My mother was a consistent, unrepentant, cigarette smoker.
What she smoked when she first took it up, I don’t know.
Could have been my grandfather’s Havelock.
When I was a teenager she smoked Marlboro Reds.
They were what I stole from her and smoked weekdays at 3.45pm, leaning on the kitchen sink in my school uniform, blowing smoke out through the window.
Next she took up Winfield Red.
I was buying my own Alpine Lights by then, so no need for thieving.
The last brand I remember her smoking were Longbeach 40’s.
Lights, with only 1mg of tar.
She was smoking them around the time my father died and, Jetlagged, I’d sit outside on my brothers patio, cutting the filters off and smoking them when I ran out of my Marlboro Reds.
'I hope you give up smoking, Mum,' I said, condescendingly, arrogantly, a few days after my Dad's funeral, 'I don't like the thought of having 2 dead parents.'
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