Slowing Down (17 page)

Noël really did hate and despise ‘Winifred’. When he died on the tennis court after one set too many to impress a brace of pretty boys who were his house guests, they, very emotionally, found his address book and eventually (I imagine with considerable difficulty) a full bottle of gin. Swigging this down after a weekend of near-abstention, they thought it appropriate to call up almost everybody listed, and eventually reached Coward’s number in Switzerland, where he had long retired for tax reasons, and was also growing old and slightly feeble.

To protect his sleep he had no telephone in his bedroom. Woken in the small hours, he eventually heard it ringing in the hall, and for so long he felt it might be important. So, wearily, he got out of bed, put on one of the famous dressing-gowns, inserted and lit a cigarette in his holder, and shuffled downstairs. ‘Yes?’ he said (I should imagine his delivery even more clipped than usual).

‘Oh, Sir Noël,’ explained one of the two drunk youths emotionally, ‘we thought we ought to let you know that poor Godfrey Winn is dead.’

‘Good!’ snapped Coward, banged the phone down and went back upstairs to catch up on his broken sleep.

The main incentive to start to smoke in my youth was the cinema. Watching old films on TV today, it’s quite a shock to see how everyone puffs away: crooks, heroes, country gents, policemen and of course, once the war started, the armed forces. They were all at it all of the time, like experimental beagles in a laboratory. In battle, if someone was dying or badly wounded, the first thing his comrades did was to light one up and place it between his lips. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he’d usually say, if he could still speak.

I was born eight years after the end of the First World War. My mother’s brothers, who had survived the conflict, were full of tales of the war and told me that cigarettes were as welcome as food parcels from those in Blighty, keeping the ‘Home Fires Burning’. There were also references to smoking in some of the songs popular in the trenches and elsewhere. ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, for one, includes the following line: ‘Whilst you’ve a Lucifer [a match] to light your fag, smile boys…’

In the twenties everyone, but bright young people especially, smoked away. In fact a cigarette, often in a holder, was as much part of their image as short skirts, make-up, bobbed hair and the Charleston. Much later, Humphrey Bogart was my example. He made it sexy and when he lit one and placed it between his heroine’s lips, it was (during my testosterone years) totally seductive.

In the cinemas thereafter, far into the fifties and beyond, the air was grey with smoke, clearly to be seen in the beam of light carrying the image to the screen from the projection box high above the circle.

Then scientific research firmly tied the habit to terminal diseases. In America it has become banned almost everywhere. In France and Ireland, amazing in both cases, it is forbidden in all bars. Here, the prohibitions have been more gradual, but escalating all the time; and it’s the sly manipulation, as slowly as a predator stalks a herbivore, that I especially resent. Examples: on buses, where you used to be able to smoke in the back seats upstairs, they have banned it totally. In the case of planes, too, to begin with the total ban was confined to short trips – now, to anywhere in the globe, whatever the distance. In most stations it’s still allowed, except when they are below ground level, for example at Liverpool Street. Of course, the disastrous fire at King’s Cross underground station made it easier to tighten the screws.

The majority of taxis are non-smoking and one very grumpy driver without a ‘thank you for not smoking’ sign told me it was up to him personally whether he allowed it or not, and he didn’t. Many restaurants ban smokers. Most pubs don’t bar it as yet, but the government has pledged to deny them that right if food is available. Airports have very small smoking areas – but for how long? Many office blocks, especially public buildings such as the BBC, have banned it and display notices telling you that ‘This is a non-smoking building’. How, I wonder, does a building smoke?

Now don’t imagine I haven’t every sympathy with non-or anti-smokers; but surely, in fairness to the addicted, some
smoking areas should be available. There is no sight so pathetic as those groups of people puffing frantically away outside buildings in the freezing cold or pouring rain. It is in those rare and decreasing areas where it is still permitted that I join what I have come to think of as ‘the leper colony’.

