You gradually gave up smoking in your twenties.
- I was 21 when another Vicar's son invited me to a Pentecostal house meeting where those present layed hands on me, prayed, stamped, shouted, hooted, and hollered over me to stop smoking, with the result that I lost the urge to.
How do explain your clergyman father’s decades of chain smoking?
- He was addicted to nicotine.
You grew up in an environment where most Vicars were addicted to nicotine.
- I began smoking at an early age, 8 or 9. Not regularly to start with.
But you were passively smoking since you were born.
- True. My formative years were a haze of smoke and vicars.
NICOTINE VICARS
Always smoking, as if sipping something sweet, with short breaths.
Cigarettes burning down to butts, long ash still intact, beginning to drupe.
Sometimes breaking off, being caught in a hastily positioned hand, or falling on surfaces below to be swept or blown away.
Tapping on the butt would make long ash drop, ash tray held beneath, its fall to stop.
Time to light another one.
Clerical collar, clergy stipend, cigarettes and safety matches.
God knows if it was holy smoke that hit their flesh, these nicotine vicars, leading liturgies.
They all lit again and again, until lung cancer took them.
