player but he isn’t a gambler, not really. That’s no thanks to Grandpa Sam. When we were little, Sam gave us a comprehensive education in blackjack, which he called pontoon. Here was the lesson: he was always the dealer, and we always lost. Sometimes we lost enough to buy him a Fry’s Peppermint Cream. If he was really in form, enough to buy him a packet of Park Lane. But at the first sound of our parents’ key in the front door, he’d move like a panther. By the time my mother and father had walked the three steps to the kitchen, the money had vanished and he was sitting there in all innocence, ‘showing us a card trick’.
My parents only gamble once a year; £5 each way on four horses in the Grand National. That’s unless you count their bridge games with Roger and Fiona, every Friday or Sunday night, 10p a hundred. But I don’t think that counts. At the end of every bridge night, they put the losers’ £2 or £3 or £5 into a jar, and at the end of the year they all go out for a big dinner with the money. The losers don’t have to have a worse meal than the winners or anything like that. So it’s not gambling, really, it’s more like saving.
My father loves watching sport. He gets very involved but he doesn’t bet on it. When we were little, he always let Giles stay up late when there was cricket on the radio or an Olympics in the middle of the night, but he only got excited because he actually cares who wins. I remember him once yelling at Jimmy Connors when Wimbledon was on television, ‘Forwards!’, ‘Smash it!’, ‘Get back to the baseline!’, then slumping back on the sofa and sighing, ‘God, I wish I was there to shout advice.’
But it was just because he liked Jimmy Connors.
My father is not going to get sick on the dogs and the football, go skint and lose everything, like his uncles did. My father is not like them. He is a self-made man. He went to university and learned to speak ‘properly’. He became editor of Punch magazine. He sent his children to private school. He was invited for lunch with the Queen, spent all month reading the broadsheets and planning elegant bons mots for the palace table, then the Queen took one look at him and asked, ‘Why don’t workmen wear boots any more?’ Canny woman, that Queen. She sniffed a rum bloodline, just like the girls at my school. Nevertheless, some say it’s the best girls’ school in the country. My father’s damned if his children aren’t going to benefit from his hard work. They’re not going to be poor. They’re not going to live and die in Southgate. And they’re certainly not going to be crooks, or gamblers.
My father’s parents socialized only with other members of the family. They were actually related to each other, distant cousins, even before they got married; they’d never have met otherwise. They went through a fashionable phase as newlyweds, going to horse races and spiritualist meetings in the 1930s, but always with a safe group of uncles and in-laws. My father, an only child, broke that tradition among many others and we don’t see much of the extended Corens. But we hear tales of Uncle Sid who nicked the silver at Dunkirk, Great-Grandpa Dave who went away for GBH on his own son-in-law, Fat Sam’s spat with Ginger Phil, the Wet Fish Corens of Southgate, and the ones who threw their lives away in betting shops. It’s close enough for my father to be glad he has left it behind. But I’m not. Whenever we do see the relatives, gathered together for weddings or funerals, I love them all. And I always loved sitting at the kitchen table with Grandpa while he smoked and dealt and chuckled, ‘It’d take a lot of this to kill ya.’ I didn’t care that I lost. I just liked playing.
The bridge comes from my mother’s side. Grandma Isabel has a heavy accent, wears big earrings, bakes chocolate-walnut cakes, and bids very loudly because she is deaf. She plays bridge with fellow Hungarian émigrés from one end of St John’s Wood to the other. But she has always been very patient about playing with me, even when I was so small that I could only hold eight cards at once and I had to keep putting them down to check things in my little yellow Book Of Bridge Rules. She may be a tiny, frail, foreign lady with a bad hip replacement and a faulty hearing aid, but my grandma sparkles like a chandelier. She’s the life and soul of a room. If you make an encouraging bid she will immediately go for slam, shouting, ‘Don’t invite me to a party if you don’t expect me to dance!’ She can’t walk but she always dances.
♠
I hate being at school and I love being at home. Especially when the house is full of Giles’s friends. Boys show off and tell jokes, and shout when they’re angry. They don’t smile and ask personal questions, then bitch behind your back and share your secrets with the class. They don’t write diaries, all sweetly floral and girlish on the outside, for you to be unable to resist flicking through at break-time, which say things like, ‘I hope Vicky leaves school soon, we all hate her, the fat cow,’ and then smile at you across the tuck shop and ask if you want a Highland Toffee.
Boys say what they think to your face. Bit harsh, sometimes, but straightforward. This room feels, for all its billowing smoke and whisky fumes, safe and healthy.
And they are playing this game . . . you get two cards face-down and one face-up, and you put chips in the pot if you like your cards, and more get dealt. Or sometimes you only have two cards, and three are dealt face-up in the middle, and you hope that the three in the middle will chime somehow with your secret two. But even if they don’t, you can pretend that they do. And if you pretend right, you can double your pocket money.
It is a serious game. I don’t know if they play well or not, since I barely understand the rules myself, but they play seriously. Lots of macho stuff and poker jargon, pocket rockets and big slick (or is it big stick? I’m not sure and don’t want to ask) that Matt has picked up from books and his trip to Vegas. It’s really cool. One time, we played all night and whoever won the most money took us all up to the Coffee Cup in Hampstead and bought us breakfast.
My entire poker strategy is based on one of Matt’s phrases, ‘Don’t disgrace an ace.’ I never pass any hand with an ace in it. I sit waiting for aces to come.
♠
I don’t want to go back to school. It’s the first day of term, dark as a maths book and cold as its owner’s wit. The warmth and laughter of the holidays are already shrinking into a walnut of memory. Yesterday I was a happy, funny, bright kid, playing games and laughing with my family. Today I am fat, clumsy, uncool, living in the wrong part of town, wearing the wrong clothes. And I haven’t even got on the bus yet.
My brother walks me up the hill and gives me a cigarette to stop me from crying, and promises that I won’t be at school for ever.
♠
On the other side of the ocean, Johnny Chan is winning the 1988 World Series of Poker. Johnny Chan is nicknamed ‘The Orient Express’, for obvious reasons: he arrived in America before political correctness did.
He was born in the Guangzhou province of China, and in 1962 moved to Texas, where his family ran restaurants. What must they have thought, that good and hardworking Chinese family, when their number one son dropped out of the University of Houston to become a full-time gambler in Las Vegas? He had been majoring in hotel and restaurant management. He was going to be big in catering. And off he ran to piss it up the wall in the Nevada desert. Or so they must have thought. That’s what usually happens.
It works out for Johnny, though. He wins the World Series of Poker in 1987 and 1988, the fourth man to win back-to-back world titles. In the 1988 tournament, there are 167 players and Johnny Chan reaps the grand prize of $700,000. The field includes some of the great names of poker history: Jack ‘Treetop’ Straus, Puggy Pearson, Crandall Addington, Jack Keller, Johnny Moss, ‘Amarillo Slim’ Preston. They’re pretty much all from Texas.
Betty Carey is the only female player in the field. There’s a story about the time she lost a big heads-up match to Amarillo Slim, after he tricked her by asking whether she liked her cup of tea. She said, ‘Yes,
