Sally Vincent 

Tell me something I don’t know

Allen Carr is the giving-up-smoking guru, helping millions kick the habit. Sally Vincent has been a dyed-in-the-wool smoker for decades. And then they met...
  
  


We do so want to be better people. Captains of our ships, masters of our fates, striding forth on sturdy legs to pursue the happiness to which we are so richly entitled. We want, what is it? Self-esteem. We want to put our hands on our hearts and say it out loud: I love myself. Because, for one thing, when we do, everyone applauds. Hooray for the self-lover, for he has self-esteem without which he is doomed (unless he happens to be Saddam Hussein, who has it in bucket-loads but is wrong). Meanwhile, for those of us still yearning for betterness, there is the seeking of help. Low self-esteem? Seek help. Don't be proud. Go on the Trisha show, get a counsellor, a makeover, a shrink, a hypnotist, a life coach, a guru; ring 0800 169 0169 (it says here on this packet) and be a better person. It's easy. There are those to be helped and to help - and those to stand on the sidelines, merchandising the commerce between them. We're only human. Some of us, for instance, publish offerings euphemistically known as self-help manuals, making sure the slogans and images upon their covers have all the subtlety and grace of a snake-oil salesman's patter.

It's easy. In the kingdom of the help-seekers, it is the rigorous uniformity that first seduces; we subscribe to the new product because it is exactly like its predecessor and we know the form. We know it will give us a bit of a lift, make things better, and if afterwards we sense a slight sinking feeling, we can always go out and buy another. The same can be said of a cigarette. You know the appeal. In a precarious world, it is comforting to avail yourself of the odd certainty. True, you can get addicted, but hey, you can always transfer the more stubborn, repetitive elements of your mind-set to another place and have it serve another cause; do something more creative with yourself than light the next fag.

When Allen Carr was a little boy at school, he felt the thrill of certainty. One minute he was a 12-year-old ragamuffin with nothing in his head more compelling than the desire to get through the day with the least possible interference from his elders, and the next he was in possession of one of life's most enduring certainties. Six sevens make 42. St Paul was not more deeply affected on the road to Damascus. Not only do six sevens make 42, he realised, but six sevens always had made 42, always will till the end of time, and there is bugger all anyone can do about it. Now this, he thought, was something to hold on to, a mantra for life, a substantial leg-up on the greasy pole of progress, the first block in a philosophy predicated on the glorious assumption of certainty. Small wonder he grew up to smoke 100 a day, then magically metamorphosed into the scourge of the tobacco industry, the great guru of the nicotine-addicted and the bestselling author of the most effective, if naff, self-help books in the business, all of which are annoyingly signatured by his coinage of the rubbish word "easyway", except for the one about losing weight, which is even more infuriatingly trumpeted as "easyweight".

Somehow, although I've been smoking since I was 19, I have managed to hold myself aloof from Allen Carr and his influence until now. I don't know how I managed it, since practically everyone I know is familiar with the magnitude of his reputation and most of them have availed themselves of his services at one time or another. Apparently it's not something you talk about unless heavily pressed. Greta, for instance, says it cost her £1,100 for a four-hour, one-on-one session with Carr, and she won't say any more because it was five years ago and she's still struggling with it. But, yes, she's a non-smoker. David, every time he thinks he needs what he calls a top-up, goes to the group sessions at the house in Raynes Park, south London, where Carr opened his first clinic, now run by his successors. He's convinced there's hypnosis involved, and auto-suggestion. That Carr, he says, he must have studied brainwashing techniques at MI6. It's been three years off the weed now, but he feels he can't be too careful.

