Lulu has a new love: Nancy Drew. She discovered her marauding through the shelves of the children's bookstore in Grenada which isn't a bad bookstore if you don't mind flicking through the Christian titles. Apologies, I have no beef with any one who does and I'd probably be impressed if I saw a girl Lu's age take a paperback about God's love to the cashier, they’re just not for me. The bookstore's collection is eclectic for sure and you find books you'd never stumble across on a digital platform. Like Old Yeller. I bought it cause it was cheap and has a dog in it and I remembered Delphine's blood-thirsty stare every time I read Jack London's Return to the Wild to her. Good bed time reading I hoped, staring at Old Yeller's mournful retriever’s face in the air-conditioned shop. And the crazy thing was it really was, a few weeks later we've just finished it and have gone right back and started reading it again cause the first time you're focused on the story and this time it's about trying to thrive in a log cabin in the 1860s in Birdsong Creek, Texas. 

Delphine listens wide-eyed to the stories of loafer wolves, hogs with cutting 'tushes' and has a particular fondness for Little Arliss who puts snakes in his pockets and is always cooling off in the family's drinking water. Lulu is more interested in the particulars like how they make soap, filtering water through the fire ashes and then boiling it up with hog fat, how to be sure to hunt upwind of game at the Salt Licks and tying up meat with plaited bear grass for string. Predictably, I like considering how it was under the mother's impetus that they built a cabin where the trees were covered in mockingbird song. But there's no getting away with the turn of events at the end and the first time I wasn't sure these girls would want to read on but they did, albeit Lulu with eyes shut tight but Delph right in there, eyes as bright as flashlights and asking, 'What are entrails?' 

After we're finished reading and I've pinned Delph down, brushed her choppers and we've had a small but significant fight about it, it's lights out. Except it isn't quite; Lu picks up Nancy Drew and turns her back to us. After half an hour, it's, 'Lu, ten minutes to read,' then, 'Come oonnnn, Lu, it's late,' and finally, 'Lulu, turn the god**** light out and go to SLEEP!' What can she do? The kid wants to be a detective.

'I wish things happened here,' she said wistfully as we walked down the main street in Hillsborough, the main town in Carriacou. 'I wish there were crimes here I could solve.' I looked around. Sleepy didn't quite describe it. It was the hottest part of the day and we were clearly the only people without the sanity to be inside. We squinted and felt our way down the street, found the bakery in a shipping container in a back street then went into what was surely loosely termed a supermarket and wondered how long the items had been on the shelves. The cashiers chatted amongst each other and didn't even look up when we stumbled past, assuming either we were ghosts or just another heat-stroke-affected bunch from out of town. 

It wasn't our first time in Hillsborough either. We'd rushed in from Tyrell Bay on the bus the Saturday before the shops closed at lunch time. We'd been low on fresh fruit and vegetables and heard there was a Grenada Marketing Board and got excited about it because in these shops you can buy subsidised produce and the eggs are the freshest you can get. We opened the door to be greeted with the sweet and prickly smell of rotting potatoes, a darkened room and a silent queue roping its way through the shop to the UHT milk at the back. Gulping slightly, Jack and I picked up our baskets and groped our way through the last of the passion fruits and cabbages, then joined the back of the queue which shuffled slightly, absorbing us in its ranks. Then the lights blazed back on. Hold on, we thought, this place is supposed to be lit? Everyone else in the queue sighed and allowed themselves little pursed smiles and as I watched them, I was suddenly transported back to 1980s Poland, standing in a queue and holding my grandmother's hand as she bantered and laughed with everyone else in the queue. There's definitely a strong whiff of socialism in the average Grenadian.

But there's money here too. Boats are its historic speciality and Carriacou is famous throughout the Caribbean for its wooden boat construction, often right on the beach. Evolving from these maritime roots, we've heard that many of the ferries in Grenada are owned by Carriacou families and a fair few fishing operations too. Walking through Hillsborough, you get the feeling that it's a notes-stuffed-into-pillows-kind-of-place though with a sort of rural, hidden wealth. Saying that, few flash German cars did cruise pass us and we found a deli as we made our way back to the dinghy. A deli! A real old-fashioned British-type high street one with a cold meats and cheese counter, red velvet cake in glass cake holders, Twining's Earl Grey tea, basil-infused olive oil and fresh milk in the fridge. It was enough to make me have a little cry in the corner.. not proud of it though..wiped my nose on some fancy shortbread.

We were standing at the cash register with a large lump of blue cheese when the shop lady approached. We looked up, startled to see Lu standing behind her looking furtive. Guilty. 'I found your daughter in the store room,' she announced with raised eyebrows. Lulu looked suitably sorry too until we left the store and then any last show of fake remorse vanished from her face. 'It looked dark and there was the shape of someone in there,' she said, her face now positively glowing, ‘it looked like a mystery that needed to be solved.’ With this, she walked ahead of us, lost in a dream and Jack and I fell back and shrugged at each other. She's eleven and she's a detective in the Caribbean. The kid needs a mystery to solve.

Love from Quest and her crew xx