Ted Bruning has some thoughts on an unfashionable habit...
Smoking. It's terrible, isn't it? It stinks, it's expensive, and it kills you. So why do I do it?
Cigarette smoke has always been - pardon the pun - part of the air I breathe. My Dad started at the age of eight or nine in New York. His best friend's father had a small cigarette factory - and this boy would steal bagfuls of cigarettes, which were sold loose by weight then, for his pals to puff away on in secret. Dad was smoker from that day to the day he died nearly seventy years later. When we were kids he used to come into our bedroom after lights out sometimes and draw fiery hieroglyphs in the dark, whirling his glowing Peter Styvesant round and round, up and down, side to side.
One Christmas, despairing of buying four different presents, Dad got us a lighter each, with our initials engraved. I was so proud of mine. It was a big steel Ronson, heavy and solid in my hand.
My mother didn't smoke but liked the smell which she said was masculine and sexy. James Bond smoked, too - the real James Bond, that is, not the simpering geek of the post-Connery movies. He had his own blend hand-made by a West End tobacconist, with a shot of strong Turkish tobacco to spice the insipid Virginia.
My brothers all smoked: The oldest was in the army, and affected a pipe. He had an American girlfriend smoked Camel, which in rural Shropshire in the 1960s was impossibly exotic! The middle brother smoked a brand called Sterling which came in a chunky silver packet that looked as solid as a real ingot. My nearest brother, who was always broke, smoked Player's Number 6 because they were cheap. When he was especially broke he would buy 10 Woodbine and a packet of Rizlas and refashion each one into three tiny white slivers. One oldest sister didn't really smoke, but would occasionally pose with a packet of multi coloured Sobranie Cocktails or sensuous Black Russian. My middle sister who was a student nurse, smoked No. 10, which were even cheaper than No.6. I can't recall what my nearest sister smoked: cannabis mostly, I think.
It wasn't just the family. The farmer we used to visit on holiday smoked Woodbines. He was in the Eighth Army in the war, and I have an image of him and the crew gathered round the Sherman, all skinny and sharp-faced and thin as wire, their Royal Armoured Corp berets pushed back to reveal Brylcreemed quiffs, winding down after a battle or winding up to the next one with the aid of an untipped Players.
At my prep school, the headmaster used to take classes while chain-smoking Kensitas, flicking his butts through the window. At the end of the class the naughtiest boy would be sent out to pick up the dog-ends. Once, Nebreda Minor, having somehow acquired some matches, tried smoking the butts instead of throwing them away. It was one of the few offences that earned the cane rather than the slipper. Nebreda was duly caned, amid dire moral warnings from the very man he had merely been trying to imitate. Ah, sanctimony!
Inevitably, at public school at the age of 13, I started too. I remember smoking in the Junior House changing room with Johnny McCarthy, who had already smoked for long enough to take his Consulate like a man. It took me a while to reach his level of attainment, but I persisted. Smoking was a badge I was proud to wear. It made me one of the work-shy, sports-shy, pre-punk post-hippies who hung around on the assault course on winter afternoons dodging games, trying (with absolutely no success) to chat up village girls ... and smoking.
I smoked for 20 years, graduating to ever stronger brands. I never got as far as Capstan Full Strength, but I did smoke Gauloise roll-ups for a while. My sister bought me some of king-size leopard-skin papers, and I loved the sideways looks I got, smoking funny-smelling tobacco in funny-looking papers. I almost wished I could get nicked, just to see the coppers' faces when they found it was only tobacco after all.
When I was a young reporter, the newroom the air was always blue with lazy layers of smoke that hung like banks of fog under the strip-lights. It wouldn't have been a newsroom otherwise. But by the end I was under siege. I gave up one freezing January when we last poor few defiant ones were exiled from the covered fire-escape, which was just bearable, to the car park, which wasn't. I read Alan Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking, and despite having been a 30-a-day man for so long, I stopped overnight.
Nearly eight years later, after a few drinks, I started again. I'll just have the one, I thought, and bummed a snout off a mate. Within weeks I was hooked again and this time Alan Carr's remorseless hypnotic repetition of common-sense truths, didn't work. Like the Borg in Star Trek: First Encounter, I'd adapted.
I never smoke in front of the kids. I don't smoke in the house. I don't even smoke in the pub with friends who I know object. If I have a fag in the garden, I dispose of the butt so as to leave no offending trace.
I suppose one day I'll rejoin the ranks of the righteous. But the truth is that even when I'm not smoking, I'm a smoker. All my heroes smoked, and although I know smoking doesn't make me heroic, it's still in my blood, and in my hair and my clothes for that matter. So, I'm in denial of my identity when I don't smoke and in denial of all reason when I do.
It's a tough one. I'll think about it over a fag.
