It wasn’t until we got outside that I realized Ros was carrying flippers and goggles and the rest of it not merely for herself but also had a set marked GIANT (this referred to foot size) for me. Given that I couldn’t swim I wondered how I would benefit from these, but she was too angry from her encounter still to tell me. I gathered that I would lie face down in twenty inches of water – which was enough after all for an eighteen-foot crocodile to be content in – and at least get a look at the wonders of the shallows as a kind of compensation for missing out on the wonders of the deep. We trudged across the island, ruminating; past dripping ferns and dropping palms and signs explaining that this area or that area was set aside for regeneration and would we therefore stay out of them, until we reached the water.

It looked cold and inhospitable. Not the translucent blue of our previous visit but a dirty disconsolate grey. I stepped into my flippers and looked about me, hoping that no one was watching, just as the rain fell. Real rain this time, heavy gobs of it, not so much falling as thrown. From more distant reefs came the rumble of thunder. We trudged back to our ‘Tropical’, using one of my GIANT flippers each in lieu of umbrellas. We must have looked like bird-men in a Voodoo mystery play.

Once we had dried ourselves with the fans and flowers and conch shells which it took me a while to believe were really our towels, we decided it might be pleasant to sit out under our verandah, where there was a table and chairs, and watch the rain from there. We could read, put our feet up, catch up with our journals, write postcards, and otherwise contrive to squeeze some enjoyment yet out of the island.

This worked fine for about ten minutes, then we heard Taffy and his men returning through the jungle from their tea break. Singing. Like the Seven Dwarfs. Ours was the last completed ‘Tropical’ on the row. Work was proceeding on the next one, ten yards away. I didn’t mind the sawing too much. Or the hammering. Or the noise of the electric drills. It was the cursing I couldn’t take. The Welsh cursing. Of all the inharmonious sounds in the world there can be none that has so little in the way of saving grace or compensating virtue as a Welshman shouting, ‘Ohh, fack!’ on a tropical island. Cruel anywhere, but too cruel here.