When I was small, I used to feel a sharp little pang of envy every September. My school friends would drift back into the classroom full of stories about France, and to my young ears France sounded impossibly cool. It was a place where people spoke another language, ate food I could not pronounce, and my classmates came home full of confidence. I had decided, with all the certainty of a child who has never properly looked at a map, that France must be a small sort of country. Small enough, surely, that all my friends would bump into one another on the same stretch of sand, swapping stories while I was somewhere else entirely.
That somewhere else was Barbados. Needless to say, I am of course now aware of how very lucky I was!
Summers with John and Alice
Every year, without fail, we would make the journey to see my grandparents, John and Alice. These holidays have defined my life — so much so that I had mapped out my retirement plan of living in Barbados by the time I met James, aged 23. These holidays felt like the centre of my childhood and the part I return to whenever I want to feel calm.
My grandparents had a way of making those holidays feel endless, learning to play cards with Granny, dancing with Grandad John and all the delicious Bajan lunches we ate together. Eating mangoes from their tree and grabbing the soursop before the birds got to it and the morning beach walks with my family are the happiest memories one could hope for. There is a particular little cove of beach on the walk between Coconut Court and The Hilton on the South Coast which is where I take my mind in moments of high stress, as it instantly takes me back to those happy childhood holidays.
At the time, of course, I would happily have traded a little of it for a short trip to Brittany. Children are like that! The exotic always seems to be wherever you are not.
Swimming in Crystal Blue Water
The sea in Barbados is a colour I have never quite found elsewhere. Bright and impossibly turquoise, you feel completely free when you’re swimming in it. My brother and I lived in it. We would be in at first light and dragged out at dusk, salt in our hair and our fingertips wrinkled like raisins, already negotiating for five more minutes.
Snorkelling was a great obsession. We would push out from the shore with our masks fogging up, and then the surface would close over us and the whole world would change. Below the waterline was a hidden landscape of coral and slow, drifting movement. We discovered underwater worlds along that Barbadian coastline that I can still picture with my eyes closed, with fish in vibrant colours wherever you looked.
How the Underwater World Became a Print
This is where the tea towels come in, though it took me a while to make the connection myself.
When I first saw the prints that would become this collection, I was not thinking about business or stock or seasons. I was eight years old again, face down in the water, watching a flash of yellow dart between the rocks and coral. The little fish suspended in the blue, they pulled me straight back to those long days with my brother, my Mum and my Dad. I knew at once that these designs carried something of Barbados in them, and that I wanted to bring that feeling into the kitchen, where so much of family life actually happens.
Colour has always been my language — from my GCSE artwork to my Fashion Degree final collection. It is how I make sense of a room, and how I make sense of a memory. These prints let me hold a piece of the Caribbean in my hands and hang it by the sink, a small daily reminder of where I come from and what shaped me.
Sharing Barbados with Darcy
The loveliest part of all this is that the story has not finished. I now have the joy of taking my own family back to Barbados, and watching my daughter Darcy fall in love with the same water that raised me.
Darcy is never happier than when she is snorkelling, kicking out over a shipwreck with her mask pressed tight to her face, calling out through her snorkel every time a fish swims close. On a very good day she gets to swim alongside a turtle, and the look on her face when she surfaces is something I will keep forever. To see her discovering the underwater world I grew up loving is a gift I never take lightly.
Our Maiden Own Label Collection
So this collection means a great deal to me. It is the first own label range The Blue Loft has ever produced, our maiden step into designing rather than only sourcing, and I could not have chosen a subject closer to my heart. Every time I look at the coral and the fish I see my grandparents, my parents, my brother, and now my husband and daughter, all held in a single length of cotton.
The towels are very limited in number. This is a small, personal beginning rather than a grand launch, and once they are gone they are gone. If a flash of coral or a scatter of little fish brings a bit of holiday warmth to your kitchen, then they will have done exactly what I hoped.
If you would like to bring a little of that Caribbean warmth into your own kitchen, you can explore our Summer Tea Towel Edit here.
Thank you for letting me share where it all began.
Anna x
The Blue Loft
