A single word can change the tenor of a day. I was stepping out of my front door in London on my way to work when a black guy staggered round the corner, blood running out of his hair, pursued by a white guy with a claw-hammer, screaming at him to pay the fucking money.

I stepped back into my house, ushered the injured man inside and closed and locked the door. I sat him on a chair and cleaned the blood off his face, hoping none of it would end up on my new Italian suit. He had a half-inch wound just below the hair-line. Said his name was Mr Fullerton.

‘Fucker hit me with a hammer, man,’ he said.

‘So I see,’ I said.

‘Don’t know what for,’ he said. ‘I never seen him before in my life.’

I gave Mr Fullerton the phone to call the police. By then the hammer man had vanished. The police came and took a statement and summoned an ambulance. I said I was sorry but I had to leave. I was late for work. Mr Fullerton turned to me and smiled and said: ‘You been good, man. You been sweet.’

Sweet Jamaica

The word sweet stayed with me all day. In Jamaica people use it like that. In the autobiography of Lord Caradon, the last British Governor of Jamaica, there’s an account of the Queen’s visit there in 1953, which she repeated on her tour of the Caribbean a year or two ago. Lord Caradon (late brother of Michael Foot, the former leader of the Labour Party, and father of the campaigning journalist Paul Foot) describes the royal progress across the island, parish by parish.

As we drove through on Wednesday on the hundred-mile drive from Montego Bay to Spanish Town . . . there was a cry that came like a wave across the Island . . . I heard it again and again – amongst the little groups of country people along the road and in the Parish capitals and in Spanish Town and then up and down the crowded streets of the capital – the cry that came like a wave across the Island breaking with the Royal Progress was the cry of ‘Sweet, Sweet.’

‘I suppose that word is more commonly used in Jamaica than I had realised,’ continues Lord Caradon:

Certainly that was the word that came immediately to thousands of country and townspeople as they caught the unforgettable sight of the Queen and the Duke smiling their pleasure at the Jamaica welcome. Whenever I remember the Royal visit to Jamaica that cry will come back to me, ‘Sweet Queen. Sweet Lady.’ What a lovely Jamaican phrase!

Mr Fullerton, despite being in shock, paid me the same compliment his countrymen paid the Queen back then. I thought that was handsome of him. Sweet, in fact.

In Guava Ground

In Jamaica, the word springs from the soil. But the history of slavery gives it a bitterness too. The country exists because of sugar. Sugar for the sweet tea that energised workers in Britain in the factories of the industrial revolution; sugar for the enslaved people who worked the cane plantations. In Jamaica molasses and sugar syrup haunt every marinade, every sauce. Even Jamaican beer has an extra high sugar content – it’s as toothsome as lemonade. The quintessence of this Jamaican sweetness – peak sucrose – is found in egg-nog, glutinous and ubiquitous: sugar, eggs and rum combined into a thick custardy cocktail.

A year or two ago I toured the island with my friend Wesley, whose forebears are from Clarendon, from Guava Ground, a village near Lluidas Vale, a cane-growing area in the heart of the island. There, in the middle of a green plain, where steep islands of rock and forest leap from a sea of cane, stands the Lluidas Vale sugar factory, flanked by silver vats of molasses, towers of sweetness shining in the sun. Here, I wrote at the time, Wesley’s forefathers had laboured as slaves until the early nineteenth century, while mine in England were drinking tea – sweetened, as like as not, with sugar from Lluidas Vale. At the sugar factory, I wrote,

we watched as a huge magnet swung over a river of cut cane, plucking out stray metal objects – axes and cutlasses – before the conveyor belt entered the crusher. Cane harvesting is evil work. A missed stroke of a machete from a weary arm or a splinter from the cane stalk can cut you to the bone. But Lluidas Vale looked like paradise that day: afternoon light pencilling through the banana groves, gilding the sticky sugar dust on our skins – muddy, voluptuous, the colour of blood-oranges, of egg-nog, a light that Albert Huie, a Jamaican landscape painter, has called ‘sulphur light’.

On the lip of the saxophone

The sweetness of that afternoon in Lluidas Vale came to mind again in Westbourne Park as I considered Mr Fullerton and the wound on his head. Jamaica’s reputation for violence is not unjustified. The gun courts in the capital, Kingston, are notorious. Wesley’s brother Eyton George, a policeman, had narrowly escaped death shortly before our arrival. He was ambushed in his car and kidnapped on the way from Kingston to Lluidas Vale by Natty Morgan, a gangster and multiple murderer who was Jamaica’s most wanted man. A few months later Morgan was shot down in a battle with police in Kingston. George was lucky to have survived.

As for Mr Fullerton, back in London, the reason he was being pursued by a man with a hammer outside my front door I was unable to discover. Yardies? Drugs? Had he really never laid eyes on his assailant before, as he said? Was there no dodgy business involved? Yet, that evening, as I cleaned the bloodstains off my kitchen floor, all that remained in my mind was that word sweet, with its air of balm.

In London this summer, most evenings, a West Indian saxophonist can be heard busking on the Hungerford Bridge, on the pedestrian walkway where concert-goers cross the Thames to the Royal Festival Hall. The light from the river there is tropical. It glints on the lip of the sax. Time stops for a moment. It’s a sound so sweet you want to bottle it for winter. ★