It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

it started in a cupboard
smoking? Is spelling out the risks enough or will smokers just ignore
the mountainous accretion of evidence that it’s bad for them? At what
point do you give up on efforts to try to persuade them – or should
you? What, in short, works? And would it have worked for Dad?
That’s one of the biggest ‘what if’ questions in my life – and if anything,
it has grown even bigger in my mind as I have grown older. As
the years have gone by, I actually miss my father more and more. I
think of the joy my wife Ann and I have found watching our grandchildren
Grace and Brodie grow up. I know he would have felt that
same delight in our own children – Andrew, Lynn and Susan.
My father had died only a year after the first definitive evidence of
the link between smoking and lung cancer emerged. 3 Smoking was
not only socially acceptable, but, hard as it is to understand now, the
first government information campaigns actually encouraged it. In
1917, the Pipes and Tobacco League sent tobacco to soldiers and sailors
on the frontline, arguing that it was good for their health as well
as for morale. Six million men who served in the First World War
were introduced to smoking when they joined up, and free tobacco
only encouraged their addiction. Such attitudes carried on into the
Second World War public health education too: a wartime ‘Blood donors
wanted’ poster featured an injured soldier being tended by his
comrades while contentedly drawing on a cigarette. The 1947 Budget
even went so far as issuing pensioners with tobacco vouchers to offset
tax increases. 4
Back then, of course, I knew nothing about any of this, or that
this was one of the main directions my life would take. I was just a
nine-year-old boy shattered by grief. I now have close on 70 years
of hindsight, and I occasionally think of how easy it would be for
that nine-year-old boy’s world to collapse. But it didn’t. We were surrounded,
I can now see, by love. It was there in my primary school
teachers (Miss Bissell and Miss McKellar), despite having classes of
50-plus to contend with, taking the time to encourage me. I knew they
cared. When school ended on my first day back, one of them came to
me, bent down and did up the buttons of my coat. She’d never done
that before – no teacher had – but as she did, I saw tears welling in her
eyes.
And it wasn’t just her. In searching through my archives, I came
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