MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
MR. HUGH DALTON is not Minister of Health ; he is Chan- cellor of the Exchequer. Yet by imposing a terrific tax upon the consumption of tobacco he has done as much as Mr. Aneurin Bevan himself to improve the health of the men, women and children of this country. It will always be a pleasure to me, as a member of the Labour Party, to applaud any action on the part of the Govern- ment which is universally recognised to be both public-spirited and firm ; but My appreciation of Mr. Dalton's tax upon tobacco is enhanced by more personal considerations. Not only may it serve to postpone, for one or even two days, the complete exhaustion of our dollar credits, but it has enabled me, for the first time since 1939, to buy as many cigarettes as I want. Gone are the days when I would pause at the door of a tobacconist, considering which of the alternative methods of• approach was that most likely to meet with success. Should I enter the shop briskly, as a man accustomed to command obedience, as a man to whom cigarettes were but inci- dental in a long life of public service, trusting thereby that the girl at the counter would be cowed and rushed into tendering her packet ? Or should it be pity, rather than terror, that I should strive to inspire ; seeking to convince the girl that, if gratified on this one occasion, I should never dare to ask again ; seeking to move her warm young heart in the guise of a suppliant, with cringing upturned eyes ? Those days of anxious uncertainty are now, thanks to Mr. Dalton, gone ; perhaps they will not return for seven weeks at least ; perhaps they will not return until the great economic gale begins to howl along Downing Street in February next. And mean- while let those of us who belong to the chain gang rejoice that we can now, without either affront or humiliation, buy our cigarettes.
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It is not merely that Mr. Dalton's tobacco tax has made the cigarette shops look and feel quite different. In place of those empty shelves of grained and varnished deal, enlivened only by a few sparse packages from Cyprus, Salonika or Cairo, we have row upon row of every shape and size and blend, we have a happy sense of opulence, of recovery, of reconstruction. Nor is this all. The health and spirits of those who serve in tobacco shops have been notably improved. We have all noticed the curious psychological fact that the salesman or saleswoman who is able to provide what you want is quite a different person from the afflicted creature whose stocks are sold. One would have supposed that the effect would have been quite otherwise. One would have supposed that the man or woman who is obliged by scarcity of stock to refuse the piteous demands of his or her customer would thereby be raised to a higher level of human sympathy and would seek to mitigate the disappointment caused with smiles of comradeship, with glances of condolence, with words of compassion. But not at all. Even the friendliest, even the most intimate, tobacconist will, when un- able to hand one twenty cigarettes or a box of matches, become a sullen hostile force ; his rejection of your humble suggestion will not be couched in terms of amity, but in terms of angered disdain ; one creeps from the shop conscious, not only of being without twenty cigarettes, but of having fallen sharply upon the thorns of life. Yet the same saleswoman who, when her shelves were empty, would bark at one as if one were a stray cat sniffing at her milk- bottle, will today preen and prance as charmingly as any ballet- nymph distributing largesse from a cornucopia. One emerges into the street enriched with forty cigarettes, two boxes of matches, a warm feeling for Mr. Dalton, and the conviction that human nature is after all a lavish thing.
* * * * Then comes the reaction. Is it right that I, who earn a vast income, should spend so much of that income upon smokes ? Is it night that I, who am as sensitive as any man to the dollar position, who knows what inflation means, who loves my country very much indeed, should for the purposes of a self-indulgent habit be lacking in
civic worth ? Mr. Dalton's intention in imposing the tax was not to fill the cigarette shops or to increase my own propensity for this futile vice ; it was to save dollars in order to buy food, machinery and raw materials. In half a day, maybe, I smoke enough to equal a cent of the American loan ; that is a crime to commit. I shall commit no more crimes ; henceforward I shall buy only such tobacco as comes from the Levant ; and when the fbni dark autumn evenings come I shall go further ; I shall cut down my smoking to forty cigarettes a day. Since, when one comes to think of it, this prac- tice of inhaling tobacco is foolish and uncouth. It stains to a brownish yellow the index and forefinger of one's right hand ; it turns the teeth to ebony ; it covers one's books and papers with layers of ash as if they were survivals from Pliny's library at Castella- mare ; and it makes one cough. It is this latter effect which is perhaps the most disquieting. I have been warned by a doctor that if I persist in this practice I shall acquire chronic bronchitis and shall be faced with the alternative of having to winter in Egypt (which I should much enjoy) or dying a wheezy death. Moreover, pro- longed coughing is an affliction to others as well as to oneself. It interrupts conversation and is in itself an ungainly action. An elderly gentlemen coughing does not in any way resemble the putti of Giovanni Bellini ; he resembles old Triton blowing his wreathed horn.
Nor is it in fact very difficult to curtail, or even to abandon, this habit of smoking cigarettes. I myself, in 1940, gave up smoking for a period of four months. It was a strange experience. I had sup- posed that the moments of greatest internal struggle would coincide with the moments at which, in normal life, I most enjoy a smoke. There are those occasions when one stays in a hospitable house and is brought a cup of tea before breakfast ; the cigarette which follows that early bedroom cup of tea is assuredly one of the most pleasurable of all its long line of successors. There is the pipe which comes after breakfast, that stimulating and consoling pipe which convinces one for the moment that the past was beautiful and that the future is an amazing adventure. There is the cigarette which one smokes while seated on the bank after a bathe. There is the familiar move- ment with which one lights another cigarette, when about to read or to listen to something which one knows will be amusing or delightful. There is the final cigarette, when the clangour of the world is hushed, which one lights alone as one prepares to go to bed. Yet, in the four months of my great denial, I did not in fact find that these were the high spots of abnegation ; to my surprise I dis- covered that the period which tortured me most was that which, after twelve hours of abstinence, intervened between my evening meal and midnight. I cannot say, however, that these pangs of denial were very severe ; I did not, as I had been warned, become either nervous or irritable ; I observed an increased sensitiveness in the organs of smell and taste ; I ceased to cough ; and as the days passed my figure, which is not that of a stripling, swelled and swelled and swelled. I entered my phase of self-discipline as a man of ordinary elderly dimensions ; after four months of quiet will power I assumed the spherical shape of Montgolfier's balloon.
But what, at my age, does my figure matter in comparison to Mr. Dalton's dollars ? Nothing at all. I shall therefore make a resolution. On October 1st next I shall cease smoking American tobacco and shall only smoke Empire tobacco. On December rst next I shall cut down my daily allowance of cigarettes to forty cigarettes a day. I ‘:hall maintain unsullied and undiminished my determination not to smoke cigars ; which represent the only form of tobacco which I loathe. Pipe-smoking, I am assured by generous amateurs, never did anybody any harm ; so I need not worry about that. And I shall abandon smoking utterly in 1952, or perhaps 1962, or at any rate before woo.
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