Then there's Dominic, who's a bit upper class. He went, he says, to this place in Raynes Park where they sat him in one of those tip-back chairs they have in old people's homes, gave him an ashtray, encouraged him to smoke and then hammered him for three and a half hours about the delusions of nicotine addiction - nothing he didn't know already, of course, just more of it. Dominic reckons he "went off" for a few minutes at the end of the harangue - either hypnotised or bored into some sort of acquiescence - after which he joined the other clients ostentatiously throwing their cigarette packets into a fireplace provided for the purpose. That was five years ago and he hasn't smoked since, but Dominic thinks that's because he'd decided to jack it in before he went and, besides, he can't help noticing that when he's feeling a bit full of himself, he postures in front of a full-length mirror to assure himself what a fine fellow he is and, without his knowledge or consent, his right arm comes up, crooked at the elbow, and his two fingers point skywards, holding an imaginary cigarette. Somewhere inside, Dominic is afraid, his smoker is still alive. He thinks he delegated his responsibility for his smoker to Carr, not that there's anything wrong with delegation, he hastens to add. All busy men must learn to delegate or they'd get nowhere. It's like playing tennis, he says. Why piss about finding people to play with three times a week when you can hire a professional?

I listen to these testimonials with amused cynicism. People believe what they want to believe, I've always known that. If it works for them, jolly good. Credulity is nothing to be ashamed of. And yet I agree with Dominic - I've browsed the Easyway route and there's nothing in it I don't already know. Nicotine is the chosen self-medication of the inconsolable. It is also a hard drug and it tells you lies. Everything you've been led to believe are its properties are the precise opposite of the truth: you think it's an aid to concentration, that you need it to work - but you don't; you think it gives you a lift - actually it pulls you down and you have to have another cigarette to bring yourself up again. It's a dirty little con trick. The key is to see you've been duped. And so on and so forth. Might there be something I don't know? And, if there was, would Mr Carr be so silly as to divulge his secret to the world and have his magic formula stolen and used by some other ruthless practitioner of addiction cracking? I know it all.

I know today's not a good day for giving up - I've got a lot to do and I'm going to a party tonight - so I'll think about it tomorrow. And the next day comes and I haven't got anything to do or anywhere to go - so that's out. I'll need the company, you see. "You're never alone with a Strand" was an advertising slogan in the 1960s - sad man in trilby smokes a fag on Westminster bridge with poignant violins playing. The reason the campaign failed so spectacularly and nobody remembers a brand called Strand is that the copywriter was a non-smoker, an idiot or a tobacco company plant - the message was self-defeatingly non-specific. Smokers are always lonely and they'll smoke anything.

The day after the day with nothing to do, it's too late - nobody would be foolish enough to slam the stable door when the horse has bolted. It's now clear to you that at least one of the diseases promised on the pack have already got a hold.

I've known it all while Carr's clinics have proliferated all over the world and earnest non-smokers have sat down and worked out how many millions (and millions and millions) of inveterate addicts he has saved from their filthy habit. Even the Raynes Park clinic continues to be booked solid for at least three months ahead. As his former clients remarked uniformly but with no rancour, he must be rich as Croesus by now. They wonder if he's still alive...

He is. And he has written another book. It looks like all the others: horrid, crumpled fag packet on the cover, catch-penny title, Packing It In The Easy Way. You wouldn't be caught dead with it at an airport, which is a shame, because it is as fine a piece of social history as I've encountered in many months. It was not what I expected. In fact, I'd say the whole thing was a prime example of serendipity - a word Carr cherishes so much he's made it the name of his Spanish villa. You think you're getting a self-help manual and find you're reading an autobiography. At any event, it tells you more graphically than you'd perhaps like what it was like to be born into the English working class in 1934 and pack it all in so tightly you wind up sunning yourself on the Costa Brava without a care in the world and the full set of John Wayne decorative memorial plates on your study wall.

