Eat up your provisions,” said Magdalena Frederick, and for a brief moment, I thought she was talking to me. Glancing up, I saw that she was addressing her son, Kirsten, who was sitting beside me at the dinner table.

“How d’you like my creole sauce?”

That question was definitely aimed at me, so I answered truthfully. “Absolutely delicious.” As were the fresh tuna steak, marinated overnight then pan-fried, and the vegetables — dasheen, sweet potato and yam — collectively known as ground provisions.

The Frederick family — Magdalena, her husband, Leander, and seven-year-old Kirsten — were putting me up for the night as part of a new type of Caribbean tourism: homestays. Most visitors to the island of St Lucia shut themselves away in all-inclusive hotels, but from this summer, they will be offered the chance to bed down with a local family.

It’s an idea born of necessity. Next winter, the Cricket World Cup comes to the West Indies, and St Lucia will host all of England’s group-stage matches and a semifinal. The island’s Beausejour cricket ground — one of the most picturesque in the Caribbean — will have its capacity temporarily boosted from 12,000 to 21,000.

If English fans turn up in force, as many predict they will, St Lucia’s 4,500 hotel rooms will have no chance of coping, particularly as the tournament falls during the busy peak tourist season. Which is where Magdalena comes in.

“I think a lot of St Lucians will want to take part in this,” she told me as she cleared the dinner table. “We love our cricket, and if we have fans staying in our homes, we’ll treat them like members of the family.”

It’s not only the Barmy Army who will benefit from the scheme. The tourist board has confirmed that it will begin trialling homestays this summer and will continue to offer them after the end of the tournament. A rigorous system of standards and inspections has been established and, from tomorrow, visitors will be able to select and book individual homes on the tourist board’s website.

St Lucians have a reputation for being friendly, even by Caribbean standards, so a warm welcome is all but guaranteed. When I turned up at the Fredericks’ house — a smart three-bedroom detached on the outskirts of Soufrière (pop 7,000) — I was met with grins, handshakes, jokes about the British weather and a hastily opened bottle of Piton beer.

Leander proudly showed me the garden he had planted — rose bushes, lime and grapefruit trees — then Magdalena took me for a walk around the neighbourhood, waving greetings to friends and passing drivers. “Everybody round here knows me,” she laughed.

We turned off the road up a dirt track and through an old cocoa plantation to the house where Magdalena was born. Her parents, Francis and Glory, now both in their seventies, were sitting outside in the shade of a mango tree, watching one of Kirsten’s cousins play.

Magdalena explained that her great-grandparents had arrived from India as indentured labourers, only a notch up from slaves. St Lucia is now a happy melting pot of cultures — French, Creole, African and British — but its small Indian community has tended to keep itself to itself. Even a generation ago, Magdalena’s marriage to Leander, a black man, would have been unthinkable.

When we got back to the house, Magdalena put the finishing touches to dinner and opened a bottle of wine I’d brought as a gift. “If you’d have come on a Wednesday, I’d have made you dumplings and callaloo soup,” she said. “Dumplings on a Wednesday. I don’t know why — it’s just tradition.”

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