6 weeks
My mother has smoked almost her entire adult life. Truth be told, she was probably smoking before maturity. And my brother and I have been nagging her to give up for as long as we can remember. Not because we claim any moral superiority over her, but because we could see how ill it was making her.
I never asked just how many-a-day the habit was, figuring that knowing numbers wouldn’t reduce my concern any. The daily shopping, -Eddies the grocer, Paddy the butcher - always included a trip to the other Paddy: Paddy the tobacconist. His shop, a relic from the dark ages, seemed perpetually bare, unlit, cold. It was a place where addicts went to purchase their requirements. Why waste time or money on decor? The customers would come regardless.
She gave up smoking once. Perhaps she gave up many times, but this one I remember: It was the longest time. Months, perhaps as much as a year. And then, one evening, whilst cooking dinner for the family, the gas ran out. This was back in the days when you had to put ‘a shilling’ in the meter to keep the flow running, although if I recall correctly, it was actually fifty pee by then.
So, off she trots to the hall, bag of fifty pees in hand, pops a couple in, returns to the kitchen, lights the gas rings on the hob and carrys on cooking.
The tiny cramped kitchen kitchen is soon refilled with the steam of boiling potatoes, the hiss and spit of something frying in a pan, the noise of the Angelus followed by the six O Clock news on the radio (I recall the TV, but that can’t be. If we had fifty pee in the meter, I doubt we had portable TVs in the kitchen; they came much later, I think).
Half an hour later, she realises that she had forgotten to relight the oven, bends down, opens the oven door, and strikes a match.
I can still remember hearing my father’s voice shouting “Don’t-” before the loudest bang I’d ever heard before, and the scariest I’ve heard to this day, exploded in the minute space. I don’t remember a flash - I’m sure, in fact, that there wasn’t one; just the bang, loud and so terrifiyingly threatening.
And then, a surreal silence, broken only by the continuous bubbling of the potatoes on the stove, the popping of whatever’s in the pan, and the absence of my mother, picked bodily up, and flung the length of the kitchen, through the locked kitchen door, and out into the yard.
We gather around her, strangely (for a family who have mad an artform of Hysteria) calm. Her fringe and some of her eyebrows have been singed, and the smell of burning is drifting up from her forehead, and she opens her eyes, focuses on us, realises she’ still alive, and speaks:
“Derek, run ’round Paddy’s and get us trwenty Silk Cut, love.”
Six weeks ago, she quit. Not cold turkey, like that time. There are patches (of differing strengths) involved, a proper timetabe for weaning off of those stickey Nico-replacements, and a willpower I haven’t seen in a long time.
And, this weekend, she was a changed woman. The day didn’t begin with a cough so severe it bent her double. Breakfast was not a tiny red faced woman hacking up violently into a tissue. She went for walks in cold, windy weather, that didn’t leave her struggling for breath. She could talk and walk at the same time.
She was magnificent. Early days yet; today starts the seventh week. But already, the change is wonderful to behold, and the decision, after years of nagging, of tapes and books, of Alan Carr and Paul McKenna, the “I’m ready to stop now” moment is a joy to record.
Here’s to the next six weeks, and the six after that. We’re so very proud of you, mam.