I read How To Enjoy Flying The Easyway on the plane to Malaga. Since I've never been remotely afraid of flying, I rather enjoyed it. The formula is the same as in all Carr's other exhortations - and like them definitely does not involve hypnotism. He used to be terrified of flying, then he thought about it logically and saw how silly he was, and now he enjoys it - so you can do the same if you think about it his way, and then you, too, can fly off into the wonderful world that is your oyster. I particularly liked it when the pilot had to make a couple of swipes at the airstrip while one of those freaky Mediterranean thunderstorms chucked the plane hither and yon and everybody was sobbing jesus-mary-and-joseph-we're-all-gonna-die-we're-all-gonna-die until we got down, nice and easy, and we all clapped and cheered. I rather hoped Mr Carr would be on the observation deck to see the drama and perhaps have second thoughts, but no such luck. He was standing by the main exit holding a notice board on which someone had written with great clarity and some artistry the word Sally. I don't know when I've been more disarmed. His lovely wife Joyce, who'd been guarding another exit to be on the safe side, came running up and, all smiles, we climbed into a huge, shiny, top-of-the-range Volkswagen and repaired to a seaside restaurant that is so posh it serves your chips in a cocktail glass.

The Carrs are congenial company. He orders a bottle of wine, though neither of them drinks alcohol. Joyce hates the taste and Allen forswore the demon years ago, but they force themselves to please me.

"You'd like us to join you, wouldn't you?" Allen says persuasively, pouring a teaspoonful into Joyce's glass and half-filling his own. He picks up my cigarette packet, with its Smoking Kills legend, turns it over and peruses the subplot on the other side, shakes his head disapprovingly and says he wishes they wouldn't do that. He thinks the government's efforts to save smokers from themselves is seriously misguided. The National Health Service is wasting millions of pounds doling out nicotine patches, each one of which has enough poison in it to kill you if you injected it directly into your veins in one go, when all anyone need do is give him four hours on primetime television and he'd stop the world smoking.

He's up on his hobby horse and galloping merrily along when the coughing fit happened. A real graveyard one. Apparently this happens every two years with unfailing regularity, perhaps a legacy of those 30 years of smoking he's put behind him. A minor chest infection to be bravely borne without benefit of antibiotic drugs but with the occasional delicious swig of Benylin. He doesn't want to undermine his immune system with anything stronger. We have a bit of a fencing match about the colour of his sputum and the difference between bacterial and viral infections, and the efficacy or otherwise of antibiotic therapy, and I must say he seems to be fairly even-handed about the whole thing. "I'll make you a deal," he concludes. "I'll take the antibiotic if you let me stop you smoking." "No deal," I hear my smoker reply. This amuses him enormously. "You're a classic case," he says, his eyes lighting up. "Arms folded over chest, chin out, the typical defensive posture." He looks like a man with something wonderful to look forward to. He misses the hands-on daily tussle with clients so much since his retirement from that aspect of his mission and now God has sent him a smoker.

"We'll see." But it's late and we're having a laugh. His favourite comedian, he says, is Jack Benny. Why? This is Benny on the subject of humour: What makes us laugh? An old lady slips on a banana skin. That's not funny. Meaningful pause, impeccable timing. Then. Unless she's a very, very old lady.

The Carrs have built their dream home up a mountain on the Mijas Costa, a stone's throw from where Ronnie Knight chose to retire from public life. It is a sumptuous affair in the finest Spanish tradition of modern marblings and gildings with chandeliers and figurines galore and a few personal special effects like the clock they bought in Las Vegas featuring two little knickerbockered gilded chappies hammering an anvil every five minutes and doors (gilded) swinging open on the hour and a tune playing. A different tune for each hour. For sheer nostalgia, they have a large oil painting of an idyllic English rustic scene, a hump-back bridge and thatched cottages. This is cunningly spot-lit so that, when the blinds are drawn, the windows of the cottages seem to glow with electric light. "Wouldn't you like to live there?" Allen says, having patiently demonstrated the full effect.

We sit by the Carrs' pool for our interview. All around us are startling views: the sea, mountains, golf courses, what they call crane-trees on the building sites of other lucky British emigrants. "Isn't it funny," Allen says, "how the mountains look like they're made of canvas and paint? Like a film set?" And they do. They really do.

