Grand tours: to Barbados in the footsteps of George Lamming

George Lamming was born in Barbados in 1927. He moved to Trinidad in 1946, where he became a teacher, and emigrated to Britain in 1950. He began broadcasting for BBC radio and produced a number of major novels during the next 12 years. The extract below is taken from 'In the Castle of My Skin', which draws on his own childhood and experiences in Barbados.

Trumper was looking out across the sea. He sat with his arms thrown back. His face was smaller, but his body was larger than Boy Blue's. He was about 14 and just six months younger than Boy Blue. He had short, matted hair, black and stiff like wire. His face seldom betrayed any emotion. It was thin and plain and smooth with a single scar over the right eye. His ears were the right size for his face, and so was his nose. There was one remarkable feature about his face, and that was the eyebrows. The skin was too smooth and slightly swollen, and the eyebrows were not long and free like hair, but short and curling like weak strands of silk. When the sun struck full on his brows, it was the skin under the hair and not the hair that shone. The flesh of the brows where the hair had sprouted up had a sore, worn look. The look of skin that has been shaven for the first time.

No one knew how Trumper had come by these short silky eyebrows and the sore, worn skin that held them. But there were several suggestions, and the best known was probably the right one. When he was nine he had been sent to a reformatory school. It was an institution for boys who had been convicted, but were too young to serve sentence in gaol. Trumper had gone there, and, so the story went, he had experienced among other things the shaving of his eyebrows. When a boy was unmanageable his eyebrows were shaved clean, as a reminder, perhaps, that he was different from the others. Trumper never said that was true. He never said whether the boys had their eyebrows shaven but that was the suggestion. But there was something queer about his eyebrows, and he knew it.

The saving grace about his face was the colour of his skin. He was black too, but not as black as Boy Blue. No one was as black as Boy Blue. Trumper was what we called fair skin, or light skin, or, best of all, clear skin. Boy Blue was simply black. His blackness made us laugh. Every child in the village had a stock response for the colour, black. We had taken in like our daily bread a kind of infectious amusement about the colour, black. There was no extreme comparison. No black boy wanted to be white, but it was also true that no black boy liked the idea of being black. Brown skin was a satisfactory compromise, and brown skin meant a mixture of white and black. The best-looking girls in the village and in the whole island were those whose mothers had consorted with white men. They were brown skin, soft, chocolate creamed with long hair that curled and flew in the wind. There was a famous family on the island which could boast of the prettiest daughters. Their father was an old Scotch planter who had lived from time to time with some of the labourers on the sugar estate. The daughters were ravishing, and one was known throughout the island as the crystal sugar cake.

Neither of us could be called crystal. And there weren't many in the village who weren't black. Simply black. But though we were nearly all black, we all used colour as a weapon against interference. If we lost our temper we would charge the other with being a black fool, or a black ass. The little girls in the lanes met in the evening to play "pick up" and they would discuss among themselves the future of their shade. They were very blunt about it. The blackest among them would say, I don't mind being that colour, or even a little darker, but I won't like to be that. And the last that meant the colour of pitch.

In The Castle of My Skin (ISBN 0582642671) is published by Longman, price ?8.50.

George Lamming grew up in Carrington's Village, only a few miles from the centre of Bridgetown. In The Castle Of My Skin is set in a similar village against the background of the economic depression of the 1930s. Barbados was claimed as a colony in 1625 and finally won independence in 1966.

George Lamming lives mainly at The Atlantis Hotel in St Joseph, on the other side of the island from Bridgetown. He describes it as "one of the oldest and most illustrious hotels on the island"and says it sits on the edge of the Atlantic, looking across to Dakar, making it possibly the nearest point to Africa in the Caribbean. Only ten rooms are available for rent, since the others are occupied on a permanent basis. The rooms do not have television, radio or telephones, and rates include breakfast and dinner. Sunday lunch is something of an institution at The Atlantis, which specialises in Bajan cuisine. For more information and for room rates, go to www.atlantisbarbados.com, telephone 001 246 4339445, or fax 001 246 4337180.

Virigin flies to Bridgetown from Gatwick for ?388.50 return (including taxes). Book through Trailfinders before 31 October (020-7937 8499). British Airways flies the same route for around ?510 until 2 December. Book through Airline Network (0800 727747). Cheaper fares may be available at late notice from the airlines: British Airways (0845 7733377), Virgin (01293 747747).