Homage to my Brother, Gary Robert Lavery
Gary developed an endemic hunger for aboriginal cuisines and indigenous street food culture after moving to Scotland at seventeen. Tracking down local specialties with time-honoured traditions was his forte, from haggis to ceviche to sashimi to smalahove (sheep’s head) to banoffee pie.
Gary worked
in the dining rooms as a steward on the Norwegian Royal Viking Sea luxury
cruise lines, travelling to some of the most exotic ports with off-the-beaten
path itineraries. Passengers were mostly wealthy retirees. The ships were built
for lengthier round-trip luxury trans-Atlantic excursions. Royal Viking Line
prided itself on single-seating dining, allowing guests to arrive in the dining
room unscheduled. High atop the bridge a restaurant and glass-enclosed lounge
provided magnificent panoramas.
Gary took
pleasure in telling us how he was assigned to take care of British performer
Jean Alexander, who starred as Hilda Ogden, and a couple of other well-known
actresses from the British soap opera Coronation Street. The actresses were on
hiatus and travelling together on this particular voyage.
Gary's
penchant for sampling local delicacies and immersing his inquisitive palate in
new flavours had included domesticated rats in China. Anecdotes about communist
China's economic reforms and open-door policy which allowed the easing of its
borders and restrictions to Westerners is a story he never tired of recounting.
A too-blunt observation was Gary’s strong suit, and if he could repulse you in
the process, it was a bonus.
Gary would purchase tchotchkes
and traditional crafts from ports of call, such as decorative, papier-mache
Russian lacquer boxes, hand-painted with iconic, highly detailed scenes from
folk tales on shore excursions. I retailed these decorative items in my shop,
Not Just Antiques, on Talbot Street at the foot of Market Lane in London,
Ontario in the mid-eighties. He purchased a large handmade Peruvian tapestry
made from dyed, woven alpaca wool in the village outside of Machu Picchu that
hung in the dining room of my Proudfoot Lane apartment. He would later abandon
it in a dispute with a landlord. There is a traditional woven wicker rooster
with a removable head that presides on my parent’s kitchen island that he
purchased in China. The body of the rooster is the resting place for his cremation
ashes which we brought back from Birmingham, England after his funeral.
In 1992,
with only my brother's previous address and a verbal commitment to contact him,
I arrived in Southampton, England, unannounced. Aware that he recently moved,
sold his catering truck, separated from his partner Colin, and did not have a
telephone. I put faith in my investigative
abilities. We had spoken long-distance weeks after my grandmother died. During
the sale of my first restaurant, La Cucina on King which I co-owned with my
parents, and before I sold my Palace Street turn-of- the- century cottage we
talked vaguely about taking a trip to Izmir, Turkey. We were concerned about
the politics and unrest. I remember reading, after hours of siege an extremist
mob set a hotel ablaze in the city of Sivas, killing 37 people. The hotel was the residence of Aziz Nesin,
The Satanic Verses translator.
Travelling
on the early evening express from London-Waterloo to Southampton, and disembarking
from my compartment, I bumped into my brother. Gary was in London for the
weekend and was returning home in the carriage next to mine. At the precise
moment I did, he descended onto the platform beside me. By any measure, it was a
remarkable coincidence.
A month
later, I booked an inexpensive flight on a small overloaded turbo-prop plane.
Gary and I were soon crossing the English Channel in the middle of a sudden,
severe thunder and lightning storm for a vacation at the seaside town of
Benidorm just outside of Alicante in Spain. Benidorm is a fishing village that
turned into a mega-resort dotted with skyscraper hotels with pristine white,
sandy beaches, palm-lined boulevards and promenades with a mountainous skyline.
With the small inheritance my grandmother left
me I had underwritten this trip. Exhausted, Gary slept most of the holiday with
a few brief forays into the old port town for a local specialty of memorable
sea bream with capers and heavy cream baked in a low-fired, wide terracotta pot
known as a cazuela. We left a glowing review of the restaurant at the front
desk of the hotel despite the hotel clerk’s indifference.
