“There’s a lot of old hunters and grumpy old coots like you who will identify with that, and it sort of lends itself to conjuring up pictures of sprawling round back-woods camp fires and sipping tin mugs of whisky and telling lies long into the night.”
At the time we were, instead, sitting round a large circular table in our favourite Chinese restaurant and trying to finish off the last of the delicious Peking duck and equally tasty roast pork. A great steaming bowl of ‘Godly Vegetables’ (that’s what the menu said, and having had several similar such dishes I don’t doubt their word) and a massive plate of ‘Combination Fried Rice’ had both been mauled with considerable vigour, and the side dipping-dishes of soy, chilli and sweet sauce were heavily depleted. As usual, we had had a superb meal, all at less than $20 a head – and the beagle dog of my learned friend who suggested the column was to find himself in for a treat that evening as well, dining expansively on a wad of succulent left-overs.
As is normal on such occasions, we had been swapping a rich mix of banter, disparaging comment (such as decrepit old journalists are wont to do), insightful observations on the upcoming local body elections, and discussion on a wide and various range of topics that dropped in out of nowhere.
The talk had briefly turned to smoking. Three of us were old lag journos, and we were blessed with the company of a vivacious young woman half our age, twice our mental capacity, and a specialist in media arts. And while the young lady politely listened, us old newshounds waded into the glory of reminiscing on earlier times when journalists habitually wore suits and ties, thrashed massive Remington typewriters using several sheets of carbon paper, sometimes enjoyed two-hour liquid lunches, and smoked 40 and more cigarettes a day. The newsroom invariably huddled urgently under a permanent blue haze and ashtrays were always piled high and mouldering with reeking butts.
By contrast, the young lady had never touched a cigarette in her life, and she and her partner did seriously healthy things such as powering round the Rotorua Mud Run. She was also on a month-long no-wine, no-caffeine gig that secretly shamed the rest of us. We raised our glasses – several times – in salute to her fortitude. She beamed over her glass of green tea.
But the talk persisted on the subject of smoking. All of us old grumpies had participated at some stage of our woebegone lives. It was a sort of rite of passage – join a newsroom as a junior reporter and spend the next few years being yelled at, running coffee for the seniors, and smoking innumerable tailor-made cigarettes.
Then, as we migrated into the mid-grade echelons of journalism, our desks, the coffee, our opinions and the tobacco consumption tended to broaden. Some went into roll-yer-owns, with or without inserted filters; some swapped coffee-and-two for black tea without sugar; some of us opted for Falcon pipes with screw-in interchangeable bowls and little cans of sweet-smelling, pungent tobacco.
I reckoned smoking one of those aluminium-stemmed pipes was about as cool as I could get, and I hung with it for most of 20 years. I loved it. There was the daily ritual of scraping out the dottle and carbon build-up; running a pipe-cleaner through the stem; frequently filling the bowl with fragrant shredded tobacco; lighting, tamping and relighting the brew; and finally getting it smouldering well enough that a serious lung-full of sweet fumes could be sucked in.
For those who have never done this, the enjoyment of all the interlocking pieces of that ritual are impossible to comprehend. To those of us who have been there and done that, there is always the secret, terrible understanding that it would be magic to do it again.
And finally we come to the denouement – “You should write a column about that.”
The conversation had moved through the fragrance of good cigars and on past boyhood Grammar School secretive cigarettes, and further to the ‘fashionable’ flavoured and coloured ladies’ smokes of the early 1960s, and then on to the pipes that were packed and stoked up and ignited by twigs drawn from a campfire high in the mountains of the central North Island.
Such images give themselves over to a reminiscence that is good and strong and filled with youthful exuberance and the indefatigable belief that we knew everything and could do anything. They were wonderful days.
We hauled heavy packs over long and tortuous tracks up on to the Kaimanawa tussock-covered tops, we hunted with a considerable lack of ability, we shot an occasional deer and concocted dubious venison stews, we slept in the clothes we wore all day and after day three we stunk badly, and in the evenings we huddled round our large manuka campfire while frost settled round us, and we drank endless mugs of hot sweet tea thick with condensed milk … and smoked our pipes.
Without doubt, we considered ourselves masters of our universe. The universe above us was massive and extraordinary in that otherwise totally dark night, and the sky was then still lacking in sputniks. We all marvelled at its magnificence, and wondered what else there might be out there. We probably even discussed God, because we were from an age where Sunday-school had been a normal part of the weekend ritual for most families.
Somehow the pipe and the paraphernalia that went with it all became an established part of the required daily equipment one carried in those times, resulting often in the linings of suit coat or sports jacket pockets becoming badly perforated from spilled embers after a lighted pipe had been hastily stuffed away. As well, there was the “changing of the guard” – replacing a heavily-charred-up bowl with a clean one. This involved reaming out the char from the old bowl, smearing the interior with honey, and burying the bowl in the garden with a suitable marker stick. A fortnight later it was dug up, washed out and left on the windowsill to dry until its turn came round again. Always, such bowls tasted sweet as a nut.
But the inevitable happened, at least for me. A doctor one day noticed a small white scaly piece on my lower lip, examined it closely, injected a thin needleful of local anaesthetic into the lip and, using a scalpel, hacked out a pea-sized lump. A fortnight later he called me back to his surgery, and said bluntly: “It’s cancerous. Either you stop smoking or your face will rot off.” I think he was ex-World War Two, where front-line doctors had learned to face facts and deal with them without unnecessary niceties.
I quit, though I still have the pipe and several spare bowls, and for years I promised myself that if I ever got to 75 I’d take it up again and be damned with the consequences. Some time later I unwisely accepted a cigarette while supping a pleasant beer, and then another – and, of course, I was hooked again.
But on the morning of the new millennium, having enjoyed a festive New Year’s Eve, I made a mug of coffee and went out into the sun with my packet of fags, as was the holiday habit, took my first sip of coffee, open the cigarette pack, and then thought Nah! I don’t think I will just now … In fact I think I’ll quit.
I haven’t touched one since, though occasionally I come across my old pipe and the little blue soft-leather tobacco pouch complete with the polished .30-30 Winchester brass cartridge case that I used to tamp the smouldering brew. I can’t throw them out. They’ve travelled too far and too widely with me, and they bring back good, happy memories of frenetic newsrooms and cosy campfires, and even times of that quiet companionable contentment which involves smoking a pipe and reading a good book.
Yet now as 75 looms on my near horizon, I’m less and less inclined to take up my pipe again. Maybe it’s the realisation that the end is not far over that same horizon, and there’s little point in enticing it closer any more quickly than is necessary.
Besides, tobacco is such an horrendous price these days.
Kingsley Field can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz His first volume of these columns was published recently, and he is now working on Volume II.