Decca Aitkenhead - All at Sea

‘Just having coffee down on the beach,’ Tony calls over his shoulder, as he strolls down the garden path towards the gate. Still half asleep, he treads languidly, flip-flops flapping faintly on the soles of his feet. Our three-year-old son, Joe, is playing inside in his bedroom, but I can’t spot his older brother. From the front deck of the cottage, I call down to Tony.

‘Have you got Jake?’

Tony settles on the edge of a sunlounger, his back to me, gazing out to sea. ‘Yeah, got him here.’ I look again, and there Jake is, in his navy blue pyjamas, playing in the sand between Tony’s feet and the water’s edge. It is just after 8 a.m. on a cloudless Caribbean morning.

We arrived here ten days ago, for a holiday that feels not so much recreational as medicinal. Tony and I have two small children, two full-time jobs, and the usual unmanageable levels of exhaustion and stress. Twelve months earlier we moved out of London and launched into renovating a sixteenth-century farmhouse with the naïve excitement of a couple who had no idea what living in a building site with two little boys would be like. After an interminable winter of dust and rubble, we are frazzled. The holiday had been my idea. I know we can’t afford to go away, I had said, but perhaps we can’t afford not to either? I put the trip on a credit card, telling myself it was not an extravagance but a necessity.

I first came to this scruffy little fishing village on the south coast of Jamaica almost twenty years ago. Too remote and untamed for the package-holiday market, Treasure Beach is not a resort but just a dusty muddle of potholed lanes and driftwood shacks clustered around two bays, Calabash and Frenchman’s. To the east and west, the coastline is wild and deserted. On the hillside overlooking the ocean, farmers grow scallion and melons in blood-red soil.

I was first sent here to write a travel story about a new hotel called Jake’s. Back then, in the early Nineties, Jake’s was nothing more than a few artfully rustic cottages nestled in a rocky cove between the village’s two beaches. But it is owned by a family of celebrated Jamaican filmmakers and artists, and over the years evolved into a boutique spa hotel with a boho hipster reputation among fashionable types who find St Barts and Barbados a bit bling, and prefer not to be bothered by paparazzi stalking Simon Cowell. Treasure Beach’s other guesthouses attract a more hippyish backpacker type, but even in high season tourists seldom outnumber the battered wooden fishing boats on the beach.

Almost two decades later, Treasure Beach feels more like home to me than anywhere else on earth. I have been coming here every year, beguiled by the discovery of epic melodrama concealed beneath its sleepy surface. This tiny Caribbean community contains more comedy and intrigue than I have ever managed to find in London. In 2000 I rented a house in Calabash Bay for nine months while I wrote a book, and some of my oldest and most precious friendships belong here in this village.

After all these years, Calabash beach is as familiar to me as my own reflection. It is a slender curl of sand between two rocky points no more than 300 yards apart, dotted with just seven cottages and villas. Over time I have stayed in all but one of the houses, and for this holiday we have rented the cottage at the eastern end of the bay, close to the corner where the fishing boats lie upturned on the sand. It is the cottage where Tony and I stayed the very first time I brought him here.

Before our boys were born, holidays involved late nights in local bars, sleeping until noon beneath the cool of a ceiling fan and lazing afternoons away in a hammock. Those days are long gone. Dusk falls fast in the tropics; it is inky black by 7.30 p.m., and on this holiday we have all been in bed not much later. Most mornings I have been on the tennis court at dawn with my friend Annabelle, a ballsy six-foot motorbiker, while Tony wandered down to the fishing boats with the boys to see what the night catch had brought. We have been laughing at what an unexpectedly wholesome couple we appear to have become.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ Tony had remarked after the first few days, ‘how this is actually more fun than everything we used to get up to here?’ We are slowly beginning to unwind, to feel almost normal again. I am even going to give yoga a go. For years everyone has been telling me to try it, and at last I am about to; my first lesson starts at 9 a.m. at Jake’s. Feeling self-conscious about how creaky I have become, I had been stretching on the deck when a friend appeared in the garden, passing by on his way into the village.

Shugoo is a chef, and one of Tony’s closest friends in the village. A great mountain of a man, he is practically round, and on first impression can appear rather solemn – even Buddha-like – for he tends to move majestically slowly, and is at ease in silence. But when Shugoo laughs, he explodes into peals of schoolboy giggles, and he and Tony are usually helpless with laughter within minutes together. The kettle had just boiled, so Tony made coffee, and the pair wandered down to the beach to leave me to my stretching.

The only yoga move I have ever tried is something very basic called a sun salutation. A friend showed me it years ago, and I’m pretty sure I don’t do it properly, but I bend backwards and begin. Sunlight dapples the deck through the tangled branches of an overhanging calabash tree. I straighten and lean forward to touch my toes. Any second now our son Joe will emerge onto the deck and demand we join the others on the beach, but for now all is quiet, and in the rare calm my mind drifts.

As I straighten a few minutes later and stand, my eye catches something in the sea. A head is bobbing in the water. The swimmer is clearly out of their depth – but how is that possible? The swimmer can be no more than 10 feet from the shore. On a normal day you can wade out 30 or 40 feet before your feet no longer touch the bottom. It must be a child, I think idly – a very small child. I scan the beach, wondering where its parents can be.

The waves on Frenchman’s beach can often be fierce, but Calabash Bay has been like a millpond since we arrived. We have spent hours in the ocean most days, the boys astonished by the crystal warmth of glassy water. ‘Dec it’s like a giant bath!’ they would squeal. ‘Look, Tony, we can see our toenails!’ They call us by our names instead of Mum and Dad, and it makes others on the beach laugh. We had planned to move to another cottage around the headland for the second week of our holiday, but this beach is so perfect for the children that we cancelled the other booking and decided to stay put here.

The villa to our left belongs to friends, and when guests had left the previous day the owners had let our boys use the pool. Jake is four, and on the cusp of learning to swim; he had spent the whole day in the pool with Tony, splashing about without his floatation vest. Tony had taught him how to tread water, and Jake was elated with his new buoyancy.

That afternoon, while they had been in the pool, I had glanced out to sea and saw the current had shifted. The bay was still fairly calm but a little choppy, no longer glassy. To anyone unfamiliar with these waters, the change would be imperceptible, but I understood its significance. Beneath an apparently benign surface, a treacherous undertow builds, doubling the depth of the water and sucking anyone in it out to sea. I have been caught in one a few times here, and the force can be startling. ‘See how the current’s changed?’ I had called to Tony, gesturing out to sea. He had cast a brief glance, but could see nothing, and had turned back to Jake. We had this lovely pool to ourselves, so it seemed unimportant, and soon drifted out of my mind.