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This is a question Your first cigarette

To be honest, inhaling the fumes from some burning leaves isn't the most natural thing in the world.
Tell us about the first time. Where, when, and who were you trying to show off to?

Or, if you've never tried a cigarette, tell us something interesting on the subject of smoking.

Personally, I've never ever smoked a cigarette. Lung damage from pneumonia put me off.

(, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 18:49)
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United are 2 nil up
There’s a housing estate there now, but back when it was just the haunted house, it was where me and my pal used to hang out. Every day at weekends or holidays, just before first thing in the morning, I’d leave my parents’ cheaply built house on the estate and walk down the road to his house. We’d walk through the building sites, throwing stones at the diggers asleep in the lines drawn ambitiously on the chalk soil of the South of England, down into where the old village was and then up past the Rampant Cat, past the Chase and turn right into the grounds of the Haunted House.

The haunted house was magical in the dew dazed, sleepy coated, sun lit, swallow flighted jaunty, lolling lazed mornings. We’d fight lines of obedient Germans or throw pebbled shaped depth charges at the frogs which dwelt at the slime at the bottom of the old swimming pool. I never was brave enough to enter the house. As sad as yesterday to a boy dreaming of tomorrow, the house was in mourning for itself. Trees hung droopy as Victorian moustaches around its door, windows as broken as the hopes the house had had for the people who had grown up and left it. There was a rumour of a German helmet which was supposedly upstairs in one of the vast, dark, oakpanneld wood wormed , gossamer webbed rooms. But there were rumours of ghosts too. Terrible ghosts. (Years later, in a squat on microdots those ghosts would rouse themselves from my dreams and chase me, screaming into the night, to the bemusement of my then love)

I’d wait outside, fearful, hopping restless from one foot to another, while he went in through the broken window. The house was as quiet as a the memory of a bad memory. I’d try not to count time, feeling the pebble fat and ready in my hand, the smoothness going round and round and drawing warmth from the dirty, nascent lifelines and contours of my palms, feeling how tense my legs were to run away. Hours would pass, then weeks as the sun hung, indulgent and motionless in the sky and after a lifetime, he’d clamber out, proud at my embarrassment and we’d go and check on our stores of sticks which looked like guns. Then the orchard would be the jungle and the lankly nettles which loitered, cocky and acid tounged against the trees would be the japs. We’d fix bayonets and charge.

I probably spent a year at the grounds of that house, certainly loving them more and knowing it better than the last man who had locked the door of that house and left it. Most of the time was either spent imagining enemies, or making plans. We’d dig tunnels incase the Argies kicked off again. We’d build a den and run away. We’d write a book about it all one day.


As the years passed the games changed. The germans became communists, then the Irish, and then we made peace with them all and the sticks which looked like they might be guns lay, unloved and mouldy in their caches.

Hunting ghosts became hunting rabbits with the airgun we had hidden in the nettle valley, then the hunt evolved again- unspoken, unplanned and unstoppable - into a hunt for pornography in the hedges by the road. Then the hunt became the riding of the motorbike he’d bought for £30 (another fortune I’d lent him)

And the village, stealthy, was creeping up on the house. The road we lived on became a street and building sites turned into rows of managerial type houses (each as straight lined and regimented as the imaginary Germans we used to gun down). The tarmac encircled the grounds and the bricks and the mortar were unloaded in a clearing in the orchard. (It took us months to clear that place of nettles, it took them less than a sunny afternoon to tear the whole place down),

“Here look what I got” he said, tugging the packet of Silk Cut out of his pockets. He took a box of matches from the other. A month ago, a lifetime, we’d said how we could set the whole world alight with just one box of Englands’ Glory. Now I watched as his dirty fingers tore the cellophane off and opened the lid. He peeled the tin foil back and rolled it into a ball. I watched as he pressed it into the soft, obliging soil. Then he carefully turned the packet upside down, tapped it soft, turned it back and tugged soft at the cigarette he’d chosen. I watched the long thing cigarette as he tugged it with his thickening fingers. He put it so that the filter was between his thumb and trigger finger, holding the cigarette inside his balled fist. Then I watched it as he put it into his mouth, gripping it cheerful with his lips. He struck the match and I saw the flame of the sulphur then the quick hisss as the paper caught. He drew in a drag, deep and dark and smokily sure. He held it, moving the fag down, away from his face and his new fringe. He exhaled with a sigh and smoke through his nose.

He’d done this before, and for some reason I felt something which made me feel ashamed.

“Here” he said, and handed the cigarette to me. He had his back to the house but I didn’t and I watched the house. I watched it as I lifted the cigarette. I watched it with a feeling that I wouldn’t know had a name if no one had told me about it.

I drew a drag. Everyone said you got sick the first time, but I wasn’t. Not then. Later, much later, but not then.

A very little while later the haunted house was gone and the next time I went that way, years later, by accident on purpose, I sneered at a man in a blue short sleeved polo shirt briskly washing his Mercedes.
(, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:40, Reply)

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