Wednesday 6 July 2022 12:42 AM My grandfather blew his head off with a shotgun to avoid a painful smoker's ... trends now
A few days ago I met a beautiful woman in her early 50s who couldn’t stop smoking, and it gave me a feeling of desperate sorrow.
How much of her life will she forfeit? Ten, 15, 20 years?
It was an encounter that set me thinking about my own relationship with tobacco.
I’m 67 and anyone of my vintage will recall the enormous part that smoking used to play in our lives. It was something grown-ups did, and so you would aspire to it if you were young.
My father used to smoke Guards cigarettes, because he had been an officer in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards.
Like my grandfather, I was smoking both cigarettes and a pipe when I was 17. It was our social lubricant, but there always came a time when you realised you were addicted
My little sister and I used to take his butts from the ashtray and smoke the last quarter-inch in the shed at the end of the garden.
Later, at prep school, I would steal Ambassador cigarettes from the headmaster’s study, break them up and smoke them up a tree in a pipe I had made from a shotgun cartridge and piece of glass tube from the science lab.
My mother had been a heavy smoker during the war, when she was a submarines signals officer in what was then Ceylon, having to stay up all night on a diet of cigarettes and tea.
But after the war she packed it in, except for one Cocktail Sobranie a week, which she smoked on Saturday evenings with a glass of wine.
She would put on one of her favourite records, sit back and smoke. Her bliss was beautiful to witness.
My grandfather ‘AK’ smoked both a pipe and cigarettes. He had bullets left in him from World War I and had smashed his legs when the landing gear on his Sopwith Camel collapsed.
He would lean down and stuff his pipe with Three Nuns Navy Cut while steering his Morris Minor with one shoulder; it was bloody terrifying.
His wife, my grandmother, suffered from paralysing depression, and he had to look after her while keeping up appearances. The smoking must have been a matter of consolation and pain relief.
Almost all of us smoked. It was part of being cool and sophisticated. It gave you something to do at parties, something to share at bus stops, something to help you study, something to help you keep awake. Someone you fancied could be approached with ‘Got a light?’
Like my grandfather, I was smoking both cigarettes and a pipe when I was 17. It was our social lubricant, but there always came a time when you realised you were addicted, and no amount of willpower could make you stop.
You saw yourself prematurely ageing in the mirror, your skin yellowing, your teeth turning brown, your energy gone. You began to hate yourself and your enslavement.
If you were lucky, your instinct for survival kicked in. I had several hours of hypnotism and was miraculously switched off.
Within days I was feeling ten years younger and the ageing was going into reverse.
My father managed to quit when he was 50, and lived to 96. My Uncle John, who smoked continuously, didn’t, and suffered a series of strokes. The list of people who have been assisted to an early death would surely reach to the moon and back. Not just T.S. Eliot, but whole generations of continental intellectuals, for a start
It didn’t work on my girlfriend, who tried to stop anyway, and just got very bad-tempered.
My father managed to quit when he was 50, and lived to 96. My Uncle John, who smoked continuously, didn’t, and suffered a series of strokes. The list of people who have been assisted to an early death would
