What is it that I remember best about my father?
– The pervasive smell of old tobacco. Blue Gauloises were his favourites for many years, and there was a period when he was burning a couple of packets a day. For a time he had an unsophisticated little aluminium gadget for rolling cigarettes, and I remember using it to roll them for him: it was predictable, and boring. I associate him mainly, however, with hand rolled cigarettes made from rich smelling fresh tobacco, stored precariously in sundry unremarkable looking pouches, and then rolled half heartedly in fine but flimsy white papers (why, I wonder, are cigarettes always dressed in white? wouldn’t they look good in red, or blue, or gold papers?). He was a simple matches man. Pipes? I have three of his, but I can’t remember seeing him use them: perhaps they represent a short lived period? perhaps he used them when away from home? or do I recollect him struggling to light them, and then struggling to keep them going? Maybe the memories diminish the man, do nothing for him, and for that reason have blurred into insignificance. He only rarely smoked and enjoyed a cigar – one of the miniatures. Yes, he smelt strongly of tobacco.
There was continuous guerrilla warfare with my mother on the tobacco issue. My mother would have been concerned for his health, as he had had T.B. and often coughed, but she may have taken exception also to the smell which extended around him and lingered afterwards, clashing with her ‘Bourbon’ and ‘Jacobean’ décor.
As his health deteriorated, he cut back on smoking, reducing it … occasionally … to half a dozen cigarettes a day. I don’t know if my mother had put an embargo on his habit, but I recollect two details. If I was in the garden, I could see my father leaning out of his study window, puffing away, I suppose to stop the telltale smell from alerting my mother’s vigilant nose. And when he died from a stroke to which smoking may have contributed, I found a hoard of butts in his briefcase and another behind his books. I felt sad. He had loved his smokes, but the love was not requited.
* * *
He loved his pint. I remember many a beer at ‘The Roebuck’, by the Market in Oxford, and some at ‘The Trout’, Wolvercote. He would have his beer, I would have my draught cider, and we would talk. He would unwind in a way he did not seem to do at home, with ‘Maggie’ around. He would reminisce matter- of- factly, perhaps a little distantly – thinking I might not remember them, or know them? – about colleagues of long ago in Glasgow and one or two more recent ones in Paris. He would discuss one or two people he knew or had known in Oxford, where he had the fewest of friends. He might get engrossed in some of the poets, novelists, artists, editors and publishers he had known personally, had written about, or had fallen out with. He would often mention his mother affectionately and longingly, and Maggie, and refer to the acrimonious relationship between them. His sister, and his brother in particular, received little and uncomfortable mention. In his last few years when the secret was out, he would talk sadly of Agnes and the daughter they had had, Lalo. When the pint had been downed, he would gather up the shopping for which he had been despatched, and head for the bus and home, perhaps slightly the happier. But he often seemed bothered about the reception he was going to receive.