Our youngest was two when we arrived in Barbados. We spent five weeks in a hotel, house-hunting. She was like a Labrador pup: on three occasions in our first couple of days we happened to be walking past the hotel pool and she just leapt in – and I leapt in after her. The third time her hat was floating on the surface and she was at the bottom of the deep end. After that her armbands became a part of her daily attire – she was not allowed to leave the hotel room without them on. My priority became swimming lessons, and she swam well before she was three.

We found a house called Xanadu.

[More:]

The roof leaked, the floor subsided, and we had wooden slats for windows. But the view was to die for. When Hurricane Hugo hurtled towards us in 1989, we boarded up our windows and braced ourselves. At the last minute, Hugo veered north and narrowly missed us. But for about eleven months out of twelve, the weather forecast was the same: ‘Fair to partly cloudy with scattered showers. Twenty-seven degrees Celsius.’

Every day, I picked the kids up from school and we drove north on Highway 2A. As we reached Sandy Lane and turned west downhill towards home, we voted on the view of the Caribbean: rarely was it under 8/10.

‘Kids,’ I would say, ‘remember this view for ever. When we go back and live in Belgium, just visualize this.’

I would take the kids down to Sandy Lane beach when homework was done, and their dad would join us after work. We would gloat. There was a raft out to sea where we would swim out to and rest. Occasionally tourists would chat. ‘So how long are you here for?’ they asked. ‘Four years,’ the kids would giggle. They picked up Bajan accents and learnt all the latest Soca songs.

In the evening we sat in the gazebo, sipped rum punches, and watched the sun set over the Caribbean. The air was filled with the sweet scent of ylang-ylang. Occasionally - if the rum punch was strong enough (‘One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and two of weak’ was the recipe, referring to lime, cane sugar, rum and water) - we might imagine we saw the ‘green flash’. Sometimes we grilled huge prawns on the barbecue. As the sun set, the tree frogs and crickets would start their ear-bursting chant.

Our garden was huge. The previous tenants had neglected most of it, but we hired an old man called Bradshaw, who had twenty-two children from two wives, to look after it for us twice a week. We had four little tortoises in an enclosure, called wonderful names like Nelson and Winston. Fruit trees grew in abundance: soursop, pomegranate, lime, lemon, mango (the kids had a tree house called ‘The Eagle’s Nest’ in the mango tree), pawpaw, Bajan cherry…and bananas. The banana trees were extremely prolific. They grew just outside the kitchen window, and it took us a couple of years to realize that the reason they grew so well was that there was a leaky pipe which irrigated them constantly.

In Barbados we were never lonely. We hardly had time to change the sheets between one lot of guests and the next. Once my friend Nicole came to visit with her family. She went wild about the plants in our garden, and took away a couple of banana tree shoots with her. And back at her home in Belgium, they did well. They didn’t bear any fruit, but produced many baby banana trees.

Last week, twenty years after her visit to Barbados, she came to visit my flat, with a gift. ‘Paola’, she said, ‘this plant is a descendant of the original banana plant I brought back from your garden.’ And that’s when the memories started flowing.

My baby banana plant