[69] No Shit

Last night I was talking to my 17 year-old grand-daughter. She was bemoaning the fact that her mother – my daughter-in-law – smokes cigarettes. Susan wondered out loud why we adults are so stupid as to risk our health and indeed our lives in the pursuit of such a “filthy and disgusting habit”. I resisted the urge to point out to her that it is not just we older people who smoke, while I wondered what kind of school she attends where none of her peers inhale the dreaded weed. Or perhaps they do it in secret, behind the bicycle sheds – do they still have bicycle sheds in modern day schools? – away from the prying eyes and sensitive noses of non-smokers like Susan, and more urgently, prowling teachers intent on catching them red, or nicotine-stain, handed.

Susan was on a mission as she mocked the world at large for allowing the sale of cigarettes in the first place.

“It’s all about profit and greed,” she said, turning up her little nose as if she had just caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. “Why should the big capitalist tobacco conglomerates care about people’s health when there are millions to be made?”

I began to wonder if she had been reading my weekly copy of Socialist Worker again.

“I understand where you are coming from girl,” I replied in an empathetic tone. “But it isn’t as bad as it used to be. The authorities have done a lot over the years to make smokers feel unwanted and unwelcome in most public places.”

“But it should be banned everywhere. Made totally illegal.”

“Even in the comfort of one’s own home?” I asked, playing devil’s advocate.

“Yes. All smokers should be transported to an island somewhere and left to smoke themselves and each other to death.”

I began to wonder where my grand-daughter was getting all this pent-up anger. As a non-smoker myself, I would not object to a total ban on smoking, but at the same time I realise it would be utterly impractical and unworkable.

“When I was your age, smokers were allowed to smoke anywhere and everywhere.”

“Where exactly?”

“Well, anywhere really. In restaurants. In the cinema. In the theatre.”

“No way.”

“Seriously,” I put my book down and gave her my full attention. “Ask your mum and dad. Believe it or not, people smoked in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“In fact, when you got in to see the doctor, sometimes he was puffing away as he examined you.”

“Now I know you are kidding me.”

“Seriously Susan, there was no restriction on smoking. Very few at least.”

She tilted her head slightly and looked at me for a few moments, deep in thought, rather like an attentive puppy dog.

“What about on an aircraft?”

“Yes, even there,” I confirmed, warming to the subject. “You were allowed to smoke on the plane. Well at least after take-off. When the plane had taken off, the no-smoking light went out and people would instantly light up.”

“But wasn’t it dangerous?”

“Of course it was – looking back. But in those days, as I have said, you could smoke anywhere. It was only through time that society woke up to the dangers of allowing people to smoke anywhere and everywhere.”

“They really smoked in the surgery?”

“Yes they did. In fact, as a teenager I remember my father being rushed to hospital with a hernia. When I went to visit him, patients were smoking in their beds.”

“Bullshit!”

“No shit. In fact, when the doctor came round to look at my father, he examined his stitched wound with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.”

“Oh my God that is so gross.”

“It gets better. When my first son was born – your uncle Tony – your grandmother, God rest her soul, was lying there, legs akimbo, and the midwife delivered the baby with a cigarette in her mouth.”

“Urgh!”

“Several times she had to brush away ash from your grandmother’s thighs.”

“No.”

“When I was at school I had to visit the dentist to have a tooth pulled.”

“No. Don’t tell me.”

“The dentist looked down into my wide open mouth with a burning cigarette hanging from between his lips. The dental nurse stood there with an ashtray which, at his signal, she would place under the cigarette and allow him to drop the ash into it with a clever flick of his tongue. A couple of times I coughed and spluttered as ash fell into my mouth.”

“Oh no. I swear I would have thrown up.”

“It was common for surgeons to perform brain surgery and open-heart surgery with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.”

“Stop it or I really will throw up.”

“Many a patient was sown-up after surgery with cigarette ash, and even the occasional stubbed-out cigarette end still in their bodies.”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear any more . . .”

“Some surgeons believed in cauterising internal bleeding by stubbing their cigarette out on the offending wound.”

Susan ran to the toilet and as I returned to my book, I could hear her retching as her stomach reacted to the images I had implanted in her over-active brain.

“Happened all the time,” I shouted above the sound of more retching.

NB - I do not have a grand-daughter called Susan and I do not have a daughter-in-law. This is purely a work of fiction and I am not the narrator.