Touchdown

Yesterday was my first full day at the house, having arrived the previous afternoon. The flight had a goodly number of elderly Jamaicans, wisely deciding against ‘being shut up in the North’ for the winter and, like me, taking the first ‘cheap’ Virgin flight of the winter season. That’s £400, if you want to know. At Montego Bay, a stack of wheelchairs awaited them. I wondered briefly if any of them were planning a trip to the healing waters of Bath. Sangster airport has been undergoing massive expansion recently, fuelled by excitement over hosting some of the games in last year’s cricket World Cup, and the pressure exerted by airlines such as Virgin who required much bigger facilities to cope with the numbers pouring out their Boeing jumbo jets which had taken over slots vacated by Air Jamaica. Anyway, the new facilities are pretty much completed now, with a new departure lounge and massively enlarged baggage reclaim hall have opened since I was here in April. Even the passport control point was properly staffed, with helpful staff smiling and directing passengers quickly and efficiently. Whatever happened to the ‘look’?
Outside, it was chaos as usual. The pick-up area has been enlarged but when, as happened on Wednesday, a thunderstorm rolls over the hills and disgorged its contents in sheets of monsoon rain for about 40 minutes, just as the passengers from Virgin flight V065 are exiting, well, it’s just chaos and it’s difficult to think of it being any other way. Merrise was circling the pick up point with Hamish riding shotgun on the look-out for me.
Anyway, yesterday was picture perfect. We swam in the pool around nine, after Hamish had come back from a 5km run down towards Hopewell. Shelley did some vague stretching and curling up on the bed exercises. Then did 40 lengths. I managed an heroic 25.
Our mission for the day was to clear out one remaining store room on the side of the apartment building which we had never, in three years, got round to doing. It’s a small, L-shaped room, created out of what might once have been a reception point. It’s full of dress-making materials: row upon row of paper pattern hanging from the ceiling, bales of material, boxes of buttons, jar after jar of bits and pieces. There’s three old, damaged Singer sewing machines. And, in amongst it all is a portfolio of designs, address books with measurements. They all belong to Trevor Owen, the previous owner who died five or six years ago, I think. There are three boxes of labels bearing his name in elegant black lettering. Trevor Owen : Montego Bay : Jamaica WI. I keep the portfolio and all the paperwork, thinking maybe I’ll frame up one of his sketches. They are so evocative of a different time and place – where rich ladies sent postcards from England saying ‘Trevor, I shall be out in November. Can you run me up three of those cocktail dresses?’
Trevor bequeathed us many other little bits and pieces around the place, all of which we have tried to preserve. We want his ghost to be at peace. Because looking after ghosts out here in Jamaica is a very serious business.