Our two families coincided, I seem to remember, as guests at Sandra’s in Reguengos de Monsaraz sometime in June or July of 1997. I must have told Bernard I had a summer to spare before going off on a course in Florence in September. He owned and ran the Casa Velha, a reputable, excellent restaurant in Quinta do Lago, and I remember him saying he was tired of many of the foreigners requesting chicken and chips for their kids whilst they dined on the finer fare the menu had to offer. He wanted to exploit the back of the installations that gave on to the garden to offer a grill option for the less discerning clientele and would I like to help him run it for a spell. I think he’d called it “La Pérgola” on account of that roofed structure out on the gravel beyond the terrace. I have ink sketches of it in my sketchbook of that time. The conditions he offered me were more than fair; over and above my salary and tips he offered to put me up at theirs for the duration of my stay.

Upon my arrival on the last day of July, both he and Cathy took me in with much kindness and I was made to feel at home and as an extended part of the family. I was given the guest room in front of the pool. I remember vividly those glorious August mornings, falling out of bed and straight into the water. I’d swim thirty or forty lengths to clear my head before emerging to contemplate the ample garden that stretched to the edge of the cliff and the fantastic views of the sea beyond. We’d have some lunch before Bernard and I drove into Albufeira to the bank where I imagine he deposited cash takings from the previous night and dropped me off to be picked up by his head waiter who would drive me into work. Sundays at theirs was a family day and lunch was a relaxed but deliberate and delicious affair thanks to Cathy’s culinary flair. After work Bernard often handed me the keys to the Defender and I would drive us home as we discussed how the evening had gone. Roll-mops for supper in the kitchen, the two of us, with a glass of white and then it was off to bed. Such was my gilded room and board.

The lads that drove me into work, like the rest of the staff, were friendly but understandably guarded with me at first. Initially in their eyes I must have been nothing more than a temporary imposition. I seem to remember we’d get to work at around four although my working day at La Pérgola would not start for a few hours. From day one I knew I wasn’t going to make any friends unless I pitched in, so I rolled up my sleeves and helped out with the sweeping and the mopping and the moving of heavy tables as we set up the main restaurant for the evening. Most of them were cordial, some a bit suspicious of me but within a few days I sensed they appreciated my efforts and began to accept me as part of the crew. I don’t remember many of their names but I remember many of their faces. José might have been the name of the head waiter . A sharp and intelligent guy in his early thirties with a wicked sense of  humour; he seemed experienced and visibly commanded respect amongst the staff. He’d pick me up from the bank and then we’d drive off to fetch Fernando – a close friend or perhaps a cousin – from a rough part of Albufeira. Fernando was a dead ringer for Freddy Mercury although smaller and leaner. He was quite highly strung and had a hard, acidic edge to him that smacked of contained aggression. This sometimes spilled out into bullying remarks he made to other members of staff he considered incompetent but he grew to like me and soon became a friend of sorts. The chef and sous-chef were both French and they didn’t seem to get on all that well. I remember the former striking me as being a bit full of himself whilst the latter came across as earthier with his French from the Midi somewhere. Bruno, another member of the kitchen crew, was Belgian and lower down in the ranks. I think he prepared the cold dishes and the deserts. A really nice guy of my age but quite a hard drinker for someone in his mid twenties. One Sunday he asked me over to lunch and greeted me with a tumbler of scotch filled to the brim. And that was just the aperitif. We became close friends and often did the rounds of late night Albufeira after work, tearing around in his Golf GTI to the sound of Cesária Évora. Then there was Celio, the unfortunate Portuguese-South African kid with wall eyes who always seemed to get it all wrong and who everyone kicked about.  And that girl who washed the dishes: a beautiful face with an enormous behind. She propositioned me quite frankly at least once if not twice. And so on…

La Pérgola was just Daniel and I. I took the orders and handled the cash whilst Daniel was on the grill. I think he was from Ghana and had landed in the Algarve as a cook for some minted Franco-Vietnamese lady who one day had turfed him out and left him to his luck. He was a nice guy and dependable. He and I spoke to each other in broken English. There must have been a salad option but as far as I can remember there were just three things on the menu: chicken, lamb or veal with chips. Business trickled in, sometimes as youthful over-spill from next door as Bernard had intended. I remember at least one birthday party that took up all the tables outside. More often than not the evenings were quiet and provided me with plenty of time to read and sketch and think…all to the sound of Bossa Nova, drifting over the low ambient lights placed around the garden, from the band of the hotel a couple of hundred metres away. There was an embracing melancholy to those warm slow evenings. Between indoors and the terrace I suppose we had room for about forty diners at maximum capacity but I don’t recall ever having served more than twenty meals on any given night. There were nights when no-one appeared. One evening Bernard dropped in, sat himself outside with a paper and asked me for a glass of wine. There was no-one else about. I misheard the rest of his instructions to me and after half an hour he asked me how long I thought the lamb cutlets were going to take. I was so apologetic and he just calmly smiled it off.

All this happened twenty one years ago and I was only there for a month but I still look back on that August with nothing but warmth. On my last day at work José caught me with my hands in his locker and for a moment he and I were on the verge of having a misunderstanding. In fact what I was doing was leaving him a bottle of single malt by way of thanks for all the driving he had done for me. That night, after work, a select group of the lads took me out on the lash and I wasn’t allowed to pay for a single round. The sun was coming up when José dropped me off at the Cremer’s, pissed as a fart. I caught the bus up to Lisbon that afternoon feeling like shit but content. I was in Lisbon for a night, just long enough to repack. The next day I left on the train for Florence.