A card-carrying Baby-Boomer, I was born and brought up in the fifties, and for the first four years of my life we (Father, Mother, my Baby self) all lived in a bedsit in Ladbroke Grove in London.
I’m pretty sure I could claim Cockney status, but I digress.
Like many people who lived through the war years, my father was a hardened smoker. He was a bit irritable, and no doubt more so if deprived of his fix. Most smokers and ex-smokers will be able to relate to this.
Back then there was a brand of cigarettes called Players (advertising tag-line ‘Players Please’ [geddit?]) and father’s favoured type was Players Navy Cut. These were untipped and full-on. Perhaps the English equivalent of the French Gauloises. There’s a surprisingly full entry for the brand in Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player%27s_Navy_Cut
Two strong memories I have of my early childhood with my father (who left us when I was four) are watching him reading, seriously and intently, cigarette in hand, and also sitting at his feet while he played classical guitar (very wonderfully), wreathed in cigarette smoke.
An important part of both these memories is therefore the powerfully evocative aroma of tobacco. I later fell victim to the same addiction for twenty-odd years (not to Players, obvs) and attribute this to the pleasant association tobacco had with my father in his calmest and most sympathetic moments.
Among the few photos that have survived from that time in my childhood is one of him reading, with cigarette, by the window in our bedsit. I decided to try and draw this in a way that would evoke the mood, and the foggy memory, and to write a few lines to go with the drawing.
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