THE KRAYS OF GRAYS & THE GOODFELLAS OF STROUD

There's nothing like the smell of stale lager on pool table cloth. It just has a certain heady aroma that grabs you by the nostrils. To my mind, it smells something like small town dreams that have spilt over in a premature fizz and taken weeks to dry out under the feature lighting of a pub, restaurant or club.

Whenever I would head to Grays nightclub after school to impress my schoolmates and pretend I was similar to the young Henry Hill from the 1990 movie 'Goodfellas', I would always be struck by the pungent smell of the place. They say it's often smells that ignite our memories of the past and stale lager and cigarettes are ones I definitely remember the most from this particular chapter of my life. That and excessive amounts of knock off Cologne, including heavily diluted Calvin Klein and Hugo Boss which lost its scent quicker than the guy who scarpered after selling it to you.

The only place with similar atmosphere and smell to Grays nightclub was Riley's, the surprisingly large snooker hall club in town my brother Reuben had taken me to on occasion and Astrovision, my beloved VHS emporium of Hollywood dreams. Strangely all three seemed to share that similar energy of late 1980's/early 1990's America reduced to English rural inertia.

In those days, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was far less fastidious on checking up on such venues as Grays nightclub, the kind of place you might arrange a hit on someone if anyone knew what a hit was. Most of them didn't. The general customer at Grays was cut more from the McVicar and Krays school of criminal over-romanticisation - snooker balls in socks, knuckle dusters and the occasional machete etc.

Well, okay. Maybe not machetes. My need here for some creative exaggeration is probably yet another example of the frustrating limits of rural gangster fantasies. They were more innocent times back then before acid attacks and shanking had become a national pastime.

This distinction between British and American criminal sensibility is important though. It's the same transatlantic differences we find in our sport, cuisine and music. I've personally always found British gangster films are generally sweatier and less glamorous, with bad teeth and bad hair accompanied by a mod rock soundtrack, than American gangster movies where typically the criminals are handsome, wear shiny suits and listen to Tony Bennett.

I was far more from the Scorsese/Coppola school of gangster sensibility and having only recently initiated myself with the 'Godfather' movies, 'Mean Streets' and 'Goodfellas', I was already half living my school days thinking of myself as a cultured mafioso. The reality told a different story of course, being a tall, curly headed somewhat insecure teenage hypochondriac with no organisation to support me. A one man mafia with zero enemies. I was nothing if not original.

But the Grays days offered me a brief chance to extend my movie fantasy into a form of reality.

Without the guilt and without the blood.

The two brothers running the place liked to think of themselves as the Reg and Ronnie Kray of Stroud, except they closer resembled more something from 'Bugsy Malone' - kids playing gangsters in oversized suits, minus the splurge guns.

Nevertheless, in the play acting out, I was happy to be young Henry Hill from Goodfellas and wallow in the ambience of their establishment, enjoying the freedom from school books and bored looking teachers who appeared to watch the clock on the wall as much as we did before the final school bell finally sounded.

I could feel my physiology instantly change as I entered the dimly lit establishment as I began to drop my shoulders and walk with an Italianate swagger toward the bar.

"Hey it's Maxie!" they would shout out, welcoming me into their club so that I felt as close to a made man as possible, my friends looking on with envy.

When you are given free (non-alcoholic) drinks at the age of 12 in a club such as Grays, you might as well have taken the oath of omerta in the bargain you make for your soul.

I happily made that exchange.

And though I never had a gun handed to me, a provincial licence to use a soda gun at my leisure felt far cooler. If cocaine was the drug of choice for the small town pretend gangsters, then Coca-Cola was mine. Hitting the bottom of a large contoured Coke glass filled with ice with a fast stream of black carbonated syrup felt like being the hippest kid in town.

Along with the soda gun, I was entrusted with providing the soundtrack on the club's multi-CD sound system. If I had earned the brothers respect in any capacity, it was for picking out the best music for the late afternoon ambience when no-one was around.

What did they care if I blasted The Moonglows, Tony Bennett or Luciano Pavarotti while there was no customers to annoy. After school hours were the quietest hours of the week for Grays and so it made no difference to the two brothers if I wanted to hang out and relax there and pretend to be in 'Goodfellas', 'Once Upon A Time In America' or 'The Godfather'.

Sitting at a table with my mates, I had the sense that I was the Vito Corleone of the 2nd year at secondary school. I could envisage future wedding parties where they would come to me asking for favours and my respect.

But for now, they asked me to put a fifty in the pool table so we could play another game for free. We had a trick coin that the younger of the two brothers had given us to use over and over again.

In that happy hour before the adults came out to play, we felt like kings enjoying privileges courtesy of the two brothers who allowed us to act out our gangster fantasies before we had to head home for dinner.

Perhaps that was the difference; I always knew when it was time to go home.

They never did.