So this is Serendipity; the fortuitous happenstance and one man's life. Joyce gets out the old Breville to toast us cheese and onion sandwiches, and we settle to talk about the whys and wherefores of memory. Allen says it was really strange, embarking on his autobiography, what memories came to him. Everybody should do it, he advises. Ask themselves what they can remember from early childhood. Not necessarily to write it down, but just to understand how they came to be who they are, to see if they can remember the significant turns in their life, all the things that happened that they didn't understand at the time. Once you start, he says, you can't stop, which is really weird because some memories don't make any sense when they come to you. It's as if they choose you, not the other way around.

He can't think why his earliest memory is of himself lying on his father's chest, the roughness of the jacket, the smell, the feel of moving gently up and down with his father's breathing as he slept. It makes no sense. He never really knew his father, not to have an actual conversation with. He was a very private man. But that was the first memory he could drum up. Not even what you'd call an incident. Unlike the one about his sister's splinter, which haunted him for years. He could never forget that, the pain, the screaming and shouting, the enormity of this awful, poisoned thing in her finger and the terrible fear when he had his bath in her water that the splinter would have left her finger and somehow get into his. No great significance, though, he says, not enough to put in his book.

It was the Saturday morning cinema episode that really tells you who he is, he says. He must have been four or five years old when his sister, three years older, came to him with two of her friends and asked him to go with them to the picture show. He said no. Immediately and emphatically. No. And no again. The little girls cajoled and insisted. No. They cajoled and insisted some more. Still no. Then the little girls went off and he waited for them to come back. He really, really wanted to go with them. But they didn't come back. He thought they were bluffing, that any minute they'd be back for him, but they never came. End of story. And that, says Allen Carr, is my character. I simply can't have somebody telling me what to do. I felt coerced, pressurised, urged into doing something I didn't want to do, and then, as soon as the pressure was off, I realised I did want to do it. He says he doesn't know the moral of this story, just that he felt deserted and betrayed, as if they'd made him want something, then ratted on him. Oh, and he'd shot himself in the foot. That, too. But he can't be dominated, you see. It gets him in trouble, but that's the way he is. He can't be a sheep. When he sees a Keep Off The Grass notice, he has to go and put his foot on it. Not out of disrespect for someone's nice lawn, you understand, just that he won't have some unknown person telling him where he can't go.

From early childhood he sensed he was a dominant type. This, he thinks, is because he was male. In the 1930s, girls were shoved aside and boys were regarded as much more important than their sisters. Girls just didn't count. This was his normality. His mother was in a permanent state of depression and anger, continually slapping children round the ear-hole or laying into them with the broom handle. And when she wasn't doing that, she was threatening to put her head in the gas oven. Allen chuckles at the memory. His dad never spoke. He'd go to the pub, where he was regarded as the life and soul of the four-ale bar, then come home the worse for drink with a cigarette in his mouth and sit silently while his wife raged out her rages. And all the mothers and fathers he knew behaved in exactly the same way. All perfectly normal.

It wasn't until he went to the grammar school and met boys whose mothers spoke to them as though they were human beings and went into houses where families actually had conversations that he realised the whole world wasn't patterned on the Carr principle. It came as quite a shock. This makes him laugh a lot, provoking his cough. "I'll just have a drop of this Benylin," he says cheerfully. "You can get hooked on this stuff if you're not careful." He used to be, he confesses. Sometimes even when he didn't have a cough, he'd have a swig of it. It takes him back to the war, when there were no sweets and he'd drink his dad's cough medicine because it was the nearest he could get to his idea of lemonade.

Allen did fairly well at school, but by the age of 15 he was pushing his dad's barrow, helping out with the odd building job. In any case, as any boy knew at the time, there was no point in getting all ambitious because National Service was up-coming and freedom of any choice a million miles away. So he learned to smoke and not cough when he inhaled, enjoyed sports, and discovered the delights of ballroom dancing and dancehalls and girls. Then the RAF took him and made him a drill instructor. You're either a leader or a sheep, he asserts, not that he particularly wanted to be either.

