According to the company’s advertising, Old Spice has ‘75 years of experience helping guys improve their mansmells with deodorant, antiperspirant and fragrances’. They seem to have forgotten the main advantage of their aftershave. It was the pong of choice for anyone who had taken up smoking.
Once one had finished fagging, it was time to begin with another sort of fags. By the mid-1960s the fact that cigarettes gave you cancer had been pretty well established, though the tobacco companies were doing their best to throw a great deal of dust into the air. Allowed the full run of newspaper and television advertising, they were quite successful in convincing addicts that a product which had turned a very rare cancer into a worldwide epidemic was doing them no harm at all. Some brands even claimed to be doing you good.
Both of my parents were among the many millions of smokers who preferred the blithe deceits of the tobacco firms – my mother’s favourite being ‘cork-filtered’ Craven A from a red packet with a black cat on the front, while my father smoked untipped Senior Service, which came in a white packet illustrated with a three-masted sailing ship, suggesting they were the very essence of a life on the ocean wave and carrying the slogan ‘The Perfection of Cigarette Luxury’. When, at the age of thirteen or so, I stole and smoked some, they tore the back out of my throat. The cigarettes that had been stolen by Neil Saunders, my friend living over the road, from his very exotic mother (she was rumoured to have been divorced) were altogether nicer. During school holidays we would take ourselves off to one of our falling-down outbuildings and stand in the cold, earnestly puffing through cocktail cigarettes in astonishingly coloured papers – black, pink or peppermint green. We thought we were rather cool.
Normal teenagers, whose school day ended in the middle of the afternoon, poured out of the school gates and lit up on the way home. At boarding school there was no such opportunity, so life was a series of escape and evasion manoeuvres which, with a little elaboration, could have been used to good effect in an SAS manual. Since the smoking spots tended to be passed on from one generation of boys to the next they must have become tediously familiar to every member of the staff common room, most of whom sensibly went out of their way to avoid going anywhere near them. Furtive pupils made a point of returning to school reeking of Old Spice and peppermints – two smells which, even after all these years, retain their ability to make me swing along the street trying to look as if I couldn’t possibly have been up to anything. The holidays were another matter. Free of the necessity to strike an attitude before one’s classmates, one only had to smoke when there was a pressing need, like a girl to whom one wanted to look nonchalant and sophisticated. Most of the time you could give your lungs a much-needed rest.
There seemed to be no shortage of holiday jobs to be picked up in order to raise the money for some absurd pair of shoes or a new record. Some of these jobs – for example the couple of weeks I spent as a fifteen-year-old hospital porter, or the two months as a builders’ labourer – positively demanded that one smoked. For the most part, a builders’ labourer mixes cement or carries bricks up and down ladders in a hod, so the bricklayer can lay them uninterruptedly (brickies were paid ‘on the rip’ – i.e. by the number of courses they got down in a day). But as far as I was concerned, the most demanding duties were brewing tea on an open brazier and running down to the bookies with the afternoon bets. This last task in particular required much smoking, as well as rather terrifying feats of memory about whether it was number six in the third at Kelso or number three in the sixth. Work as a hospital porter necessitated a similar familiarity with cigarettes during breaks in the porters’ duty room, but this led to meeting a pretty red-haired nurse whom I took on the 143 bus to the Essoldo cinema in Edgbaston. We were so keen on the back row of the stalls that she didn’t seem to mind sitting through the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night twice in a week. There was much furious smoking on the top deck of the bus on the way home.
Smoking at Malvern College was more problematic. However many mints one chewed or gallons of Old Spice one splashed on one’s face, there remained the question of where to store the numerous packets of fags that a serious habit required. It was rumoured that Rasmussen, a Swedish boy who came to spend a year at the school, had arrived with a tuckbox packed with cartons of cigarettes, bottles of vodka and a gross of condoms, and that the first thing you saw on lifting the lid was a revolver. About the only part of the story that seems plausible is that the contents of his tuckbox were known to the school authorities, since it was accepted as a fact of life that the boiler room in which the tuckboxes were stored was regularly inspected by Scribe, the house tutor, as he pursued his fervent crusade against tobacco.
One was bound to get caught sooner or later. Because the place was largely run by the prefect corps, most punishments were meted out by them. But beatings became progressively rarer as time passed, and the commonest form of punishment was to be ‘dropped lines’, which required you to attend the housemaster’s study, report that you had been sentenced to fifty or a hundred ‘lines’, and be given sheets of special crème-coloured foolscap paper on which the housemaster had signed his name in the top right-hand corner. The prefect then prescribed an essay subject on something like ‘Why no country can exist without a hierarchy’, or ‘Describe the inside of a ping-pong ball’.
Smoking, drinking and making night-time assignations with girls were more serious disciplinary matters, and were generally dealt with by housemasters themselves. I managed to be punished for all three. The carpeting for smoking began with the usual ‘Have you been smoking?’, an accusation I denied. ‘Well let me remind you,’ my housemaster replied, as he blew clouds of smoke from his pipe. ‘On Monday you had three cigarettes, on Tuesday you had two, and on Wednesday you had another two.’ I was toast, and although I had no evidence, I immediately concluded that the study patrols by Scribe, the House Tutor, had included monitoring my not-very-secret stash on a daily basis. The punishment was, if I recall, to be ‘gated’, or not allowed to leave the school grounds, for a few weeks. They soon passed.
Scribe was also the author of my downfall when it came to drinking. The school’s Officer Cadet Corps, which over the decades had produced thousands of soldiers, had been formally renamed the Combined Cadet Force, but was still known as ‘corps’. In the Royal Naval section Wednesday succeeded Wednesday in tying knots, building rope bridges, and occasional expeditions to try to sail decommissioned ‘whalers’ on a muddy stretch of the river Avon. On one of these afternoons I somehow managed to capsize not one but three dinghies while they were still moored to a jetty. By the time I was sixteen I had determined that I wasn’t a sailor at all, but a conscientious objector. I joined the Peace Pledge Union, swearing to renounce war and inviting two splendid old ladies who led the deeply unfashionable organisation to visit the school and take part in a debate on militarism. Some time after that I approached the headmaster and told him that I really could not reconcile Wednesday afternoons with my conscience. Being a wise man, he merely said that I should find something socially useful to do instead. I discovered a nearby school for what were then known as ‘mentally subnormal children’, and went along each Wednesday to help teach them to do things like tying their shoelaces. I rather enjoyed it.
The problem came a year or so later. Field Day was the one weekday each term when there were no lessons, and instead the entire school played soldiers. The special-needs school only wanted me for a few hours, which provided a perfect opportunity to meet my friend Stuart at the Blue Bell pub at lunchtime. Because Stuart was an American citizen at the school on an English-Speaking Union scholarship for a year, he was excused military service. The Blue Bell, like all pubs, was seriously out of bounds, but when the entire school was out on map-reading exercises in the hills, it seemed safe enough to risk a leisurely lunchtime drink. We cycled the couple of miles from school quickly, installed ourselves in the back bar and began our first pints of ale.
Well before we had reached the bottom of our glasses we looked through the hatch into the bar at the front of the pub. There, shiny pate gleaming, was Scribe. At that instant he turned to look through the hatch, fixed our eyes and expostulated ‘Hmm’ in a nasally theatrical fashion. For reasons I have never understood, at that point Stuart and I stood on our chairs, pulled open the casement window, climbed through it into the garden, ran to our bicycles and cycled off, as if it was possible that we hadn’t been seen.
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