Nineteen years ago I went to Antigua to become a beach hunk – but how is it as a father of two?

Each time I’ve visited the Caribbean island I’ve been in a different stage of my life, but the sun, sea and sand feel the same

Our Return Journeys series explores the joy of a nostalgic trip back to a destination from one’s past – whether a childhood camping holiday or a formative first job abroad. This week, Ed Cumming makes a repeat visit to Antigua
One afternoon in June I found myself standing next to my wife with my feet in the Caribbean sea, a cold beer in my hand, watching our children playing nearby, with one thought in my mind: this was completely lost on them.
They didn’t care about the palm-fringed crescent of white sand, the Hollywood-framed sunset, the spacious beachfront suite, the abundant tennis courts, the air-conditioned gym, the constant supply of delicious meals, the attentive service. When you are four and one, like our children, you expect attentive service. Luxury is wasted on the youth, partly because nothing is as luxurious as being young. They would be just as happy in the playground at the end of the road, provided there was an ice cream to hand.
Sadly leaving them behind was not an option. The brief was to revisit places that had meant somewhere to us when we were young. A few other destinations crossed my mind. Inverness, perhaps, where my Scottish grandparents lived? Or the Algarve, where my family went most summers? How about Devon, where I didn’t learn to surf?
No, I thought, selflessly. I shall go back to Antigua. Let my colleagues enjoy the campsites in Normandy and derelict English seaside towns. I would take my chances with Carlisle Bay, a five-star resort on the island’s south coast. It was made clear to me that while I might protest that this was an important work trip, it was not one I would be enjoying alone. So here we were, mob-handed in the West Indies.
It was only my third time on the island. The first visit lasted five months. In August 2005, after I finished my A levels, I went to work for Eli Fuller. A former Olympic windsurfer who studied business at university, Eli grew up in, on or around boats. In 1999 he founded Adventure Antigua, a boat tour company, to show visitors parts of the island beyond the limits of their hotels and cruise ships.
My mum put me up to it. Most of my school friends were heading off to university and the rest were embarking on worthy Raleigh International-style ‘dig a hole in Chile’ gap years or taking up tedious office jobs to pay for tours of Thailand or Vietnam. None of these appealed much. I had a deferred place at university and I was lazy. The Fullers were friends of some other family friends of ours. To stop me spending my entire gap year playing Football Manager, my mum called in a favour.
I had never been to the Caribbean before, but was quickly taken with the idea of becoming a beach guy. I would go to Antigua and return a bronzed, blond, salty seaman, deeply appealing to the girls in freshers’ week.
I hadn’t counted on my incompetence. Adventure Antigua offered two tours. The Eco Tour explored the nature-rich archipelago off Antigua’s north coast, while the XTreme was a complete circumnavigation of Antigua, stopping off to swim with stingrays, tour the historic dockyard and sip a rum punch on a remote beach.
As a lifelong Londoner, the closest I had been to a boat was a school trip round HMS Belfast. I was laughably ill suited to the practicalities of the new gig. One morning, we were about to collect guests from the quayside when I slipped and fell into the water between the dock and the boat. Eli deftly manoeuvred the boat to avoid chopping me to death with his propellor. The guests wondered what they had let themselves in for. How they laughed when, dripping wet, I took them through the boat’s safety features.
Falling in was far from my only problem. Antigua provided a range of challenges to a naive townie. I slammed hatches shut on my feet. I ran through fields of cactus-like burr grass. On the first night I slept with my arm against the mosquito net, so I woke up with 81 bites from shoulder to wrist and an arm that looked like I was suffering from a rare form of leprosy.
At Stingray City, an off-shore stingray reserve, one of my tasks was to show guests how to feed the rays. You’d hold a squid in a fist, which the stingray would come and dutifully gobble up. One morning I left my hand a little loose, so my thumb and index finger were briefly and painlessly sucked into the stingray’s mechanism. Releasing myself from its jaws, I held my hands up to show the guests that the squid had been eaten.
‘As you can see, it’s easy and there is no risk,’ I said, only for a guest to scream and point out that blood was pouring from my hand. Nobody else fed the stingrays that day.
My skills slowly improved. I learnt to point out the great frigate birds circling high above the Caribbean, waiting to harass smaller birds for the fish they had caught. I got better at spotting the turtles who would poke their heads out of the water for gulps of air, or the dolphins that would come to play in the bow wake.
While I was a hapless seaman, I was marginally better at explaining Antigua’s history. There was Nelson’s Dockyard, the beautifully preserved 18th-century harbour where Nelson spent three unhappy years in the 1780s. At the time, much of the island gossip revolved around Allen Stanford, a mysterious Texan billionaire who had rocked up and set about building a cricket pitch, two restaurants, a spa, an airline and a bank. ‘He’s like a Bond villain,’ I would explain. Shortly afterwards Stanford would become a notorious figure in English cricket, funding the Stanford 20/20, before being sentenced to 110 years in prison for fraud.
