Smokin'...

...for Knots in the String.

Once, I was a smoker.

That whole awful business was inhaled on a daily basis, tar and nicotine notwithstanding.

I’ve just finished reading Antoine Laurain’s French Windows in which one of the characters is a heavy smoker and he talks about his journey with tobacco. He begins with Gitanes, moving onto Gauloises and further. My memory lit up like the glowing crimson tip of a cigarette on a dark night.

When I say I was a smoker, I was in fact a passive smoker – a child of parents who were both smokers. Chain smokers? Probably. Thus from birth, I was subjected to houses and cars where a a smoky fug often drifted on the air. I thank the stars for fresh sea air and the smell of Mum’s delicious home cooking – it balanced it out... slightly…

My aunt and uncle smoked as well and I can remember shared holidays at my grandfather’s house when Mum and her sister would watch the road and when they saw Pa’s black car gliding across the bridge from Triabunna, they would open every window and door and rush about fanning the smoke out and the seabreeze in, spraying themselves with hairspray and perfume in the hope that Pa, who hated women smoking or drinking gin, would never notice. Seriously, how could he not?!

At the time, my family lived two and a half hours away from the coastal house and so every few weekends and for school holidays, my brother and I would travel in the back of the car, with Mum and Dad puffing away like industrial chimneys in the front and no windows open. Dad would occasionally flick a hot spark on his clothes, and there’d be a mad moment, eyes off the road, while he brushed furiously at his trousers. I recall the way he and Mum would light up in the car, pressing in the cigarette lighter, waiting till it popped and then holding the glowing end to the tips of the ciggies. It would emit its fiery glow on the night journey to the coast, as phantom eucalypts flashed past in the beam of the headlights, Mum’s and Dad’s faces lit by the dashboard lights and by the devil spawn glow of their cigarettes.

The Post War generation saw smoking as elegant and sophisticated, and each brand appealed to that image. Movie stars underlined the ideal.

In French Windows, Laurain’s character talks about Craven A, about Dunhill and Benson and Hedges and I remember them all. Even the sleek tin of Sobranies that Dad had in the drinks-cabinet. Sobranies were masterpieces of design, have an elegant history and Dad’s were matte black with a gold tip, for display only.

I also recall the beautiful ashtrays, some Wedgewood, some Royal Doulton, even Lalique glass positioned around the house, and how Dad collected matchboxes and had an interesting array of lighters. I recall Mum having a little collapsible ashtray that folded on itself, and which could be carried in a handbag, and I also remember a rather stunning silver wire cigarette case, also for handbags. There was a whole fashion culture built around a filthy habit.

Dad flirted with pipes for a while and as a child, I thought that looked rather good – very English, ex-war, gardener extraordinaire, sitting in a deck chair with the cricket on the radio and surveying his loved coastal lawns.

The words ex-war speak volumes. As a young serviceman in the RAAF, it’s where Dad began smoking and now I long to ask, was it for escape? Did it help you relax? Was it peer-group pressure? Was it worth it?

Because that’s how it ended.

Dad, who never smelled of cigarettes, always deliciously of Old Spice, Brût or Dunhill, contracted emphysema and lived less than five years from diagnosis, dying at seventy years of age. He passed away peacefully in palliative care with his room’s French doors opened to the private little garden outside. I look back and think I’m almost seventy three, Dad, and you could perhaps have lived as long or longer if you hadn’t been a smoker.

Distraught at the loss of her loved partner, Mum stopped smoking for three months but became so depressed and lost that I asked her to start again and within days her mood had lifted, and she was able to love life for another fifteen years.

Mum used to go into her GP, her Sports Medicine doctor, her eye specialist and her geriatrician and when they would dare to mention her habit, she would say point blank in her gravelly voice: ‘Look at me! (She looked wonderful!) Fit as a fiddle! So I’m not giving up the fags for you or anyone else!’ They would never gainsay her. Even now, those same doctors light up with a grin when they mention Mum and her ciggies!

Mum became frailer in her last couple of years. Mainly due to ligament and joint issues, but also macular degeneration. Yes, you can say that was exacerbated by her smoking and maybe she knew it, but she smoked far more, rather than less after Dad died. All this despite science and societal rules preventing smoking almost everywhere. Despite that it was patently her crutch, I too, had rules – no smoking in my house or my car. She hated it but grudgingly agreed.

Once, we flew together to Melbourne for a clothes shopping expedition (she loved elegant clothing and had an enviable figure) and whilst I was in David Jones, she said she’d meet me out in Bourke Street (she was then in her late seventies) and after I’d made a purchase, I found her, immaculately coiffed and dressed, amongst the workers in their high-viz vests, all smoking in the street. It was her bond with everyone, no matter the social divide and it gave my usually anxious mum the courage she’d never have had otherwise. Simply, cigarettes were a common bond.

Of course in the end, it was smoking that did for her a couple of months shy of ninety years of age (to which she would no doubt have said to her doctors ‘Take that! Nearly ninety! Ha!). She had a stroke one morning and I was called to her house by her visiting nurse to find her with facial palsy and slurred speech. The ambulance rushed her to hospital, but the stroke was spreading rapidly, and she became incomprehensible in A and E. They warned me at the hospital that a big one was approaching and indeed it did. She lapsed into a coma within hours, and thirty-six hours later she passed away.

(My daughter’s hand holding Mum’s oh-so-gently as she lay in a coma in her last hours)

These days we talk about the two smokers with love, rueful about their habit, knowing full well the dangers. A year or so ago I attended a ballet performance, and I carried one of Mum’s rather yummy clutch bags. I reached in to pull out my glasses and noticed a zip pocket I had never investigated. Unzipping it, I found a Benson and Hedges cigarette snapped in two, and I couldn’t help laughing.

I saved that cigarette in an envelope and when we scattered Mum’s and Dad’s ashes off the boat in the bay, I scattered the cigarette as well. One half for each of them. I bet both of them appreciated it as their conjoined soft-as-mist dust floated away along with a bottle of gin splashed about as a libation, dark chocolate chunks (Dad’s fave) and ciggies, all in the bay they adored…

Song for this week?

Has to be this one, I think…