Lady of the island

No one knows more about the party island of Mustique than Lady Glenconner, who talks to Pamela Goodman about her memories of and favourite spots on the Caribbean islands

- Pamela Goodman

THERE is a certain serendipity to the timing of my conversation with Lady Glenconner. She is off to Mustique imminently. 'I suspect this may be the last time I go,' says the 91-year-old, rather wistfully, of the tiny West Indian island she and her husband, Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconner), brought to life over many decades, turning it, as Colin prophesied he would, into a household name'

'We have been lent a house by a good friend and I'm taking all the family,' she adds with clear delight, referring to Phibblestown, one of the first, and 'loveliest', houses to be built on the island, and she recounts the tale of Lady Honor Svejdar, née Guinness, arriving by boat on Mustique and deciding she was so sick of life at sea that she'd buy a plot of land -two, in fact, plus a tiny beach, christened Honor Bay. It was the only beach Tennant would ever sell privately to a house owner.

These were the early days, a decade or so after Lord Glenconner had bought the island on a whim from two Creole sisters, whose brother had recently drowned off Mustique and were happy to see it go. He never set foot on the island, only circumnavigating its shores by boat, before parting with the $45,000 that secured its ownership. The sound of having your very own desert island was wonderful, the reality was far less attractive,' recalls Lady Glenconner of the scrubby island infested with mosquitoes and overrun with wild cows, where she was to spend months and years eating barely more than tinned beans and 'sweating rather than sleeping at night'.