Strix
The Accessories of an Addict
ISUPPOSE we all of us have problems in our lives which we recognise as soluble but know that we shall never solve. My problem is what to do with old pipes; my atti- tude to this problem has for many years been feckless and defeatist; and my excuse for writing this article is that this policy of less than laissez-faire has at last produced a dividend.
* * * Four brothers, of whom I was the eldest, were promised a handsome monetary reward if they refrained from smoking until after they had left their public school. (I have an idea that this form of well-intentioned bribery was fairly rife in those days.) Two of us earned, claimed and received the reward; the fragrant weed got the other two.
This early abstinence did me little good. It is true that my consumption of cigarettes has so far worked out at approxi- mately one-fifth of a cigarette a year, and that most of the cigarettes I have smoked were offered, in circumstances in which it would have been difficult to refuse them, by persons of local importance in a remote part of the world. My trouble is that I took to smoking a pipe.
At the beginning of my first term at Oxford my friend R and I marched into the most expensive tobacconist's in the High Street and bought a pipe. We also bought a pound of tobacco—not ordinary tobacco, but a mixture strongly recom- mended by the tobacconist. I think it probable that he also sold us each a pouch, a jar to put the mixture in and a supply of pipe-cleaners, but I cannot remember about this for certain.
We carried this unfamiliar gear back to R's rooms and addressed ourselves to the task of smoking our pipes. Mine was a very short one, in design though not in price resembling the pipes smoked by ghillies, shepherds, roadmen and the like. R's was a more striking affair, with a deciduous, Baker Street stem and a bowl carved in the image of a death's head. At first the mixture proved curiously incombustible, but before long we were puffing away like mad. After a bit R left the room and was sick. I finished my pipe and knocked out the practically white-hot dottle into the fireplace. 'Rather good,' I said in a judicious, off-hand tone. It had been quite horrible.
Since that day 1 have smoked a pipe with an assiduity worthy of a better cause. Pounds of tobacco—kilograms, maunds, poods, Hangs of tobacco have been inexorably reduced to ashes in the immediate vicinity of my nose. Why do I say 'I have smoked a pipe'? A heavy cigarette smoker does not say 'I smoke a cigarette.' I have smoked hundreds and hundreds of pipes. and each one, outliving its usefulness, has presented me with a small problem which I have never come within sight of solving. What does one do with old pipes?
* * * The best people, the crack smokers, do not have this prob- lem. They go on smoking their old pipes, tending them with great care, disinfecting them with whisky and periodically decarbonising them with little patent gadgets. Even when, after several decades, half one side of the bowl has been burnt away, they still sometimes take them down from the rack and light them, if only for the sake of a chance to allude to their longevity.
1 might, perhaps. have joined this elite but for the fact that my teeth were in earlier years extremely sharp. Clenched be- tween these lycanthropic fangs, mouth-pieces proved unequal to the strain. Like the teredo, the ship-worm which bores through even the stoutest wooden hull, I scuttled pipe after pipe; but I worked faster than the teredo, for all the odds were on my side. I was much bigger, and in many respects abler, than this tiny mollusc; and whereas his teeth had to find their way through several feet of teak, mine only had to puncture a thin tube of ebonite, or whatever the stuff is called.
They did it with invariable success, and I came to regard pipes as expendable things, like razor-blades. But time passed, and my teeth grew gradually blunter. When 1 smiled, people were less and less apt to be reminded of Count Dracula or Red Riding Hood's grandmamma; the ebonite held firm. But still my pipes become unsmokable after two or three weeks, and stall do not know what to do with them when this happens.
* * *
This is not the sort of thing that ought to worry a well- adjusted individual, but it does vaguely worry me. There seems to be a certain lack of precedent for these continual discards. is there, in the whole of English literature, a single instance of anyone throwing away a pipe? I think not. Sher- lock Holmes never did it; and, at the end of the last chapter his innumerable successors have always tended (according to their background) to utter a contented sigh and reach for their favourite pipe, to fumble in theii pockets and produce a villainous pipe, or merely to knock out their pipe and say something about a spot of shut-eye. None of them ever throws away a pipe.
Nor (and this is really the trouble) do I. Ospreys leave fish- bones on ledges in the cliffs, thrushes scatter snail-shells on the crazy-paving, Tibetan pilgrims plant prayer-flags on the passes, hikers add a stone to a cairn; I merely leave pipes all over the place. I only smoke one pipe at a time. but when I buy a new one its predecessor is somehow assumed to be still on the active list and is kept ready to hand on a desk or a mantelpiece or in what I believe is properly called the glove- pocket of my car. There, in a fortnight or so, it is joined by its successor. Thus considerable deposits or infestations of pipes come, as the years roll by, into being, and are periodically tidied away into a drawer. There, besides occupying valuable space, they produce a slatternly and dissolute effect, like empty bottles under a tippler's bed.
My house would be little better than a warehouse of used pipes had I not discovered that there is a market for these relics at rural jumble sales, and now I keep a sort of bin from which they can be doled out, a dozen or two at a time, to the devoted ladies who organise these affairs, at which I am told they sell for as much as threepence apiece.
Some of the pipes were on sale at a fete which was opened by Mr. Kenneth More. Mr. More is playing the leading part in a film about the exploits of Group Captain Bader and was, as it happened, in need of several short, battered pipes of the kind which Bader smokes, or used to smoke, in real life. He bought the lot. So a sad story has a happy ending. When the film appears I expect they will put in the usual stuff at the beginning about thanking the Air Ministry and the Royal Air Force for their whole-hearted co-operation, and I suppose it is a bit too much to hope that they will feel obliged to mention the part I played, behind the scenes, in ensuring its success. But at least the dusty gloom surrounding all those discarded briars will be dispelled by a faint ray of reflected glory, and the bad habits of a life-time will have made an unexpected contribution to the cause of art.
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