When I was about 19 one of my best friends, a boy, started going out with a really attractive girl, who always seemed to have lots of spare cash and many nice clothes. I discovered that she was a waitress in an up-market gambling club in Mayfair and one day I said, 'I wish I could work somewhere like that'. She said, 'Why don't you come with me to-night then.' 'So I did.'

The club was on two floors of a huge house near Grosvenor Square. It was decorated in a grand, but cosy, style, using lots of dark red and blue velvet and with very thick, swagged curtains so that you wouldn't notice the dawn. It was owned and run by an imperious Irish woman in her forties called Pauline, who liked to think of it as part of a country house. It was meant to have a casually upper-class air, to attract the 'right sort' of punter. As far as possible she employed waitresses who had been debutantes and croupiers who had been to (ideally) Eton. So that the whole thing actually worked, she had a strangely ill-matched partener, Joe. He was in his 60's and was an East End gangster of the old school. Always dressed, when I saw him in the evenings, in an immaculate dinner jacket, he was as charming as could be and his weakness for the ladies meant that he said 'Yes' to any pretty girl who asked for a job. So I was in.

Pauline's sideline was greyhound racing. At the time this was very much a working-class sport and the kind of people who had boxes and champagne at the track were quite likely to have a scary side to them. She was one of those people. Her favourite greyhound, Johnny, had been forced to retire and now lived in the club. He was a total sweetheart and keen to avoid any form of trouble. Unfortunately, he was exactly the same height as the little side tables and regularly throughout the evening there would be a high-pitched shreik as some punter reached behind him to stub out his cigarette and accidentally used the dog. Pauline would leap up booming, 'Is someone hurting my Johnny?', while some red-faced man and Johnny both tried to pretend they weren't there.

The night that Paulene's dog won the Greyhound Derby, the biggest race of the year, she brought back the vast cup, about three feet across, filled it with champagne and made us all drink out of it.

There were the 'serious' punters, unbelievably rich dedicated gamblers who were the backbone of the club, mostly playing blackjack and backgammon and returning several nights a week right through the year. And to make a cheerful, busy atmosphere there were the young aristocratic boys that she loved so much who could buy a lower-priced membership without any privileges like free breakfast. That made a really nice atmosphere for us girls too.
- posted by Iris @ 10/07/2003 11:25:00 PM comment