Melissa Thompson’s fantasy dinner

It’s taken about 20 minutes, but I’ve finally managed to persuade Mary Spencer Watson to buy me a glass of Cheddar. “Only a half though,” says the sculptor with a knowing look, placing the bright orange cider in front of me. “I remember what happened last time.” At least one of us does, I think. We touch glasses, take a sip and immediately the stress of planning this dinner evaporates.

Even in the warm light of the fire Mary looks an unhealthy shade of grey so I ask how she’s keeping. She’s pushing 80 but dismisses me with the flick of a hand that is rough and lined after decades of chipping away at stone in her Worth Matravers studio. “I’m great, my love,” she reassures in her deep voice with a slight Dorset twang. “I’ve been working.”

She slaps her hands against her apron and a cloud of dust rises into the air. We both cough, prompting Dr Jessica B Harris, matriarch of ­African-American culinary history, to subtly move her plate of whitebait out of the way. Whitebait’s her favourite and, as she can’t get it in the US, it’s what she always has when she comes to the UK.

We’d bumped into each other a few weeks before in PFC grocers in Sydenham, south-east London. She was looking for dried crayfish to make egusi soup because she woke up missing Lagos. I mentioned missing Weymouth, my hometown, and because she’d never visited, she suggested a trip. A welcome break from filming her latest documentary.

I head to the bar, wondering what to buy the leader of Jamaica’s Windward Maroons

Tonight, she’s brought me a jar of Trinidadian pepper sauce, but the author Gordon Burn intercepts it. “Fantastic,” he growls, dipping his finger in to taste. He seems impervious to the chilli heat but removes his flat cap a few minutes later. Gordon is more relaxed now than when he arrived. He’s working on a book but doesn’t want to talk about it. He has written deep dives into the crimes of Fred and Rosemary West and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, so his mood is understandable.

I wasn’t sure how The Boot Inn would work for a dinner party but as Weymouth’s oldest pub, it seemed ideal. Plus, it serves Cheddar and it’s got lots of dark corners. I find Skin from Skunk Anansie in one of them. She’s on the phone to her wife checking in on their baby daughter. She sings sweetly down the phone. I can’t name the song, but then it hits me. It’s “Twisted (Everyday Hurts)”, rearranged as a lullaby. “Works every time,” shrugs Skin as she joins us. “She loves Metallica too.”

As a vegetarian, Skin shuns the seafood starter so chef Maureen Tyne asks her team to bring out the mains. Maureen is one of the best chefs I know and because the food was cooked back at her place near Brixton, she can relax with us. Soon plates of brown stew chicken and curry chickpeas appear, with bowls of Mannish water and red peas soup, plus piles of plantain and festival dumplings.

Everyone cheers. Skin dives into the chickpeas, tearing off pieces of festival to dunk. Gordon pours pepper sauce over the chicken and eats it as though it’s tomato ketchup. Dr Harris takes a sip of the Mannish water and whoops. The food reminds her of her friend Norma Shirley, the trailblazing Jamaican chef who died in 2010, and just as the mood threatens to dip into melancholy Gordon brings over a tray of sambuca “as a toast to the dearly departed”. Everyone drinks it apart from Mary, who is still keeping an eye on me.

It’s at this point Queen Nanny walks in. We’ve only ever DMed on Instagram but I instantly know who she is from the smell of woodsmoke and the way she keeps looking over her shoulder. She shakes my hand, looks at the group and goes to lunge at Gordon before I explain that he’s safe and just writes books. “Careful,” I joke. “Talk to him too long and he’ll write about you.”

I head to the bar, wondering what to buy the leader of Jamaica’s Windward Maroons, the 18th-­century group of Africans who had escaped enslavement and resisted the attempts of the savage British imperialists to recapture them. Especially one rumoured to have supernatural powers? In the end I go for an Appleton’s rum over ice with a squeeze of lime, plus a glass of water. Nanny downs the water and pushes away the rum. Soon she takes up space next to Skin, whose melodious voice she finds grounding.

As the pub closes we head to the Rumshack for a dance, apart from Mary who hasn’t heeded her own advice and is now too drunk to join us. She walks off into the night singing something we can’t make out. It sounds good though.

Melissa Thompson is a food writer and columnist. “Motherland: A Jamaican Cookbook” is out now (Bloomsbury)

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