In my final year at Wycombe Abbey, instead of going to the 8am morning chapel service, I would often sneak out of the gates, over the road and into the piss-puddled pedestrian underpass, nicknamed the Concrete Jungle. Here, all the dedicated smokers of my year who’d made the break would suck on a morning Silk Cut or two, followed by a frantic squirting of Impulse body spray before we wafted back behind the school gates at canny intervals to avoid suspicion.
No such lengths were taken by my mother to hide her tobacco habit when was 17. She remembered friends brushing teeth furiously to get rid of the smell of cigarettes before going home at the end of term from drama school, and she being “rather blasé” as her parents already knew she smoked. Indeed, her entire extended family were all smokers, as were mine, on both my parents’ sides. If there were an international competition for smoking, my family would’ve made the medals podium: Benson & Hedges, Rothmans, Marlboro and cigars (which my dad would smoke on the Sundays of Lent, as in the eyes of the Lord cigars didn’t count as Real Smoking).
Depending on the season and the visitors, my family sitting room had a permanent head-height nimbostratus of exhales and inhales: acetone, butane and arsenic, formaldehyde, benzene and lead. Not to mention the tar. We called it the Health Spa. I loved the smell then, and I still do. I have an old green fishing jacket of my mother’s from the 1980s that magically still smells of Eternity perfume and Silk Cuts, no matter how many times it visits the washing machine. The freshly toasted, nutty smell of a cigarette when it is first lit still beguiles me; I sometimes walk in the slipstream of a person who has just lit up, simply to get a whiff. I’m not talking about the acrid smell of old cigarettes in an ashtray. That’s the kind of smell that hypnotists waft under your nose when your eyes are closed to persuade your subconscious to give up. That is revolting and is the thing that keeps me off the cigarettes – but to me, Ma never smelt like that.
My mother was a dedicated smoker for almost all her life. She started as a teenager and smoked throughout her 20s, 30s, all through my gestation – this wasn’t considered a big deal – and on to the grand old age of 72, when a major stroke brought a shocking halt to the cigarettes altogether.
There are countless photos of my father and mother, cigarettes on the go, looking seductive and sophisticated – all the things we have come to know smoking not to be. But they do very sexy, nonetheless.
There were a few early attempts to give up. At my father’s suggestion, they once went to a clinic where electroshock therapy was used each time the smoker pulled on their cigarette. With pads placed on the head and body, the incoming shocks were meant to deter the smoker with increases of voltage each time they chuffed away. After the first few shocks, my father was whimpering and swearing he would forever abstain. Not so my mother, who stared down the poor therapist whose job it was to up the power until the patient relented. She continued to inhale deeply and exhale slowly with a cool gaze fixed on her therapist-now-nemesis while he tentatively increased her shock level each time, desperately trying to gauge the level of electricity it was going to take to break this woman. She didn’t cave, and nor did she give up that day. Dad said the machine started smoking and Ma’s hair was a bit stand-uppy for a while afterwards. He relays this story with obvious admiration for my mother’s very high pain threshold.
Ma and I tried to give up smoking together only once, using hypnotherapy. I was in my 20s and she in her 60s when we went to a swanky spa just outside London. We didn’t ever really go to spas, my mother and I. We’d go somewhere far-flung for Christmas and might have a massage or two but, on the whole, the idea of a full-body MOT never appealed to her. She didn’t want to know. Yet, here we were in Hampshire or Hertfordshire, or wherever-you-please-shire, in white towelling robes to try to give up the fags this time.
This had been mostly my idea. I had just read Simon Gray’s poignant, painful . I booked a “relaxing spa weekend”, including a session of hypnotherapy to help us give up the baccy. I remember sitting outside the room while my mother commenced the treatment that I had just experienced. I was hearing the familiar calming murmurings of the same hypnotherapist, who was explaining to my mother how they were going to “access the subconscious” and “harness the will of her inner self” to “face the fear of not smoking…” But this was suddenly interrupted by my mother, “I take exception to this predictable script! It’s such a ! Rewrite! Rewrite!” I don’t think the therapist even got to the actual therapy bit before my mother exited the treatment centre altogether, me in her wake. We smoked, her defiantly and me defeatedly, all the way home in the car.
There were Sundays when I was home from university after my parents’ divorce, and I would wake up and get straight into the empty side of Ma’s enormous bed. We would turn on the telly, read the newspapers and spend all day smoking, chatting and drinking coffee, her bed a happy bordello of ashtrays and magazine supplements. We did the general knowledge crossword, sudoku and word wheels, all while eating what we felt like and when we felt like it, drinking wine and watching old movies. Black-and-white movies on BBC Two or Channel 4, and anything with Bette Davis or Ava Gardner was a winner, but Gregory Peck was Ma’s catnip – gentlemanly, wise and beautiful.