There is no doubt that smoking is a threat to health, but surely those who decide to continue to do so should be allowed that choice. Some doctors refuse to treat heavy smokers. They claim, probably with some justification, that they fill up beds that should be available to non-smokers with serious or terminal complaints, but what of the gaga, the mindless, the ‘old fools’, an increasing number of whom also take up beds, doubly incontinent in many cases, unable to recognize anybody, their memories shot through? And what of alcoholics, their livers like inflated footballs? They too are surely an equal threat and often more aggressive than most smokers? What of petrol fumes which are just as lethal as nicotine, and are probably responsible for the hole in the ozone layer above the Arctic Circle?

This is not a defence of smoking. It’s bad for you and should be limited, but the government, despite the enormous amount of money it gains from every packet, might act less slyly. I wonder, too, how many MPs smoke in secret? Are you old enough to remember when a pipe was considered a sign of being trustworthy? There was Baldwin, for a start, then Attlee and especially Harold Wilson (who, they say, in fact preferred cigars)?

Here finisheth my modified rant! Now I’m going to light a fag and drink a small Irish whiskey.

And, of course, in pulling out my packet of Marlboro Lites (I do know that the rugged young cowboy who used
to advertise this brand died of lung cancer), I see that the gold and white packet has, on both sides and framed in black, an obligatory warning, ‘Smoking seriously harms you and others around you’ and on the other ‘Stopping smoking reduces the risk of fatal heart and lung diseases’. I’m sure that’s all true, but it lacks the more basic message on some packets ‘Smoking kills’, and that’s certainly true too, but sometimes, especially after a few drinks, I take out my fibre-point pen and add, ‘So does life’. Well, I don’t smoke in non-smokers’ cars, or around children, those with weak lungs, or even those who hate the smell of it, but I do smoke and I’ll tell you how and why this happened, and why, too, I’m not trembling at my obstinate stupidity.

When I was at school in the early forties, and as camp as a row of tents, I used to smoke only Black Russian Sobranies (rolled in black paper with gold tips). Later, when I became interested in surrealism in general and Magritte in particular, I occasionally switched to Passing Clouds. The packet had a pink frame surrounding a table of cavaliers puffing away at surely anachronistic ciggies and the large but contained cloud above them bore the name Passing Cloud in letters formed from the smoke itself. We smoked Black Russians defiantly in our taxi on the day we left the school for the last time.

Actually J. F. Roxburgh, our dandified but remarkable headmaster, had drawled at us in an early briefing. Although he would be obliged to beat us if we were foolish enough to get caught, if we chose to smoke under one of the 2,408 shrubs in the grounds that was our affair. Indeed, so lightly was smoking taken at Stowe that many masters smoked in
class, admittedly the majority favouring their ‘trustworthy’ pipes.

Still, for me smoking was a prop, not a real need.

It was the Navy which got me hooked. Duty-free tobacco was generously distributed, both in training camps and on sea-going ships, one of which, HMS
Dido
, a cruiser, I joined in Chatham, shortly after the war ended. We did little except goodwill cruises and rather uncomfortable exercises in the Bay of Biscay, mostly in very rough weather.

Here, certainly, the tobacco bonanza began. At regular intervals you were entitled to a large quantity of rolling baccy in an airproof tin (naturally they sold Rizla papers in the canteen and more luxuriously ‘tailor mades’ at seven old pence a packet). I became quite adept at making roll-ups and also owned a little machine to make it even easier and certainly neater. I, however, preferred tailor-made Gold Flakes when I was in sufficient funds.

There were strict, indeed draconian, rules about how much you were allowed to take ashore, depending on how long a leave you had. This was to stop you smuggling out enough to sell, at a huge profit in those years of fag shortage. Well I, and indeed most of the crew, didn’t want to risk a spell in ‘the glass house’, a punishment barracks rumoured to be terrifyingly sadistic. On board, however, we were all chimneys in bell bottoms, although personally I never smoked when sailing because, while never sea-sick as such, I was always queasy.

I recall once, on the train to Liverpool, a rating sitting opposite me at one of the tables opened a whole pack of tailor-mades (presumably he was on long leave) and announced with great glee, ‘I’m going ter smoke meself ter fookin’ death!’

So I left ‘the Andrew’ (slang for the Royal Navy) hooked for life.

Moving to London to work for an art gallery at a tiny salary, I continued to puff away, but was often too broke to buy cigarettes even at the modest price then asked. I partially overcame this by collecting visitors’ dog-ends, removing the cork tips and paper, and transferring the tobacco to a tin marked ‘Poet’s Mixture’. This delighted my boss, E. L. T. Mesens, although he claimed I wasn’t thorough enough.

