THE PIPE

For most of the time we were in Burma we were short of cigarettes. Apart from the blokes who got cigarettes sent from home. I never did until more or less towards the last few months of the war. It meant writing in the first place and you were asking someone to do something for you, but towards the end it got a bit desperate if you were a smoker, because your seven cigarettes a day issue didn't last long. You could order them and get them sent on a concession from certain Tobacconist, a lot of fellas used to get them, that kept the blokes going for a while.

It was only towards the end of the war that I wrote to my Mother, to ask if she would send me some cigarettes. They used to arrive in round tins of fifty Players Medium or Senior Service. There'd be about half a dozen tins. Every cigarette was treasured, I remember our seven cigarette issue was five Woodbines and two De-Reske Minors. The latter weren't a popular cigarette, unless you were used to smoking Turkish, because there was Turkish tobacco mixed in them. Blokes in the desert used to call it camel shit I believe; it wasn't a nice smoke.

I have read accounts since, where people have claimed, especially people who have written about the war, not so much those who were in it that there was no shortage of cigarettes or. They imply that cigarettes were no problem because there was the issue of fifty Victory V's cigarettes per week. Well Victory V's were an Indian cigarette. They were given free on top of the normal rations by some Maharajah. I think it was the Maharajah of Mysore. He was that bloody wealthy, that he could afford to give fifty cigarettes a week to all the troops in India. But as I say that only applied to India.

I have also read since about the Burma campaign, I get the impression, from the writers that there was no shortage of cigarettes, but there was, because in the first place Victory V's never got to Burma, not to the place I was anyway. I had to rely on my seven cigarettes a day. The other thing was, true enough in India as most of these writers say, there were plenty of Victory V', because you got your fifty a week and you could buy cigarettes at the canteen. There was no shortage of cigarettes in India if you could afford to buy them. They were cheap enough. That wasn't the problem, it was that the word spread around that the Victory V's cigarettes were bloody rubbish. I suppose because they weren't a recognised brand, like Woodbines, Weights, Senior Service and Players. Personally I found that Victory V's weren't a bad smoke. People had been brain washed and had listened to the nonsense, which was written about them, that made them unpopular. There was plenty of Victory V's in India because so many were thrown away. You could pick them up where blokes had flung them. Blokes would smoke them in desperation, then they would go to the canteen and buy Players Medium or what ever they wanted. But that wasn't the case in Burma, that's what I'm saying, that's what I wanted to correct. This fallacy that we were never short of cigarettes in Burma; we were. That's why blokes used to write home for them, because once you were in Burma you were cut off from your supply. Money wasn't the problem in Burma. Your pay just accumulated because you had nothing to bloody well spend it on.

It was the opposite of India. In barracks in India, everybody was short of money because Army pay was pitifully poor. By the time you got half way through the week, going to the canteen a couple of nights, for just tea and a sandwich, because in the Army you got nothing after teatime. There was no supper. If you wanted a cup of tea or anything, you had of course to pay for it. It was the same with the cigarettes, they were cheap but you paid for them. So most people ran short of money about midweek. The opposite was the case in Burma. The company clerk would come round periodically, he'd say to you, "Do you want any money?" and you'd say, "Go an' piss off," because there was nothing to spend it on. Your money just accumulated all the time. Anyway I'm getting off the tale about cigarettes. The tale I'm telling you about, is the quandary I found myself in with cigarettes.

The tale is, one night in the dark we arrived at a village in Burma. The villagers used to sleep together on long bamboo-slatted beds in wooden huts. I put my hand up on a shelf above a bed and I felt what appeared to be a pipe. I took it outside, it was a pipe! But it was a pipe that somebody had started to make, somebody probably as desperate as me for a smoke. They'd started to fashion this pipe, they'd almost completed it. The stem and bowl were nicely carved, but there were no holes in it. There was no hole in the bowl or through the stem. It was just a solid piece of wood in the shape of a pipe.

You never knew how long you were to stay in a place. You might be off in a couple of hours, it might be minutes or days. I took the chance, the next day I went into the village and found a native, a Burmese. He was in a little shed, he had a windless affair and a drill. It was like a bow and arrow the thing he used. I can't really describe it now, the drill point was attached to a piece of bamboo about a foot long. On this bamboo he wrapped his cord like a shoe lace, it was a right primitive affair. I took my half-finished pipe to him, to see if he could finish it off. He indicated to me that he could do it, but it would take him a few hours. Well I kept going back and watching the progress, it was painful. he got about one eighth of an inch through the stem of the pipe. I went back again and he'd only gone a little further. I thought, "Bloody hell we'll be off before he gets this bloody job done". I had no alternative, I had nothing that I could bore it through with. He sat for hours with this pipe between his toes, going left and right with this windless affair to turn the drill.

After the first day and into the next, I went to see him, 'poor bugger'; he'd finished the job. I was really happy. There was no shortage of tobacco in Burma, because they used to make these large Burmese cheroots. Any village you went in, there was no shortage of tobacco, so what fellas used to do who were desperate for a smoke, they'd either smoke the cheroot which gave me headache, it was that strong the tobacco. The natives used to chop up the tobacco leaves, rap them in corn cob sheaths and smoke them, Burmese women would also smoke them, how they did it I don't know, unless they didn't inhale. Cigarette smokers to get any satisfaction, inhale as I did. Once you started to inhale these bloody things you got a thumping bloody headache.

Well I thought I can smoke the natives tobacco in my pipe, just having a couple of puffs then put it out, because once you had lit a cheroot it was difficult to stub out. I started to smoke this pipe, until one day not long after we were crossing a riverbed. It was a dried up riverbed because it was the dry season. I had a corn, which was throbbing, plus a bloody thumping headaches from smoking this bleedin' pipe, with the rough tobacco.

When we arrived at the other side of the riverbed, we stopped for a halt. I took my boots off to ease my feet. Like a fool I then stuck my foot which had the corn into the sand, which was cool underneath. One of the blisters on my foot had bust, so I got sand in this blister. Well we got the order to move on. We all got up, putting our packs back on. When you put your pack back on it would feel as if you'd never had it off, because you're shoulders would ache that much, that when you took your pack off you get little relief. When you took your pack off you would drop it on the floor, with a 'clunk'. but you didn't feel as if you had taken the bugger off because your shoulders were that stiff from carrying it.

When we got going again down this track, I had the pipe in my mouth. I was marching along with this bloody thumping headache, sore tongue from this bleedin' tobacco, sand in my bloody blister and a throbbing corn. I just took the pipe out of my mouth, flung it as far as I could to my left into some bushes and I thought, "thank Christ for that, that's one bleedin' torment I can do without." Then I thought back on that 'poor bugger', who had spent a day and a half drilling the bloody bowl and stem.

The corn was caused by my first pair of Army boots at the start of the war, just before the war started in fact. It was on the outside of my little toe on my right foot. At the time, the opinion was that if you had a corn you had it for good. That was the opinion of most people. I remember when I used to work for a 'pawnbroker' before the war, women used to come in the shop complaining about their corns. They used to talk about pairing them. Nobody went to a chiropodist in those days, not the working classes at any rate. People used to say that pairing a corn eases it for a while then the corn grows back again. I got the impression that once you had a corn, there was nothing much you could do. By my own experience that was supported, because after I got my corn I just put up with it. It became a fuckin' nuisance, because of course I was doing a lot of marching.

Looking back on it now, it was incredible really, this throbbing bloody corn all the time. It was like having a nagging headache.

© COPYRIGHT RICHARD PATTERSON 2001