Like almost every smoker, I started when I was a child. Children aren’t supposed to smoke; it’s allegedly a part of the adult world, something you get inducted into once you turn eighteen. But everyone knows that the whole industry relies on kids. The younger the better; ideally, you’d go straight from the nipple to the filter tip. For an adult who didn’t already develop the habit, smoking is not a very attractive offer. Would you like to pay something north of a hundred thousand dollars over the course of your brief lifetime, just so you can smell bad, fail to taste your food, have difficulty walking up a gentle hill, and, eventually, die in agony, choking on your own phlegm? Probably not. But for a child this is a pretty good deal. There’s something kids want more than life itself.
Cigarettes are, notoriously, cool, but the coolness isn’t evenly distributed. France has a whole stable of glamorous black-lunged icons: Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, Serge Gainsbourg, Coco Chanel. Americans have James Dean and Kurt Cobain. In Britain, where I grew up, we got Kate Moss, and that was about it. The iconic British smokers are all older, paunchier types, and most of them went for something with a bit more gravitas than a cigarette. Winston Churchill with his cigars; J. R. R. Tolkien with his pipe. These people had something, but it wasn’t cool. There are very few teen-agers desperate to look like Bertrand Russell. Even the cigarette brands are a little grotty. Philosophers have Gauloises and rock stars have Marlboro Reds, but a Benson & Hedges is smoked by a balding man in a carpeted pub, slowly turning his teeth the same color as his pint of warm ale. Today, the most prominent cigarette smoker in British public life is Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party and probably the country’s next Prime Minister. His appeal centers on his persona as an affable, lightly sozzled bloke in a country inn, the kind of person who ends half his sentences with “but of course you’re not allowed to say that anymore.” I don’t know if teen-agers want to be like him, either.
In my case, there wasn’t anyone I was trying to be. I was fourteen, and there was a girl I was trying to impress. So far, my track record had been mixed. Buying a T-shirt that said “SECURITY” in big white letters, on the understanding that it would lend me the masculine aura of a night-club bouncer, had not been a success. Drinking six bottles of a startlingly blue and surprisingly alcoholic liquid called WKD, and then falling over—that one, surprisingly, seemed to work a bit. The cigarette seemed like an obvious next step: proof that I wasn’t just some kid, but a man. Still, it was a tough one to take. When I was much younger, my parents had so thoroughly impressed me with the dangers of smoking that I’d started stealing packs of cigarettes off strangers’ tables at cafés and throwing them into the road. I couldn’t understand why my parents then got upset at me. Even later, once I’d grown up a little, I’d sadly concluded that I would probably never be able to smoke weed, because doing so sometimes involved mixing it with deadly tobacco. But now, at a house party in North London in 2005, I needed to be seen smoking. Doing this was tricky. It was easy enough to ask one of the slightly older guests to bum a cig, but I couldn’t then go over to the girl while puffing away; that would be too obvious. Her eyes would have to alight on me casually smoking in the distance, as if I did it all the time. So I spluttered down my first-ever cigarette, entirely unobserved, and had to go back to the same person again for another, and then, when she kept failing to notice that I was smoking, another one.
