THE barefoot ARISTOCRAT

The King is her godfather, her grandmother was the last vicereine of India, and her father was arguably England's greatest 20th-century designer. But India Hicks is very much her own woman.

- SUSAN CHENERY

It all looks so perfect. So idyllic. As if Instagram was invented for India Hicks, It aristocratic daughter of one of England's grandest families. Her father, the famed British designer David Hicks, compiled a list of possible husbands for her, all dukes with vast estates. Instead, she had five children out of wedlock, a barefoot runaway to tiny Harbour Island in the Bahamas, a place with no doctor, no dentist, uncertain electricity and a three-month hurricane season.

"So when a kid falls out of a tree and breaks an arm, you're up shit creek," she tells The Weekly with a laugh. "Nothing is ever as perfect as it looks. But I'm a big believer in the adventure of life."

It is here, with her beautiful children, on these pink-sand beaches in her whitewashed plantation house among the palm trees, that India became a style icon, an exemplar of haute bohemian tropical chic. Bringing up her children, chasing snakes up trees - it's a long way from the strict, starched nannies of her own childhood.

"My children have grown up unbelievably open-minded because we live in a community where we are the minority," she says. "We are strangers in a strange land. They never forget that."

She has also built a perfectly symmetrical, white stucco second home in Oxfordshire, which was featured in Architectural Digest.

India loves nothing more than walking in biblical conditions of rain, sleet and snow," her husband, David Flint Wood, comments in her book, A Slice of England. They built the house in England to be closer to her mother, Lady Pamela Hicks, "but not too close," David adds.