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a service culture had not developed, the tourism industry was run by a ramshackle and deeply corrupt government Ministry, and the islands were in the midst of a major political crisis. On seeing that slogan on a wall poster for the first time at the airport when we landed someone had scrawled underneath ‘but it’s best anywhere else’, which was not quite the greeting we had in mind.
    Lyndon Pindling, the then Prime Minister, was one step away from being a dictator and it was only his craven sycophancy to the US Administration that enabled him to stay in power. He was arrogant and repulsive in equal measure but so were many of the old style colonial ex- pats who we soon learned to avoid like the plague. It was, in short, a country like so many others in the region, trying to shape a post colonial future against all the odds. The geographical position of the Bahamas placed it right on the drug route from Colombia to Miami and the islands were, even then, awash with cocaine.
    We were to learn all this in double quick time but first had to be allocated an island and a school. I am still embarrassed by the fact that I signed the contract, moved my wife and two children to a distant location and new life, without even knowing where precisely we would be living. We found out at the final meeting with Government officials in Nassau that our final destination would be Freeport on Grand Bahama Island and that I would be teaching at Eight Mile Rock High School.
    By this stage two couples had flown home in disgust at the chaos that had greeted us in Nassau. However we hopped on to the twenty minute flight to Freeport with minimal trepidation and gazed down at the turquoise sea and shimmering sand below with a feeling of naive optimism and excitement. As the plane banked to land both our sons projectile vomited on to the heads of the people in front of us with precision timing and deadly accuracy.
    Amazingly, once we had made the decision to move to the Bahamas we had worked ourselves into such a pumped up state of positivism that nothing would deter us. We decided that we were on a roll and for a while that’s what happened. While other newcomers were refused a bank loan to buy a car we were given one on the back of a meaningless ‘reference’ from our bank at home that said only that we had been ‘customers’. Walking into the car pound behind the VW dealership I got a chance to display my vast knowledge of the automotive industry. I had to choose between a red VW with no air conditioning and a radio, and a yellow VW with air conditioning but no radio. In the weeks to come we listened to a lot of good music while sweating profusely in our lovely little red car.
    It was two weeks before the first day of term and although we were still holed up in a hotel in Freeport having not secured a place to live, we decided to drive out to the village of Eight Mile Rock to see my future place of employment. It was twelve miles along East Sunrise ‘Highway’ to the Rock. You will be ahead of me here when I tell you that no highways existed on this little seventy by eleven mile island. A poorly maintained ‘B’ road would have been a more recognisable description. We drove onto a smaller road running parallel to the sea as we passed through tiny coastal settlements with names like ‘Hanna Town’ and ‘Fishing Hole’ as drops of warm salty sea spray occasionally made it into the car. Eight Mile Rock hove into view and turned out to be a big settlement of some four thousand people and twenty seven churches. It had a certain down at heel charm but was quite obviously an area of significant deprivation.
    Poverty always looks less shocking when the sun is shining but it didn’t take long to see that it existed here as in most of the rest of the island. The school lay four hundred metres down a track off the only road. We drove tentatively down it to see a series of metal buildings with corrugated iron roofs built around a shabby sand