The Summer I Licked the Cherries Jubilee Pans

The other day, someone mentioned Cherries Jubilee. Have you ever had Cherries Jubilee?

I worked at the Banff Springs Hotel when I was 18 years old. The waiters and waitresses, in their maroon vests and black slacks, prepared the desserts, and in their mad dashes back to the kitchen, ditched their used flambé pans on the counter.

I was a stillroom girl who stayed in the back of the kitchen by myself.

One of my jobs was to wash up the pans from the Cherries Jubilee and Crêpes Suzette, which were lit on fire tableside by the servers.

If you’ve never tasted Cherries Jubilee sauce, all I can say is, I wonder how it tastes with ice cream. I’ve only ever tasted the sauce. I was supposed to put the pans in the sink and wash them, but I couldn’t help it. I had to lick them out first. (I gained 20 lbs. during the three months I worked at the Banff Springs Hotel.)

The dinner shift duties of the stillroom girl were light in the Rob Roy Room, so I whiled away my hours reading books I bought at the bookstore in downtown Banff, a one-street strip in the mountains in western Canada.

The book I was reading and loving the most was Michael Ondaatje’s There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do. I had been introduced to Michael Ondaatje a couple of years earlier by my English teacher. He had us read The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which is an extraordinary piece of... I don’t even know what to call it. It’s a story, it’s a journal, it’s a chronicle of Billy the Kid, or what Michael Ondaatje thought Billy the Kid might have been doing in his downtime between holding up trains and stagecoaches and shooting people on dusty streets.

The summer before my job at the Banff Springs Hotel, when I was seventeen, I had visited my aunt on Cape Breton Island. She’d bought a farm and moved out there, and I visited for a month.

Years later, I wrote a book that closely resembles that summer, my own journey, my own character, with a lot of fiction mixed in. I finished writing it in late 2019 and needed to come up with a title.

All I knew was what an editor had once told me about my book Chatterbox: the title is hiding somewhere in the book.

I went through my novel about the girl on Cape Breton Island. I scanned it and scanned it. I asked my early readers for ideas, but nothing fit. Finally, one day I found the line within the book that became the title.

I named my novel Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand.

It comes from a poem I wrote back in 1977 when my writing life was poetry and journals and letters and the odd short story for English class. The title describes the feeling of being a 17-year-old girl who doesn’t know how to cope with life. She can’t make sense of anything. She is like a baby doll washed up on a beach, smothered and choked by all the sand filling up inside her.

I now wonder if reading There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do had a bigger influence on me than I realized. The strange music of it may have stayed with me all these years.

Maybe some part of Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand began while I was sitting alone in the stillroom at the Banff Springs Hotel, reading Michael Ondaatje and licking Cherries Jubilee pans.

Recently I reviewed Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand and found it needed strengthening. I revised it and published a second edition.

If you like the essays I write each week and my other novels that you may have read, I think you will enjoy Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand. It’s fictional, but it’s also the origins of my sensibilities.

If you read it, please let me know what you think.

And, because this whole thing started with Cherries Jubilee, I found this funny YouTube video of someone trying it for the first time. Enjoy!

https://youtube.com/shorts/x4wG3PhQhgQ?si=VJsv-uob26LQuyEX

For more about me and my books, please visit my website, sandyday.ca