

‘Hey, Susan!’ (Yes, I cracked and told them my name.)

‘Hey, I like the way you walk, woman.’ And, ‘You got style, woman.’ But the words that stay uppermost in my mind are those spoken by the chief idler, Peter.

‘You should sit down and chill for a while, Susan. There's more to life than work, y'know.’