I remember turning on the telly one such Sunday in a hot August and seeing that Princess Diana had died. We didn’t move all day, stayed in bed in our nighties, weeping and cuddling, glued to the surreal spectacle on the screen. It felt like the first ever rolling news cycle, on and on it went, all day, more and more footage of the car and the Ritz and the underpass, oceans of flowers outside Buckingham Palace. We bought Champagne to drink, to toast the princess and to cheer ourselves up.
Smoking inside these days is as absurd an idea to most of us as having a pee in the middle of your own front room. But this was the 1990s, and in those days we smoked on planes, trains and automobiles. When the government banned smoking inside in 2007, my mother was rehearsing with Mark Gatiss: “A funny and naughty time,” he said. “I remember her sitting on the steps outside the rehearsal room at the Old Vic, smoking away, a hand waving in the direction of rehearsals, she groaned.” A nanny state dictating what she could and couldn’t do was never going to convince my mother to give up, only induce her to do the exact opposite. So, she gave up giving up altogether.
Eventually, after repeated attempts, hypnosis worked on me and my pal nicotine. That and Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. But I’m probably much more pliant and therefore more susceptible to persuasion than my mother ever was. I finally left Allen Carr’s headquarters in Raynes Park for the last time, and as I walked down the stairs from the room in which I had just spent another six hours and £300 learning easy it is to give up smoking, who did I pass on the “We quit the easy way” celebrity wall of fame, but David Schwimmer, Anthony Hopkins and nestled between them, my own darling mother, still a decade away from quitting.
In the end, I think you either have to bore yourself into giving up or scare yourself into giving up. I’d wasted so much time thinking about doing it and feeling guilty when I was doing it, that I bored myself into giving up. It took years. It is boring. I wish I could persuade vaping youths just how and to give up.
I couldn’t really remember my very first cigarette, until one day in my 30s. My mother had just asked me if I had “ever been abused?” We had been listening to a news report and the subject matter had prompted her to turn and ask me this question with a very concerned look.
“I don’t think so,” I said, thinking back through my childhood, when suddenly I remembered, “ There was a nanny when I was about 10 who used to say in her Australian brogue, ‘If you massage my tits with a bit of oil, I’ll let you smoke a Dunhill Light before you go to bed!’”
Ma’s reaction to this tale was an appalled cry, “!” “But it really was all right Mama!” said I placatingly. “No harm done!” And it’s true. I now clearly remembered massaging this woman’s boobs which were, as I recollect, quite hard. As I’m writing about the subject, it makes me wonder: she might just have had her boobs done and the massage was purely medical, or she just liked having her boobs massaged, either way it never felt sexual. I used to massage Ma’s aching back sometimes, she said I was rather good at massaging, and oiling up my nanny’s bosoms didn’t scar me. I still love and celebrate the bosom, but I’m fairly sure that is when I smoked my first ever cigarette.
On the night of Ma’s big stroke, her neighbour Andrew, who was a doctor, met us at Charing Cross Hospital. She had been having little strokes for ages we now realised: she had fainted in the tomatoes in the supermarket in France, and collapsed in the rhododendrons on holiday in Cornwall, but doctors hadn’t yet worked out why.
On this particularly drizzly Saturday night in early 2011, I was on stage when Perfect Paulie (actor Paul Greenhalgh, her friend of 50 years) left me a voice message to say she was in hospital and to come and pick him up on the way. By the time we arrived, the scans were done and it was late. Andrew talked to us gently about the results and what had happened inside her brain. My darling Ma was a bit limp in half her face and she had lost all peripheral vision plus a bit of physical ability on her left side. It was the first time I saw her really scared. Once she saw me from her hospital bed, she wept. We both did.
The first time you see a parent as frail, you can never again be ignorant of what is in the post for them, or for you. We started to allow a shift then, I think, she and I. Certainly, my mother would now let me talk to the doctors and help in making decisions. Andrew learned of the medications she was on for various ailments, plus her HRT, and explained that with all these drugs plus the smoking of a pack a day, it was a minor miracle she hadn’t had a major stroke 20 years before. This made us laugh: the realisation that Ma had been defying the grim reaper on a combination of fags and drugs that would have wiped out a lesser human ages ago tickled us, right in the middle of the emergency ward.
In the end, it was the fags she could do something about, and so she did. Just like that. She had scared herself into stopping in one fell swoop: no self-pity, no whingeing, no offence taken at anyone else’s smoke, anywhere, ever. She was determined not to be an annoying ex-smoker, more of the, “Oh blow it in my direction” kind.
But it was definitely the End of the Smoking Years. She never got righteous, but she never relented in her own determination to quit. If she ever got cancer, she said she would take it up again immediately, but she never did. The day came when the doctor drew the diagram with those three little dots which we would come to know well, right near the top of her lungs, illustrating her cancers, which “were certainly conforming with an ex-smoker’s typical positioning of tumours”.
“You heard him,” she said as we left the clinic. “It definitely wasn’t the kind caused by cigarettes.”
All About My Mother by Rachael Stirling (John Murray, £25) is published on 10 September