Smoke gets in your eyes

I cannot be certain what, as a boy, I thought about cigarette smoking. However, I seem to remember associating it with rather scruffy men in drab clothes and cloth caps who were relegated to the upstairs of buses, where they smoked Player’s Navy Cut, Craven ‘A’, Senior service, Gold Flake, Wills Wild Woodbine, and other popular brands of the 1940s and 1950s. The bus smokers coughed, gasped – hence ‘gaspers’ for cigarettes – and would no doubt have spat were they not confronted with the wonderfully worded Expectoration Prohibited (and how it was that we all knew what this meant remains a slight mystery to me: we didn’t even know of its Latin origin – and I imagine that Hawking Prohibited would have taken on an entirely different meaning...). Certain it is that people smoked everywhere, and smoking on trains was only completely banned in 2005.

I do remember that, as children, we tried to make our own cigarettes out of dried leaves and heaven knows what else.¹ What we used for ‘cigarette paper’ I have no idea, but I do know that the results where abominable (and as well try to make ‘tea’ out of dried leaves from an English garden). My father once put some tobacco in a small plastic toy pipe I had. And when I drew on it I found it so horrible that I flung the pipe across the room. This was, I have to say a singularly irresponsible act on my father’s part, but luckily it had a good effect. My only other attempts to smoke occurred when I was a teenager. Desperate to appear ‘cool’ – long before that word had its current meaning – I tried smoking in pubs (under–aged). But I found that the tobacco made me feel nauseous, and – as I had a particular horror of throwing up – I gave up all experiments with tobacco. Someone said, “You’ll get used to it.” But I distinctly remember thinking, “What a stupid thing to get used to.” So it is that I am grateful for one example of wisdom at an age not much given to that level of judgement.

A group of British soldiers arrive in England 

after the evacuation of Flanders. One pipe, 

and three cigarettes

“Might I ever have taken up smoking?” Well, I can think of one situation when it might have been highly likely. Had I been born early enough to fight in the Second World War, I might well have. I can easily imagine that cigarettes might have been second only to food and drink in my rations. I’m sure that in such a situation I would have forced myself beyond the nausea phase; and that without compunction. War is hell, and plain tobacco is probably the only drug that can help to quell fear without compromising efficiency and accuracy of fire power. Not that I imagine modern western soldiers are encouraged to adopt these coping strategies from the past. Avoidance of immediate confrontation – where possible – is the watchword now. Besides, at eight stone, which I was at eighteen, I cannot see myself being deployed to the front line!

Since then, the ‘war against tobacco’ – to deploy a decidedly inaccurate phraseology –has reached proportions unimaginable to those born either pre– or post-war. In 1979, when I started working at Dillons flag–ship bookstore – in Malet Street, London – it was not uncommon for booksellers to smoke on the shop floor, or even carry a lighted cigarette with them when showing a customer to a section that was of interest to them. As for the cash office, heaven help the secondary smokers! Things were scarcely better when, in 1988, I transferred to one of Dillons’ new, out of London, University City bookstores. It seemed that nearly everyone smoked, and the tea room atmosphere was appalling now I think back on it.    

This latter situation was mirrored – and writ large – on the London Underground when smoking was restricted to a single carriage per train. The carriages were filled with a near–smog of carcinogenic particles; the floor littered with fag ends; and the walls turned a yellow–brown: a deadly reflection, I imagine, of the state of the smoker’s lungs.

A collection of Picasso's
cigarette boxes. From The Artists
of my Life, by Brassai. Thames &
Hudson, 1982, O/P

My paternal grandfather was, alas, a chain smoker, and would reach for the lighter even before he got out of bed in the morning. My father was a pipe smoker; and when he was at the typewriter it seemed that the machine would hardly work unless my father was wreathed in smoke! ² It would seem, however, that such glamour and faux confidence that used to attach itself to the cigarette – Rita Hayworth, Clint Eastwood, and much of Hollywood, French noir, and films across the board – is all but exhausted. Yet, whether the cigarette gave cachet to Picasso – rarely photographed without a cigarette in his hand – to Sartre, or Edith Sitwell, it was still a noxious, mass–produced drug, promoted by greedy manufacturers who cared not that it killed (then as now). Yet, take the cigarettes out of the classic films and you will kill them! That is just one of the many paradoxes we live with. And any attempts to remove such are just about as fruitless and plain stupid as many of the current PC measures that would kill our spirit – were we to let them.

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 ¹ One experiment of mine that was successful was to send up a tiny rocket – above the garden. I filled the bottom of a cylindrical cigar container with the heads of matches, put some smaller tin object on top of these, and then screwed the top down. I then carefully set this on a wire tripod above a small fire of twigs, and waited for the match heads to light / explode, blast the head off the cigar container, and launch my ‘rocket’. This was so successful that I never did find where it landed!

² My grandfather died of lung cancer and my father of a heart attack. The latter caused by the insidious narrowing of the arteries which takes place over the decades. The arteries are narrowed temporarily during the act of smoking, but over time this narrowness becomes permanent.