Then, when the gallery was closed down, I joined the jazz world, and spent about ten years with Mick Mulligan and we all smoked, even on stage. Like Mick I really did smoke. In fact, over the years I built up to seventy a day.

Diana also smoked heavily, but when her granddaughter Kezzie was born, she decided to give up. She undertook hypnosis treatment and, after a considerable struggle, succeeded. She had rolled her own for as long as I could remember, and sometimes asked me to roll one for her in the car on our way to Wales. Her reasons for stopping were completely understandable. She sometimes got bronchitis and both her father and mother had died of lung cancer within a very short time of each other.

Ten years ago I was ordered by the doctors in Colchester General Hospital to give up when I nearly died of a bleeding ulcer. Diana bought me a doodling pad, coloured pens and sweets, but when my ulcer was cured with a powerful cocktail of antibiotics I started again. Then six years ago I had bronchial pneumonia. I went in to St Mary’s, was diagnosed with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and was given oxygen at frequent intervals. I didn’t understand why so many close friends came to visit me, but later came
to the conclusion it was because Diana thought I was going to die.

But then I didn’t.

Once the novelist Penelope Mortimer came to lunch. She smoked non-stop, although she’d already had one lung removed, with the excuse that it had taken sixty years to account for that and so it would take about the same again before the other one went – a curiously unrealistic belief, and indeed she died very soon afterwards.

I’m very fond of delicious food, but would eat my dinner rather quickly and then wait – how gallantly – until Diana, a much slower chewer and swallower, had finished. But I would already have a cigarette in one hand and my lighter in the other, and she found it extremely irritating – and let me know it.

Once I’d had my bronchitis attack, she insisted I went to be hypnotized, as it had helped her; and I agreed.

There is a man called Allen Carr who is famous for curing tobacco addiction. I didn’t see him but his assistant, who practised in a distant suburb. Having learnt the business at his master’s knee, he struck me as very logical and efficient, as well as practising a clever psychological trick. He was also, of course, a hypnotist of music-hall proficiency.

Diana was told when she made the appointment that I should bring with me a packet of my preferred brand of cigarettes. When I got there and was facing my very nice interrogator and lecturer, I saw that in his consulting room there was a couch, but, most remarkably, facing his desk in the corner was a huge pyramid of cigarette packets containing enough fags, I worked out later, to last a chain-smoker a lifetime of puffing away. By my side was a large ashtray.
The psychological trick was that I was told to smoke as much as I wanted to, while he began to talk, calmly and rationally, about why I should give up. I had to agree with every word he said.

Smoking was not a pleasure; smokers thought it was, but in fact, as with any other drug, it was an addiction. Smokers simply ignored this, but of course they persisted in deceiving themselves that only satisfaction was involved and they needed the reassuring ritual of lighting up.

Excuses for this need were diverse: anxiety, happiness, boredom, pleasure, good news, bad news, just wanting one, social ease, companionship, after eating, on the loo, after making love. I’m not sure that I didn’t imagine the last, but it was certainly one of
my
excuses. I thought of a post-coital cigarette as ‘a parachute between erotic ecstasy and ordinary reality’. I am sure, too, now it’s no longer a problem, that I didn’t think I could handle an affair with anyone who didn’t smoke, easier said and done in those less lung-conscious days.

He spoke of the duplicity of the cigarette manufacturers, who, now that anti- and non-smoking opinion must have meant a considerable reduction in their profits, unload massive amounts of fags into the Third World, and their determination to find loopholes in the escalating ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship.

This is what I can remember of the gist of what he said, but it may well include items of my own invention. He was entirely convincing, and throughout I smoked like a man with his last cigarette before ascending the scaffold. When he’d finished talking he asked me to smoke one last ‘coffin nail’ before he hypnotized me. Then he told me to throw
what remained of the packet on to the pyramid in the corner. Not that many left, I noticed when about to launch the parabola into my fag-packet cemetery. Not many at all! Came the hypnosis, I went out like a light and woke feeling new-born and tobacco-free.