suffering and the Thomas plantation was no longer so prosperous. Duncan was in his early twenties when he inherited the family business and met the lovely young woman who had recently arrived from the Scottish Highlands. The charm of the palm-covered island, the lure of its balmy water and the prospect of financial security convinced Edith to accept a proposal of marriage from a man she barely knew. Gladys, her feisty elder sister, the fight for women’s suffrage powering the blood through her veins, decided that life on an island in perpetual sunshine was not for her. She returned to England, saddened by the parting from her much-loved sister and burdened with the task of telling her parents that they would probably never see their younger daughter again.
Back in England, Gladys married Bob Castor, an ex-miner and a Scottish trade unionist. Their only son, Nathanial, was born in London shortly before Edith gave birth in Barbados to her own son, Sam. Three years later Edith became the mother of a daughter, May. At the outbreak of the war Duncan had joined the British navy and, apart from one brief spell on leave in 1915, did not return to the island until 1917, when the seriousness of his wartime injuries ensured his future permanent exclusion from national service. A year after the war ended Gladys had died in prison, where she had been detained for her militant role in the suffragette cause, leaving her sister Edith shattered by the news. Shortly afterwards Bob also became fatally ill with tuberculosis, a casualty of years of inhaling the noxious air of the mines, and within eighteen months Nathanial Castor had become an orphan.
Seventeen years later, May and Sam set off on the sea passage to Liverpool on one of the plantation’s regular sugar cargo ships. The decision had not been without its challenges, especially as May was leaving the island of her birth for the first time. If it had not been for Sam’s repeated assurances to their mother that he would look after May on the ship, and deliver her safely to Bethnal Green and the front door of cousin Nathanial, their only remaining family member in England, May would not have found the courage to leave and her mother would not have found the strength to let her go.
Both children had longed to come to England for as long as they could remember. Sam had been working on the plantation since he left school at the age of sixteen. He had grown up around ships and had accompanied his father several times on board the sugar consignment boats to England. His ambition was to join the British Royal Navy, just as his father had before him.
But while Sam was motivated to follow the profession of his father, May thought of little other than how she could escape Duncan. On the face of it, Duncan appeared to be a doting father. He encouraged Sam with his studies and insisted on reading bedtime stories to May every night. As a very young girl May had lain in her bed, too hot to tolerate a nightdress, as her father had pulled up a chair beside her. Only May had known that those bedtime stories were accompanied by a “little nip,” the term of endearment, or so Duncan made it sound, that he reserved for those sneaky tots, upended in one swift movement into his mouth from the silver flask he kept in the pocket of his cream-tea planter’s jacket.
“Just one little nip to oil the wheels before we get going,” Duncan would whisper through the gap in his teeth, half speaking to himself, his small bloodshot eyes looking down at May’s body in her bed, as soon as he heard Edith’s shoes receding down the stairs.
“Our little secret,” he would say, as May tried to conceal her instinct to draw back at the moment when he began to trail his fingers through her hair, his dirty and broken nails snagging as they made their way down through her ponytail, towards her back, flicking the familiar switch of alarm. But May’s mother had suspected nothing and May had been too frightened to tell anyone, feeling that Duncan’s behaviour must somehow be her fault.
As May grew too old for the bedtime stories, Duncan left her alone, staying away from the plantation for nights at a time and reappearing with no explanation for his absence. A few years later he had seemed genuinely pleased by May’s interest