Chapter 44 — Stopping Smoking with Lemons

I decided in the new property I was going to stop smoking. You have to remember that I was around the age of thirty-four and had been smoking since the age of nine when Jimmy and I would regularly delve into the big cylindrical bins at the back of the Conservative Club for dog ends, or cigarette stubs as you might call them. All through school I'd smoked, which was not unusual as that was working class culture for ragbags like me.

I did try to give up, but I couldn't and always failed at the attempt. At seventeen, though, we'd gone fishing to the Fens, and thickheads that we are, we didn't know that they were all frozen and Maestro, a greasy biker with one eye, drove us all back to York, and Driglington Pond, where he fell into the pond and went to sleep in his car, and we had to sleep outside. The only thing to keep you warm during that night was Golden Virginia and Old Holborn, and Gaz and I mixed the lot and would ceaselessly draw smoke into our lungs all night just to take the damned chill off.

When Gaz stretched out his leg in the morning, he sliced it along some barbed wire, and he didn't even know what had happened, as his leg had been frozen, until I pointed out the blood. I suffered no such injury, but upon returning home, I had this almighty chill, which whacked me out for a week. It wasn't a case of trying to stop smoking then, it was a case that I physically couldn't, and even when someone else was smoking, I'd burst into what seemed like an interminable fit of coughing. Smoking was duly banned from 255, and that was when I began to run.

I stayed off the cigs for seven and a half years, but addiction never leaves you, and when Bernie and I had gone to Germany, Dortmund, for some festival of chess, I was offered a cigar, which I thought there wasn't any harm in having since I was assured that 'there's no nicotine in one of them.' By the next day, I was back on the cigs. That's all it took: one stupid cigar.

I did manage to stop another time, for two years, and once again I was in Bradford playing chess at the Polish Club over there, and I was offered a cigar and once again assured it was 'okay, as there's no nicotine in one of them.' The following day I was back on the cigs again.

All through University I'd tried to stop, especially when you'd wake in the morning after a night out and had to use the rough side of a matchbox to scrape the yellow residue off your fingers. However many times I tried to stop, I couldn't, and even when my mind was steadfast that it wouldn't buy another packet of cigarettes, the heart was not, and it went and bought them instead.

We'd just broken up for the summer holidays, and I thought the time was now ripe to give the attempt another go. I don't think I'd have managed it, but for a tale I'd remembered about a Mick character when I was working in London many years earlier. He was in his fifties, a chain smoker all his life, and had suffered a couple of heart attacks. He was desperate to give up smoking, and had tried almost everything, but had failed.

During the snack we were having on the back of a truck, an old Irish lad told him to go and buy a bag of lemons, and when he wanted a smoke, to cut half a lemon off, and to chew on that, rind, pips, and all. The following day I had to go to another job in Hackney, and I didn't return to that site. The next year we were on a job, and there appeared Mick, fresh faced, and eyes full of life.

'Whoa, Mick, how ye doing? You look well.'

'Alright, Karl. I still see you're still smoking,' and he pointed to the cigarette in my hand.

'Have you stopped?'

'I haven't had a cig now for over a year,' and he produced a lemon from his jacket and added, 'You remember these,' and he smiled.

I remembered Mick that summer when I was determined to stop, and the first thing I did on the Saturday morning of the holiday was to buy the biggest bag of lemons I could carry on my back on the bike. When the first urge came to smoke, a lemon was duly cut in half as prescribed by the old Irish bloke, and without any ceremony it was placed into the mouth and chewed to a pulp, which I'd go to the garden and discharge over the plants.

I haven't smoked now for nearly twenty years.