In Nassau itself, we visited a museum dedicated to the slavery history. There was a whole array of original contraptions that were used to shackle and punish the slaves. There were also accounts of slave rebellions and the mass executions that quickly followed them. All pretty harrowing, to say the least.
And back on Paradise Island we experienced a more up-to-date reminder of that unsavoury past. Our villa was located a short distance from the big Atlantis Resort, with its casino and numerous restaurants and bars. We went there almost every night. That’s a photo of Alison in one of the bars. The waitress who had just served us with those piña coladas was a beautiful young Bahamian. Standing close to the bar were three young American guys in business suits. They all had Southern accents, were very loud and seemed to have been drinking a lot. The loudest, most red-faced and most drunk of them only needed to take a couple of steps to the bar to get himself another drink, but instead he waved his glass at our waitress, who was hovering at some distance away, and demanded: “Hey, girl, fetch me another one of these!”
Well, you can take the laddie out of the Ferry, but you can’t… aye, you know the rest. I stood up immediately and made a beeline for the loudmouth. “She’s not your fucking girl!” was what I intended to tell him, but the lovely waitress stepped in front of me. “It’s okay, sir,” she said, “I’m used to it.” And then, after she had escorted me back to my seat, she whispered, “Thank you.”
The good o’ boys left the bar shortly afterwards.