Into the
Spanish interior we travelled by bus to a tasca for over-priced tapas owned by what
turned out to be a German ex-patriot. Gary's malaise concerned me, as we were
planning on travelling up the coast to Barcelona to visit architect Antoni
Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Basilica. He was exhausted and could barely summon the
strength to get out of his hotel bed. And thinking about it, I realized he was
depressed. I believe this was the beginning of his lengthy battle with HIV.
Months
later, back in Southampton, England, working as a waiter in an upscale Italian
restaurant where Pizza Margherita (a sad concoction of out-of-season tomatoes,
sketchy mozzarella, basil, and olive oil) was at the pinnacle of popularity. In
the wrong hands, it was unworthy of the Italian sobriquet. One night after my
shift, standing in a telephone booth on a cold and rainy February night, my
mother relayed long distance that my friend Catherine had been brutally
murdered by her husband. Attempting to come to terms with the horror and barbarity
of Catherine’s shocking death made for a long period of despair and grief and
outrage.
Gary saw a
posting for seasonal employment at La Sablonnerie, a 16th-century inn on the
remote island of Sark in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy that was
agriculturally self-sufficient. A couple
at the Italian restaurant in Southampton, talked late into the afternoon about
Sark’s limitless supply of seafood and the island’s sustainable ethos, leaving
me an unheard of 20-pound gratuity to
show their appreciation when they left.
At the time,
my brother and I were both devotees of the book, The Road Less
Travelled, and the island of Sark, the last bastion of feudalism in Europe
with a population of 600 residents, appealed to our adventurous natures and
curiosity. Sark, long considered a hideaway from the stress of contemporary
life, with its prohibition on cars, no airport or hospital, and a lack of
modern-day tourism infrastructure combined, with its status as the last feudal
outpost in Europe, beckoned.
Instead of
cars, there were tractors, a ubiquity of rusty bicycles, and an assortment of
carriages and carts for horse-drawn transport. Sark was once entirely Norman
French, still evidenced everywhere on the island. Some older residents still
spoke Sercquiais, a disappearing patois of Norman French that differs between
Great Sark and Little Sark.
The day
after Easter Sunday, we arrived by a small ferry from Guernsey to Sark’s tiny
Cruex harbour pier, a tower-like rocky outcrop. The harbour surrounded by a
jagged coastline with steep perpendicular cliffs is accessed by a narrow road
through a 200-foot tunnel within the cliff face. We were greeted warmly by a
resident holding a sign with our surname. He was the driver of a vintage
horse-drawn barouche that our employer, Elizabeth Perrée, sent to take us to
our cottage lodgings. The cottage's former thatch-covered roofs had been
replaced with overlapping pantiles, as they were always at risk from fires.
We wound our
way along the country lanes and marveled at the daffodils, hyacinths, tulips,
and other spring flowers already out in a blaze of spring hues. The driver took
us down the tree-lined main avenue, past a sparse collection of essential
merchants and low-built, white-washed stone cottages continuing down dirt roads
to the interior pastoral countryside.
The
hedgerows, cliff paths, valleys, and meadows possess a rich abundance of
bluebells, primroses, dog violets, and celandines and are well-suited to sheep,
rabbits and woodcock. Small shrubs of yellow-flowered gorse were in bloom on
the windswept cliff sides, and the distinctive sweet scent of coconut and good
vanilla was all-pervading on this crisp, sunshiny day. Soon we were heading
towards the breathtaking isthmus, known as Le Coupée, which connects Great Sark
to Little Sark. It towers above sea level on a plateau above its jagged cliff
face. Sark, referred to as an island, is two islands connected by a razor-thin
strip of land. There is a 260-foot precipice with a vertiginous drop on the
left side of La Coupée, affording a dramatic view of Convanche Bay. To the
right lies the expanse of La Grande Gréve Bay, accessed by the north end of La
Coupée by climbing down a 100-meter cliff pathway with steps cut into the rock.
When the tide is out, Gréve becomes a vast beach of golden sand, and crystal
clear water with cauldron-shaped rock pools, caves, and arches that we would
spend many hours exploring...
Bryan Lavery
Comments
Post a Comment