There weren't a great many careers open for the likes of Allen Carr. He chose accountancy, or it chose him, because it was a step up from what his father did and you got to wear a shirt and tie and be in an office. Not that he ever liked it. Still, seven sixes were 42, and it felt like a profession you could trust.

One thing he learned as he went about auditing books for various small, independent companies was that, however badly organised such concerns were, they somehow managed to survive. By now he knew that if you multiply six by seven, you maybe don't have to be an underling all your life. You can do your own thing. So he went out and bought the equipment to damp-proof houses and set up his own company. Easy. Then he started buying old houses, doing them up and selling them. Easier still. And, looking back, the happiest days of his life.

Apart from the smoking. He hated the smoking. Hated himself for it. But he was a gibbering wreck. He couldn't make a move without a fag. Couldn't speak on the phone, walk across the room, couldn't function at all. He tried to stop. He even went to a hypnotist once. That didn't work. He tried his best. He even toyed with the idea of pretending to be hypnotised to spare the hypnotist's blushes; in fact, he thinks a lot of people do precisely that, crack on they're out, announce they've been cured, bark like a dog, whatever seems to be required of them. The only thing that eventually stopped him was six times seven logic, the inescapable truth of the matter, the blindingly obvious comprehension of the massive confidence trick that is nicotine addiction. He was 50 years old when it hit him. He put out his last cigarette and felt this great surge of missionary zeal. He would take the world with him.

I crush out what is not my last cigarette into the snazzy onyx ashtray Joyce has given me. Allen watches with benign indifference. "Tell me something," he says. "Let me ask you this." He makes it sound very inviting. I'm never happier than when telling someone something. "Would you," he went on gently, "put your head in boiling water?" "Er, no?" "Let me ask you this. Would you encourage your child to smoke?" "No, of course not." "Of course not," he responds, as though he's just learned something interesting. "Because you don't smoke because you want to. You don't smoke because you think it's a good idea, something you'd recommend to your nearest and dearest. You don't choose to smoke. You smoke because you were lured into a trap." "I smoke therefore I am," I say wittily, lighting another one. He doesn't flinch. "You wouldn't put your head in boiling water for the pleasure of taking it out again," he goes on, and on, and on. "It's only fear that keeps you going. Fear of being without nicotine. Where's your joie de vivre?" I pretend I haven't heard. "Does someone force you to smoke? Do you know what addiction means?" I turn off my tape recorder but I can still hear him. He's having a high old time and my smoker is getting severely riled.

"When nicotine leaves the body," he goes on evenly, "it creates a feeling of loss and anxiety. It is real and it is physical." Just dry up, I hear myself say. No offence is taken. "It tastes horrible," he ventures. No, it doesn't, snaps my smoker. You might as well say you don't know the difference between a good and a bad cigar. Or that I don't prefer Gauloises to Virginia. "Why acquire a taste?" he asks with sanguine certainty. He said something similar later that day, watching me eat a dish of green olives. "I used to think," he said, "there were two sorts of people: smokers and non-smokers. Now I think it's people who like olives and people who don't like olives." He doesn't like olives. Neither does Joyce. We watched the sun shafting the Mediterranean as I ate the whole dish.

We talked about bowls, and how Allen used to be addicted to golf, then realised he was too old to get any better at it, so he gave it up with immense relief and took up bowls. Joyce says he's the Spanish national champion and he smiles modestly. They enjoy their lives. They really do. They showed me round the old town of Mijas and took an interest in my purchase of saffron. What was I going to do with it? What did it go with? Then they drove me all the way to the airport and waved me off with the Sally noticeboard.

It wasn't until I got into the departure lounge that I realised I hadn't smoked for hours. There were full tin ashtrays on the tables, so I tried to make up for it. I was feeling quite tawdry by the time the flight was called. Tawdry and a bit of a patsy. It was quite a relief to get on the plane. They don't allow smoking there.

· Packing It In The Easy Way, by Allen Carr, is published by Michael Joseph this month, priced £17.99. To order a copy for £15.99 plus p&p, call 0870 066 7979.

 

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