Cool cat under a hot tin roof

Flying into Salt Cay, a dot in the Caribbean among the Turks and Caicos islands, the shallow sea below is azure blue, the colour of Heaven. You can follow the reef from the air, and watch for the deep dark channel that bore Columbus and Drake from the Atlantic into the Caribbean and was called the Columbus Channel until revision demanded it be renamed the Turks Island Channel.
 
Just beyond is Salt Cay, shaped like an arrow head with the point facing south, about two-and-a-half square miles, edged with pristine beach. It has a population of 63, the sons and daughters of a salt-raking plantation founded in the 1680s which fades, unchanged and so far undeveloped, into the fresh trade winds.

It is two years since I first saw Felix Lightbourne's dilapidated old house on the beach, just across the road from the imperial ruins of the Old Government House. Red tin dormers poked through a forest of wild acacia thorns and a donkey stood snorting by the gate. There is a cotton tree in the front yard. I had to have it.

Built of ships' timbers and coral rock, with a tin roof and wooden hurricane shutters - you don't bother with glass in the frames here - the Bermudan Cape cottage was home to generations of Lightbournes, Simmons and Kennedys, names which remain because Salt Cay is an island of people and not just real estate for sun-seekers.

Felix was a tall man and a charmer and it is a secret leaked with pride that he passed away in the arms of his latest conquest, because none could resist him. The piano where they practiced Sunday hymns was left in the front room, too big to move.

From the back window of the house, you can watch the Atlantic roll into a creek and a mangrove swamp. From the front, the Caribbean stretches west, dotted from time to time with Haitian sloops and migrating whales.

This week I am returning to Salt Cay to spend my first summer in my Caribbean hideaway. As I fly down from New York, the Turks and Caicos, still a British overseas territory, are in the news, with the local poobahs accused by Whitehall of bribery and corruption.

But I am not thinking of that as the prop-shaft puddle-jumper lifts off from Providenciales, the nearest jet port, and phut-phuts back through time from the spas and condos of the developed islands to the Old Caribbean.

I knew that getting the house habitable again would be tricky. You have to expect that when the romantic muse sings in your ear that, yeah! you can do this, you too can live in such peace and beauty.

But what I hadn't expected was that the purchase itself would descend into chaos and that within days of finally signing the papers, and handing over $95,000 for my new holiday home, I would discover that the house was riddled with termites and beyond repair; that I would have to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.
NEXT WEEK:
The owners are not who I think they are
Charles Laurence's Americans column will return after the summer ·