The girl’s mother on the other hand was hysterical beside herself for fear that she would lose her job and be

The girl’s mother, on the other hand, was hysterical, beside herself, for fear that she would lose her job and be deported.She tells, also, of a five-year-old who came to school recently saying he had not done his homework, because he had had to be locked away in the kitchen. The guests renting the house where his mother is a cook “did not like children”. On St Vincent, extended family would take care of the children while their mothers worked; here, there is no such family, and no yards or streets to play in after school. Parents have no education themselves, and no time for their children’s either.”All the children want to do all day is talk to us,” says Miss Jeffrey, “because their mothers are busy serving the guests until the middle of the night. This is the only school I’ve ever worked at where, when it comes to three o’clock, the children don’t want to go home.”THIS, THEN, is the community to which Felix Dennis is donating a library. Bud Fisher’s wife, Patsy, has been commissioned with the project, and she has tackled it with the same cheerful energy which has her dashing about running up costumes for the school children’s play, and hammering away on the piano under the palm trees, as they run through rehearsals.”The big problem,” she admits, “is what to put in it.” The library must serve more than the 24 children, but adult literacy levels among the workers are derisory, and previous attempts at reading classes have collapsed.

So how, Patsy wonders, is she to make the new library enticing enough to tempt in new readers, without being intimidating? Literacy courses will be made available on its Apple Mac computers, and the librarian must be up to overseeing these. She is determined that the post be filled by a local, but finding one with the necessary skills is not easy. Patsy is also anxious for many of the books to be by and about blacks, but these are hard enough to come by in inner city, multi-racial London and preliminary enquiries reveal that the island’s workers are more interested in getting their hands on some cook books and tradesman’s manuals.Felix Dennis is a remarkably fortunate man to have stumbled upon Patsy. Her commitment to both Mustique’s communities is as intense as it is sincere. What sustains this tireless woman, who could just as easily be lying by her pool, is an unerring belief that just as the locals are lucky to work here, she is jolly lucky to live here, and anything she can do to make their less privileged lives better is no more than her duty. She is one of the most generous, compassionate, civic-minded and appealing people you could ever hope to meet But hers is an old-fashioned kind of goodness. In an age of equality and empowerment, these good works and good intentions, that distance Mustique homeowners from the undeniable apartheid of the place, lose some of their shine.Certainly the history of Mustique’s philanthropic gestures suggests the recipients’ needs have not always been at the forefront of the giver’s mind.

The schoolgirls have all been given T-shirts for their games kit made by the fashion company Jigsaw; meanwhile, the school lacks a science or first-aid kit. The homeowners have built a play area of swings and roundabouts for local children – essential on an inner-city council estate where the children have nowhere safe to play, but not so vital on a tropical island. Miss Jeffrey’s assistant, Mr Martin, is more concerned about how he will finance a course in learning how to operate the school’s new computer.The school itself was built and is part-funded by the Mustique Educational Trust which raises money from homeowners and visitors – generous certainly, though even here insidious double standards apply. Every year, on New Year’s Day, homeowners and guests pay $100 each for a beach banquet, to raise funds for the trust. “The children prepared songs for the feast,” snorts Miss Jeffrey, “and when the day came, we all got into a truck, went down to the beach, sang for them – and then they put us back on the truck and we came back! The children weren’t allowed to socialise with them at all! And Mick Jagger shook my hand Well, I don’t care about a handshake from Mr Jagger. I was hungry, I hadn’t had lunch!”And now there’s the Mustique Community Library built by a man whose belief in freedom of expression landed him in the dock at the Old Bailey 30 years ago. Will this give the island’s indigenous people their best hope of freedom to choose their own destiny? At its most modest, it will give the children somewhere to go after school.

But it may do much more than that.This gift couldprove as subversive in this society as Kids’ Oz was deemed in ours. Beneath a basketball hoop near the fishermen’s village is painted a slogan “UNITY,” it reads, “IS STRENGHT”. Presumably Dennis hopes, if the library fulfils its promise, that the island’s workers will correct the spelling. Were they to become literate and united enough to no longer have to skivvy with a respectful smile for a living, though, Mustique might cease to be the fantasy he thought he had bought !. Hampstead Theatre has commissioned a Lebanese novelist – a refugee from Beirut – to write her first full-length play. Paper Husband deals with a young Moroccan woman who sets about finding a husband so that she can remain in Britain. It sounds promising: especially since a programme- note tells us about Hanan Al-Shaykh’s own experiences at Lunar House in Croydon, where the Home Office processes visa extensions and naturalisation papers through a secretive system that has developed – says Al- Shaykh – out of “contempt and fear and boredom” Unfortunately our interest in the subject ends about there.