How my Primary School teacher stopped me from smoking

Seamus was a substitute teacher who taught our class in the last year of primary school. We kind of called him Seamus behind his back because he lived just down the road from us, and that’s what the parents called him.

I remember we’d been doing some lessons about the dangers of smoking. It was the usual stuff – rancid, rotting lungs that had been damaged by years of smoke filling them. Do you remember those specimens? The little microscopic bits of lung that were blackened and corroded? Yuck.

But one morning Seamus took the anti-smoking campaign to an entirely new level – he strutted into the classroom and produced a packet of cigarettes. Making quite a display of the next part, he took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it up. The constant background noise of the classroom died away as everybody realised the teacher was smoking in the class!

His puffing didn’t last long, though. He took a massive inhale of a cigarette, put it down on the desk and from nowhere produced a white handkerchief. He covered his mouth with the handkerchief and exhaled through it. When he held it up for the class to see, the pristine white cloth was now stained a yellowish colour.

The point was, if just one puff of a cigarette could produce such a visible stain, what would be the cumulative effect over 10 or 20 years? And suddenly the question hit me – how long had my parents been smoking for? Since their teens, for sure. Hell, how much damage had they already done?

I distinctly remember that day being the point where I became aware of cigarette smoke. I know that sounds funny to say, but it suddenly started to bug me when they smoked in enclosed spaces like the car or the living room. The sight of an ashtray was enough to thoroughly disgust me. And aside from the odd drag of a herbal cigarette during my university years, I’ve avoided smoking more or less entirely.

The most important part for me was avoiding smoking during the ‘peer pressure’ years. I kind of promised to myself that if I could make it through school without getting hooked (as many of my other friends did), then I’d be happy. And as it turned out, I never did. And I put it all down to that one unorthodox anti-smoking session. Thanks, Seamus.

Photo by eusezio

Halloween story: Collecting junk for the bonfire

It seems the lost art of Halloween bonfire building is actually lost. Aside from officially sanctioned bonfires and fireworks displays, there are very few ad-hoc bonfires being built in neighbourhoods. So today I’m going to play old-timer and recount for you how we built bonfires back in the day.

When I was a child, there were loads of council estates around our town. At Halloween, the kids from each estate would suddenly become viciously territorial about their bonfire. Huge collection campaigns were undertaken, and we’d amass piles and piles of burnable junk in various garages and secret stashes (sheds) all over the estate. Ocassionally, we’d stage raids on neighbouring estates’ stashes and return triumphantly with our trophies – crappy second-hand furniture, old planks and various other rags.

We’d disappear off to the fields and hack low-lying branches off trees – branches and planks were vital parts of the bonfire’s structure. You’d pile them in a pyramid formation to get the height essential for a good flame-up. Then you’d throw everything else around it.

Another essential ingredient of a good bonfire had to be tyres. Lots of tyres. They burned brilliantly and the melting rubber helped everything else to burn so much better. OK, the smoke from them was toxic and the ground would be littered in metal rings the next morning, but it was oh-so-satisfying to watch them burn. Can’t get away with that these days because of environmental concerns, but we can point to a tiny little bit of hole in the Ozone layer and tell our kids “we did that”.

The Tyre Raids!

So, where did you get enough tyres to burn? Well, they came courtesy of local farmers who used them to weigh down plastic sheets that covered their silage. We’d wait until dark and head out to the country to poach some tyres for our bonfire. If you were lucky, you’d get one of the heavy duty tractor or trailer tyres, a much covetted asset. And after a successful sting on a farmyard, you’d gleefully roll the tyres home to join the rest of the stash.

I only did a tyre raid once, and it was a complete disaster. At the point where I was old enough to join the bigger boys from our estate, I went along to steal some tyres from a nearby farmyard. There were four or five of us, and we stealthily made our way up the lane, fields to the left and right of us, and into the yard. We spent a bit of time searching out the biggest tyres for the bonfire, but before we could turn to go, car lights suddently illuminated the entire area.

Shit! The farmer had come by to check up on his property. Clearly this wasn’t the first Halloween he’d been stung for bonfire tyres! And he wasn’t alone – there were a couple of guys with him and none of them looked too happy about our trespassing. This farmer wasn’t one for dialogue. I remember a few angry words before he launched a shovel-sized hand across one boy’s face. I was shocked and trembling at the sudden violence, but was rewarded with a punch to the gut from one of the other guys. I doubled over in agony, completely unprepared for that blow.

No doubt about it, we were about to receive a beating. I don’t know how we co-ordinated or whose idea it was, but all of us sprinted out of the yard and down the lane. Angry voices were behind us and suddenly the roar of an engine starting up frightened us. There was no other choice – a car would catch us in no time. We had to dive into the fields. And that’s what we did – we vaulted the nearest field gate and hid behind the hadges as we inched our way along the edges of the fields, wet and muddy.

The farmer wasn’t going to let it go so easily. I remember the sounds of the engine as they drove slowly down the lane trying to find us. They shone a bright red light into the fields, hoping to get a glimpse of the teenage robbers who were trying to steal their tyres. We kept our heads down when they were near and moved fast whenever the lights moved past.

Eventually, we got close to town and were able to go back onto the road for a while and run back home. We got there, filthy with mud and twigs and of course the story changed from us being a bunch of whimpering kids cuaght red-handed to one of a daring escape from a murderous farmer hell-bent on revenge!

Anyway, I’m sure that we ended up with enough tyres for a decent bonfire. My abiding memory of those fires was the smouldering heap that remained the next morning, and the enormous ring of charred grass that remained throughout the winter as a reminder. The grass would grow back through the spring and summer, only to get singed when the next Halloween came along.

Being Dad: What does it take?

I discovered a terrific thread on Ask Metafilter that asks “What does it take to be a Dad?”

For me, my father spent a lot of time working to make ends meet, but from the hazy childhood memories I do have, we did spend quite a bit of time together.

Having said that, during my teenage years, I strove to be the exact opposite of my father. I hated his smoking and vowed I would never fall into that trap (even now). He worked as a bricklayer and was adamant that I should educate myself and avoid this kind of hard labour.

Back then, he had an occassional bad temper, but he’s mellowed in later years. Unfortunately, I’ve inherited the volatility.

However, I’ll always remember the Saturdays. On Saturday, I used to help out as he cleaned chimneys around the town, talked to old ladies and supped cups of tea. Those were great days…