In her fourteenth year of life, 1980, Sarah saw a sign in the Wimpy Grill for a weekend waitress. Women were still called waitresses back then rather than servers. She went into the restaurant and the manager interviewed her there and then. He asked her my age, and she said she was fifteen.
She got the job. The pay was eighty-three and a half pence per hour or $1.60.
Sarah ditched the newspaper deliveries. She’d taken on the Oxford Journal on Thursday evenings and continued with the Oxford Times. Working in the Wimpy in the neon orange, nylon dress uniform, and a baseball cap was a step up!
Every Saturday, she arrived at eight forty-five and waited for the manager to open up. Sarah made her debut in the kitchen as a pot washer.
During the busy times, the steam from the dishwashing machine would hang in the heat of the small room. The proper waitresses dumped all the dirty dishes and dashed straight out again. After a few weekends, clean crockery exited the kitchen before it ran out.
A month later, the teenager graduated to tables. The manager assigned tables one and twenty in the top section to her. She took orders; then took them to the grill for the chef to fulfill and requested the drinks over the counter from an imposing character called Mum.
The tall Black woman ran the tea, coffee, and desserts’ station. She moved like Ginger Rogers, producing perfect cups of tea from a huge steel teapot.
Customers had a choice of instant or filter coffee. Both beverages required the flip of a lever to open the boiling water flow. The geyser spurted and splashed into either the cup or the filter on the cup, depending on which was being made.
Spillages passed through a perforated steel cover to the steel tray underneath.
Sarah stacked all the clean crockery in its dishwasher tray and carried it from the pot wash to the food and drink area. On the counter near the deep chest freezer, she arranged Knickerbocker glory vessels and glass banana longboat dishes. Close to the vanilla ice cream for optimum efficiency.
The burgers, quarter-pounders, benders (sausages scored on one side so they would create a circle in the deep-fat fryer), and bags of chips on the far side of the freezer. This meant that chef Denis, a large, round, sweaty lump of long-sightedness, could slide in the grease splashes along the floor to the freezer with little trouble. Denis would also drip sweat from his forehead onto the grill during the lunch hour. Yummy.
Over the months that followed, Sarah earned extra tables. During quiet times she worked six, and at peak times, everyone had four each. Her fellow waiting staff, Elise, Gina, Masady, and Hassan worked full-time.
There was always an unspoken desire to get the tables from one to four or seventeen to twenty. Customers liked to sit at the top of the restaurant; not at the other end by the door. Happy customers left bigger tips.
Nobody liked tables thirteen to sixteen or nine to twelve. They were the most congested areas either side of the door and near the till where queues would form.
Some customers left behind cigarette packets. Most were empty and discarded. Some had one or two forgotten or overlooked by the previous owner.
At first, Sarah would give the packet to any of the other table staff. They’d take it in turns to puff away at the bottom of the stairs to the toilets during a lull in service. But one day Sarah tried a John Player Black for herself. She picked up a lighter left behind on the staffroom table and stood in front of the mirror and lit her first cigarette ever and inhaled.
Her spit hit the mirror a microsecond after the choking smoke hit the back of her throat. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She rested the cigarette in the tiny aluminium throwaway ashtray, unlocked the staff room door and dashed next door to the ladies.
She took some toilet paper and wiped her face and blew her nose. Then returned to the staff room, relocked the door, retrieved the cigarette and had another go.
Sarah studied her reflection and practised holding the cigarette like a Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She tried flicking the ash into the ashtray and missed, so then she practised tapping the ash into the tiny tray. This worked.
The fourteen-year-old studied the way she inhaled. Puckered her lips in the most alluring way and practised over and over until someone called up the stairs for her to get back to work.
Soon Sarah became one of the absences of waiters gathered at the bottom of the stairs around the corner from table one.
On the cold winter days of 1980, there were bulky coats hanging up in the small space at the bottom of the stairs. The occasional customer would do battle with the anoraks and overcoats and the cigarette brandishing staff, as they squeezed past to get to the toilets.
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