The Fry Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page A

beg, borrow or steal from my mother’s handbag went on cigarettes. As an addiction it was more expensive than Sugar Puffs or sweets and almost as disastrous to teeth, yet wholly more acceptable socially.
    The average tuck shop ciggie brands for poor students were Players Number Six, Embassy, Carlton and Sovereign. If I had enjoyed a win at three-card brag I might lash out on Rothmans, Dunhill or Benson and Hedges, but when I was truly in the funds the tobacco equivalent of the Uley village shop beckoned. My obsession with Oscar Wilde, Baron Corvo and the appealingly poisonous world of late nineteenth-century decadence resulted in a pretentious preference for exotic brands. Sobranie Cocktails, Passing Cloud, Sweet Afton, Carroll’s Major, Fribourg & Treyer and Sullivan Powell Private Stock were the most desirable, especially the last two, which could only be bought from one specialist tobacconist’s shop in all of Norfolk or from their very own premises in London’s Haymarket and Burlington Arcade.
    It was to London that I went when at last I ran awayfrom King’s Lynn. The threatening approach of exams and the probability that I would fail them had combined with a tiresome adolescent ‘I don’t need no education’ attitude, all of which resulted in a cutting and running. Like Dr Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes story, I found myself drawn to Piccadilly, ‘that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained’. Now I had someone else’s credit cards † to keep me in the very choicest brands of cigarette. Perched on a barstool in the American Bar of the Ritz Hotel, I would sip cocktails, puff Sobranies and think myself urbane. Somewhere along the way I had snaffled and kept my grandfather’s old collars and the leather box shaped like a horseshoe in which they were kept. Not only was I a seventeen-year-old trying to look like a compound of Wilde, Coward, Fitzgerald and Firbank, I was a seventeen-year-old in a Gatsby-style suit and starched wing collar smoking coloured cigarettes through an amber cigarette holder. It is extraordinary that I escaped a violent beating.
    What I did not escape was arrest. The police caught up with me in Swindon, and after a night in the cells I found myself banged up in a young offenders institution with the endearingly quaint Cotswold name of Pucklechurch.
    Tobacco, as is well known, is the major currency on the inside. Relative peace, control and stability are achieved within prison walls through structured jobs, but no convict could ever be relied upon to work were it not that the wages of his labour are the only means by which he can buy his snout, his burn, his baccy. He who has the most tobacco has the most status, influence, respect and contentment. This was certainly true in my day, it may all have changed since then.
    You might think that the really smart gaolbird would therefore be a non-smoker or at least have the sense to become one. There are almost none that smart, of course. There are plenty of clever gaolbirds, but very few clever in quite that way. You can almost define a convict as one who lacks precisely the kind of wisdom and self-control necessary to derive long-term advantage from short-term discomfort. This deficiency is what will have turned them to crime in the first place and what will have caused them to be inept enough at it to get caught and captured in the second. To expect a convict to have the strength to give up smoking is to expect a leopard to change his spots, become vegetarian and learn to knit, all on the same day.
    I was a natural criminal because I lacked just that ability to resist temptation or to defer pleasure for one single second. Whatever guard there is on duty in the minds and moral make-ups of the majority had always been absent from his post in my mental barracks. I am thinking of the sentry who mans the barrier between excess and plenty, between right and wrong. ‘That’s enough Sugar