Grenada does have a tendency to assault the senses on a fairly relentless basis. You are walking down the street, minding your own business, when a wondrous smell will suddenly deliver a sharp kick in your slats with no prior warning. Innocently round a corner on a mountain pass and a miraculous vista will poke you sharply in both eyes and then snicker in a childish manner at your discomfort. Frankly it can get a bit wearing.
I fractured my skull when I was 20 and subsequently have a very poor sense of smell, but even I get the odd whiff of delightful things which means it must be a pretty heady mixture. The air in some valleys is simply awash with the scent of nutmeg and allspice, cocoa is pretty reeky too, I’m told... in the nicest possible way. The sea air is heavy with salt and drifts across the beaches and far inland, especially on the Atlantic side of the island... which is by far the best side in my opinion. The sea air mingles with the smoke from the little fires the locals make most days when clearing ‘the bush’, it laces the air with nostalgia, sending me back to the Guy Fawkes nights of my childhood. (‘Laces the air with nostalgia?’ Surely some mistake? Ed)
If the old nasal passages get a constant bashing, the ears don’t get off lightly either. The constant soundtrack to our lives up here (in Bathway) is the sea breaking on the reef that protects the whole length of the beach. The reef sits about 50 feet from the beach and forms a perfect little lagoon where for centuries the locals have gathered at the beginning and the end of the day to swim and play, safely protected from the breakers. During the week you may get a handful of people or often nobody at all, but at the weekends it’s more lively as families come and enjoy this much-loved beach. But as the beach is well over a mile long and we are only talking about a hundred people, so even on a Sunday we are not talking of people fighting tooth and dagger for a scrap of beach to lay their towel... there is room a plenty for everyone. (Of course this would remove all the fun for German tourists who have turned annexing a towel sized piece of beach for the Fatherland into an art form. Probably why we don’t get many Germans here!) Every once in a while you may even get some live entertainment... a group, or a steel band or some dancers or perhaps the famous Tivoli drummers. It’s all very relaxed and free (and safe) so people just wonder along the beach and join in.
The other sound you learn to live with whilst driving the roads of Grenada is the sound of the horn. At first this is most disconcerting. Being an uptight Brit you scream silently inside the air conditioned car ‘What the f#@k are they honking at me for, I haven’t done anything.’ Then after a while you realise they aren’t honking at you. You also realise that in contrast to say Cairo, where they drive with their hand permanently and aggressively on the horn, the Grenadian honks are short and jaunty and rather jolly. Finally you realise they are all just honking hellos at their friends and as everyone knows just about everyone else, that’s a lot of honking!
As we drove hither and thither, trying to sate the seemingly endless appetite that three houses have for taps and tiles and door handles etc, etc, the sound that baffled us most was a noise like a very loud air horn and yet we could never spot the offending lorry. The noise is so loud it makes you jump and swing round violently in your seat searching desperately for the gigantic lorry which is surely hurtling towards you down a previously unseen side road. Finally Kitty solved the mystery - and was very smug about it too - I might add. Eagle-eyed as ever, she spotted a guy sitting on the back of a van blowing a Conch shell. I had no idea they could make so much noise. In fact I had forgotten they made any noise at all but believe me, they do. It’s extraordinary. Of course the sound needs to travel a long way as it is the Grenadian equivalent of the ice cream van jingle... they are blowing their own horn so to speak, to tell the villagers that they have fresh fish for sale. So if you are ever over here and you hear a very loud air horn you will know you are in for a treat... look for a guy with a conch shell and buy some delicious fresh fish from him quickly before it all goes.
Now the extraordinary sights we are lashed with everyday make your eyes bleed. I am quietly confident that I will never get complacent about the beauty of this breathtaking island. However, it is surprising how quickly some extraordinary sights become everyday sights, which nary raise a mention anymore between us gawking newcomers. Where do we start... oh how about the everyday sight of 5, 10, 15 people riding in the back of an open backed lorry as it careers round hairpin bends at death defying speeds. The cooler of the dudes don’t even hold on to the sides, they just surf along as if they are riding a giant skateboard. It seems suicidal. If you saw that in dear old Blighty you’d be on the blower to the Old Bill reporting the fact that some lunatic had obviously kidnapped a load of terrified innocents who were surely near death as they rode in the back of the death machine.
Then there is the sight of tiny children - and I mean 4 or 5 year olds - walking down the road in the middle of nowhere, completely alone, often in their spotless little school uniforms. It is most disconcerting at first and you feel sure they must have run off by themselves and that somewhere a distraught mother is hyper ventilating into a brown paper bag and telling the police officer that she only turned her back for a moment. One of the joys of small island life of course, is that they are perfectly safe. No one is going to abduct them here. Well that’s not strictly true, if Kitty could get one of the little girls into her handbag without anyone noticing she would.
Then early one evening not long ago, we were driving home, a little tired from another fruitless day of tile hunting, when we rounded the corner of our tiny local village and were met with one of the most moving sights I have ever seen. There is a large graveyard right in the heart of the village, nestling cheek by jowell with the school and local co op bank... death being very much part of life here in Grenada. At any time it is a lovely sight, with well maintained and often imposing graves jostling for shade beneath the flame red Flamboyant trees. But this evening, as the sun dropped behind the hill the whole cemetery was lit up with a thousand candles fluttering in the gentle breeze. Every gravestone was adorned with not only candles but beautiful flowers and around every stone, families sat beside or more often, actually on the stones just visiting their nearest and dearest who had ‘gone on before.’
It was so peaceful and wonderfully informal, no one was dressed up or being in any way reverential. No one was saying prayers or singing or feeling in any way embarrassed about being there. They were old and young, teenagers and babies mothers and grandparents and all just limin’ (relaxing) with their loved ones, and the fact that these particular loved ones were dead, really made no difference at all. It somehow seemed very natural and strangely reassuring to see how the villagers, through this simple yet dramatic rite on All Souls Night, demonstrated that their loved ones might be gone but they were not forgotten. It was a sight that will stay with me for the rest of my days, indeed until I join them in the graveyard. So come All Souls Night, if you are around this way and you have a few candles to spare, please feel free to come and ‘lime’ on my grave. But if any of you start humming ‘candle in the wind’ I will come back and haunt you in the dead of night by sticking a bat up your nightdress.
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