Important to Me by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Author:Pamela Hansford Johnson [Johnson, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447215516
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

18. Kipling’s ‘Natural Theology’

I ate my fill of a whale that died

And stranded after a month at sea …

There is a pain in my inside:

Why have the Gods afflicted me?

It cannot be

I began to smoke cigarettes sporadically, I regret to say, at the age of fourteen: both my father and my mother were very heavy smokers. My grandfather – curious this, from a Victorian papa – liked his girls, in their late teens, to have a cigarette with him. By sixteen, I was well confirmed in the habit, and now I cannot stop any more than can a drug-addict. If I do try to stop, the nicotine level in my blood falls, and I suffer withdrawal symptoms. Frightened nowadays, I go regularly every eight months for a lung X-ray. So far, nothing has shown up on the plates. But in the last year I have developed chronic bronchitis. I could not possibly be stealthy, even if I had a reason to be, because my cough heralds me from the top of the house to the bottom. (Of course, I do not really want to stop: I relish each cigarette from the first in the morning to the last at night.)

Remember, when I started to smoke, no guilt was attached to the habit. There was no fear of lung cancer, because we knew nothing about it. Furthermore, it was even cheap; sixpence for ten, a shilling for twenty.

I hoped my children would not develop the habit, knowing how important this was. Andrew doesn’t smoke at all, and Philip very rarely – perhaps three cigarettes per annum, and then only in circumstances of extreme stress. But Lindsay! I promised her money on her 21st birthday, if she hadn’t smoked by then. She since tells me that the sum was too small. But I don’t believe a sum twenty times larger would have stopped her. She is making a gallant try now to curb the habit.

I have led a singularly sedentary life. Of course, I have spent hours at my desk, or writing on my knee. But I have never had the slightest inclination for exercise. At school, I was remarkably bad at games, though at that time I had, I suppose, a reasonably athletic physique. When it came to picking teams for netball shooting (a detestable game), I was always picked last, and by someone with obvious reluctance to pick me at all, for my team would inevitably lose. I would be shooting on with increasing despair while all the rest had succeeded. I hated gymnastics, and invariably collapsed on to the middle of the vaulting-horse, though by some strange freak, I could climb ropes better than anyone else. Tennis I tolerated, but no more than that. Was I really so inept, or did I want to be? When I won two green ‘gym-stripes’ – for ‘pluck’ because I had volunteered to undergo some particularly frightening performance on the wall-bars for a second time – actually, I was too much of a

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