Hunter Davies rates Bequia for a slice of island life

Author and broadcaster Hunter Davies reveals his favourite holiday destinations.

“Until I was 18 I’ve no memory of going on holiday, as in going to a hotel or to restaurants.

There is a photo of me aged about two with my mother and father walking me down the prom at Troon.

I went to my mum’s parents in Bellshill, playing on a coal bing heap which I thought was so exciting and to Cambuslang watching trains shunting wagons on the line.

My first foreign holiday was when Margaret and I went on honeymoon to Sardinia in 1960.

I got a boil on my bottom and when a fearsome doctor pressed it Margaret fainted and crashed to the floor.

I’m just back from my favourite place in the world, an island in the West Indies called Bequia.

I’ve done three books about the West Indies and Christopher Columbus and have been to 32 islands including Haiti and Jamaica.

But Bequia is by far my favourite. It’s very small, about five miles long and with a population of 5,000.

There’s an airport but the maximum number of passengers on the planes is 20. So, it’s like the West Indies in the old days with no big hotels or mass tourism.

There’s an enormous harbour, Port Elizabeth, which has thousands of yachts and is a sailors’ haven.

There are lots of ship’s chandlers and boat builders as a result, so the island isn’t totally dependent on the tourist industry. Things don’t work as well as Barbados and the roads are a bit pot-holed.

The thing I find interesting is the “snowbirds” Europeans and Americans without a great deal of money who come to stay from January to March each year to avoid the winter back home.

They stay in the same place, rooms in other people’s homes and leave possessions each year to personalise them.

They have little cocktail parties and it’s a really amusing, welcoming little community. It’s a really unassuming island where you don’t get any celebrities and I just love it.

So, I have a tropical January and then spend May to October most years in our place in the Lake District.

Our house is in Loweswater, near Cockermouth and we have Loweswater, Buttermere and Crummock Water within walking distance.

Hunter Davies is a successful author and broadcaster. He wrote the only authorised biography of The Beatles back in 1968 and more recently published The Beatles Lyrics, using original handwritten manuscripts from the Fab Four.

Hunter, 79, also has a new book out called The Biscuit Girls, about retired factory workers in Carlisle. He lives in London and the Lake District with novelist wife Margaret Forster.”