By Mark Butler
“YOU’LL smoke and drink and wear sandals, grow a beard and be a beatnik, you won’t believe in marriage and you’ll bring your children up the same way …”
So my mother, wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke, often predicted during one of her monologues across the yellow laminex tabletop in the kitchen of our fibro housing commission home in Narraweena, one of the less salubrious new suburbs that had sprung up on Sydney’s otherwise prosperous and aspiringly middle-class Warringah peninsula in the 1960s.
We had been moved there from Crows Nest, which sits on the ridge above North Sydney, by the state government in 1964 to make way for the Warringah Expressway, which was subsequently laid down on the land where our semi-detached rented brick house and many others like it had stood, just down from St Thomas’s cemetery, last stop on the road for many North Shore nabobs, which had been spared..
Until I left home at 19, we spent a lot of time at that table, her with a pot of tea and her cigarettes, or fags as she called them, and maybe some rum cake or a packet of Arnott’s Assorted Cream biscuits between us, and her doing most of the talking. And could she talk. She used to tell others I had the gift of the gab, but the gift was truly hers.
I learnt a lot sitting across from her at that table. How much of what she told me was true I will never know.
One thing was apparent: she had a lot of score settling to do, particularly with my father, the great betrayer, who had walked out on her and their three children when I was five for a woman 15 years his junior and had since remarried, moved to Brisbane and had another son, whom we had never met; all we knew of him was his name. Worst of all, the bastard went on to win the Golden Casket Lottery, a prize of $100,000, and she didn’t get one cent out of him, despite all the unpaid alimony. That rankled, that was a raw wound, further proof of a malevolent universe, out to get her.
As we sat inspecting her grievances at that table, she wanted me to know just how badly she had been let down, and by whom. It turned out to be a very long list. But her monologues weren’t always an exercise in distilling bitterness, because she also had an ear for dialogue and an eye for a good story. She could be very funny too, and I enjoyed making her laugh, just to hear it roll out of her.
As she talked, she smoked. My mother and cigarettes are inseparable in my mind. An indelible image I have retained is of her standing by the ironing board on a Sunday afternoon, television set blaring, as she methodically irons every article of washing, her cigarette burning into a grey cylinder in the ashtray, smoked only once or twice, which is soon followed by another one.
She was never without them, and smoked until the day she died, even though her advanced motor-neurone disease meant she could barely hold one, or inhale. But she had the last laugh on those who told her the fags would kill her, because the MND got her in the end: once it made smoking physically impossible, she just turned her face to the wall and waited for the old person’s friend, pneumonia, to come and take her away.
She was a committed Benson & Hedges smoker, as much entranced by the golden pack as by the seductive televisual urging of Stuart Wagstaff, whose smarmy and very camp “When only the best will do …” ads portrayed smoking as a sophisticated activity undertaken by only the finest people. That message was aimed at women and it certainly touched something in Mum, for her low-rent Ardarth and Craven A cork-tips were supplanted soon after that campaign started by the flip-top promise of B&H.
With the cigarettes came a fierce, hacking cough that could go on for what seemed like hours when she was in bed. Some nights my brother and I would lie awake listening to her cough, wondering if she would die. Then she’d stop and resume her elephantine snoring, and we’d wonder if that was going to kill her.
I had been secretly smoking cigarettes (mainly stolen from Mum’s packets; she bought them by the carton) since I was nine but didn’t really inhale until I was 11 or 12. Being such a young smoker was not unusual: my older brother and many of our friends also smoked: hell, nearly everyone did. Wherever you went the odds were that you would be served by someone who had a cigarette stuck between their fingers or hanging from their lips or languidly burning in an ashtray nearby.
People on TV and in movies, books and magazines, smoked. Even patients, doctors and nurses in hospitals smoked. The armed services handed cigarettes out to servicemen as part of their rations. Sometimes it seemed that every room outside school was hazed with that blue, toxic cloud. And teachers used to stink of it after lunch.
Most crucially from the perspective of a child interested in exploring the pleasures of nicotine, there were always packets of cigarettes left unattended, on tables, on chairs, sideboards or coffee tables, especially when adults were socialising. During a quick tour of a house during a family Christmas or birthday party clever little fingers could purloin a fistful of cigarettes of all brands.
I grew up in a world where so many people smoked that non-smokers were seen as killjoys or eccentrics, whereas the reverse applies today, thanks to one of the most successful examples of social engineering in history: in the early 1970s smoking was agreed to be a killer that should be discouraged, and to that end advertising of tobacco products was axed and the gradual ring-fencing began of smokers into ever-shrinking areas of public spaces where they can indulge their addiction. The habit was beaten with disgust.
I recall that when one of our Ourimbah Rd neighbours gave my mother a rant over the back fence one day about how smoking had caused his cancer and taken one of his lungs, and urged her to give up, she considered this to be very bad form. A rechabite, she called him contemptuously, and avoided him thereafter. Rechabite was her alternative to wowser, and referred to the Independent Order of Rechabites, a temperance group prominent in Sydney in the 1890s. As her maternal grandfather had been the publican of The Oaks Hotel in Neutral Bay at that time, my guess is she picked the term up from her mother: it’s unlikely that rechabites were ever referred to charitably in The Oaks on either side of the bar.
By the time I was 15 I was furtively smoking mainly Peter Stuyvesent (“Your passport to international smoking pleasure”), because you could buy them in a soft 12-pack for the price of 10 (an early example of marketing to children: not that anyone cared about that, all you had to say was that the cigarettes were for your mother and the shopkeeper would happily hand them over).
It still amazes me that my brother and I thought our parents and others didn’t know we were smoking. For a start, the smell, in a residence as small as our cottage in Crows Nest, and on us, must have been a deadset giveaway, as were all the butts littering the side passage outside our bedroom where we had tossed them, and which we tried to blame on our very numerous Catholic neighbours, most of whom also smoked.
Mum knew, but never called me on it: indeed, it wasn’t until my non-smoking elder sister busted me one Saturday afternoon when I was about 14 having a quiet puff (Rothmans, I believe) in the lounge room post-football that it became an issue. My two years older brother had already, and mysteriously, passed on to full smoking status and Mum, more tired than angry, went through the motions of bawling me out but, as she was a fellow addict, it was just a matter of time before she took pity on me.
Just after my 15th birthday, at the start of what was going to be a 16-hour car journey to Brisbane with her, my sister and her fiancé, Mum turned to me, smiled, and said, “Gee, it’s going to be a long drive for you without a fag,” flipped open her golden pack, offered me one of hers, took one for herself, flicked her gilded lighter into life and lit me. And it was done. I was no longer a child.
As for her predictions, Mum knew her youngest, favoured son well, for the general thrust of them came true, although I became a hippie, not a beatnik, and I did marry, but only after having two children.
As for smoking, after several bouts of abstinence, one of which had lasted several years, I inhaled my last cigarette in Rockhampton, at my brother’s funeral in 2006: he had died of lung cancer, 30 years after quitting.