I was also happier leading snorkelling trips along the reef than some of the other crew. Antiguans, used to summer sea temperatures of 29 degrees, can find the 26 degrees in winter intolerably chilly; less of a problem if you are used to the English channel.
There was a jolly camaraderie among the crew. As well as Eli there was JD, who was my age, obsessed with cars and boats, with an impish sense of humour; Tony, a Guyanese man who was exceptionally competent at all the boat tasks; Leslie, a man-mountain who had served in the Antiguan military and still brought his gun to work – the rule was that he had to keep it unloaded during tours. I learned to understand the patois: likkle for little, tal for not at all, me feel for I think, the general expression ‘murdahhh’. In certain parts of the Caribbean an ‘e’ at the start of the word comes with an ‘h’ attached, so I was instantly nicknamed ‘Head Cumming’, apparently also because I had a big head. (JD also called me ‘Captain Planet’ for the same reason.)
There was a moment every afternoon, after we had dropped off the last of the guests and were taking the boat back to dock, when the sun turned from hot to warm and the light hit the sea at just the right angle to sparkle. We would drink cold Cokes, eat any barbecue chicken the guests hadn’t finished, and count our tips. Nothing will develop your Anglophobia like working in a service role that deals equally with Brits and Americans. Apart from the Brits’ innate stinginess, sometimes they would be a bit put out to find they had flown nine hours to be given a boat tour by an English boy.
For the time I was there I became an adoptive member of the Fullers, a sprawling Antiguan family. I lived with Eli and his mother, Jill, at Eli’s charming home on the north side of the island, except for a month when I went to live in the Lord Nelson, a former hotel the family owned on the beach. At the weekends we would go fishing for wahoo and tuna, or I would take myself off to watch cricket at the Stanford ground. On Sundays there was the weekly knees-up at Shirley Heights, where tourists and locals would listen to steel bands, hammer rum punches and look out over the superyachts twinkling in the harbour below, hoping for a glimpse of the mythical ‘green flash’ said to happen at sunset. Sometimes we would hop over to the neighbouring islands: Nevis, Barbuda, St Maarten.
I was only there for five months, but the work and life were so different from what I was used to that it left an impression which lasted long after my tan faded and my hair, bleached near-white by salt and sun, returned to a more normal colour. For someone who is naturally idle, it is disappointing to realise that labour can forge such strong bonds. I was desperate for an opportunity to go back.
When it came, it was courtesy of an even more generous institution than the Fullers: the public relations industry. It was early 2012 when a publicist invited me on a press trip to see a new housing development in Anguilla, an even smaller island, which meant a stop-off in Antigua. I was in the early stages of a promising new relationship and decided to make an audacious proposal: did she want to come too? We could split the flights. Technically speaking it was our third date. We stayed at Carlisle Bay, a hotel I remembered pointing out to guests when I was working on the boat as a fancy place, the sort of place you might stay at if you were really trying to impress someone. One day we went out on Eli’s boat, so I could show her that in a previous life I had been a bronzed blond beach hunk. I dove down to get a conch shell. Seven years later we were married.
Fortune favours the liggers.
Twelve years later, we were back. There are disadvantages to travelling long-haul with two children under five. On the first morning they both woke up at 3am, raring for a ruckus. One marker of parenthood is that you are no longer irritated when hotel breakfasts stop at 10am. Instead you are angry they do not start until 7am. ‘Four hours with a hungry toddler in a hotel room before dawn’ would be a good basis for a horror film.
When we visited Carlisle Bay as a couple we loved the generous bars, quiet and comfortable rooms, the friendly staff who would bring breakfast in bed or drinks to the beach. This time we loved the kids’ club, the ready supply of babysitters, the child-friendly menu and the staff who did not bat an eyelid when pasta was hurled around. By chance, England were playing Oman in the T20 World Cup while I was there, so I took my daughter for her first cricket match. The whole match lasted 16 overs. About right for a four-year-old.
Antigua has not changed much since I was first there. The hotels are mostly the same as they were. There is still a steel band at Shirley Heights. The roads are still careworn. Goats and dogs and cows idle in the shade of the little houses, painted in pastel pinks and yellows and blues. Locals agonise over how to make tourism sustainable. The sun and sand and sea are the same.
Eli is still running his boat tours and has his own happy family, too, children who have grown up around the ocean just like he did. One day he took us all out on his boat, sailing round to a deserted beach for a swim. It’s the Antiguan version of popping to the swings. Soon after we arrived, another boat pulled up. It was JD, my old boatmate, with his own brood. ‘Head!’ he exclaimed. ‘You mustn’t be so scarce!’ The children played in the water. Eli’s son, a little older than our daughter, dove down to fetch her a conch shell.
Ed Cumming and his family stayed in an Ocean Suite at the Carlisle Bay, b&b from £520 a night; carlisle-bay.com. The Eco Tour is £95 and XTreme Circumnav is £145; adventureantigua.com