My father and the pipes of yesteryear
1972 had dawned in the house my family and I shared with my parents. That night, my father listened to the news before bed. He had seen his last dawn: he died the next day.
Half a century on, I remember him: first as the adult I knew and then, as the father I knew as a child. Of him as an adult, I spoke before a lecture (“Under the waters of Galle” in the “D.T. Devendra Memorial Lecture” series for 1999).
“My talk today is a personal dedication to the first archaeologist in Sri Lanka who appreciated that archaeology under the sea would lead to a fuller understanding of our past.
“He had been a teacher, researcher, writer, school principal, editor, publisher and Buddhist scholar in addition to being an archaeologist. Although he served the Archaeological Department for a scant eight years, from 1948 to 1956, it is as an archaeologist that he is still remembered. He was a self-taught archaeologist, not an academically trained one. Starting as a historian-researcher in the 1920s, he continued researching till his death in 1972.
“We, his children, were the major beneficiaries of his wideranging interests, particularly in the expanding frontiers of knowledge. It is these that we cut our teeth on, in our nightly conversations round the dining table. He believed in taking archaeology along uncharted paths. I vividly recall his happiness at the recruitment of the first man of science, Dr. Rajah de Silva, into the Department, and his excitement over the first scientific test pit dug in the Anuradhapura citadel by Claudio Sestieri, who was Commissioner for a short while.
“He was born in 1901 in the village of Kalegana, Galle, in a modest house, to modest parents who believed in Education as the great liberating influence in this country. After leaving home at the age of 17 to work, he never returned to live in Galle: he was a son of Sri Lanka, not only of Galle. But he painted a vivid picture of his childhood for our children.
My childhood memories go back. My father smoked a pipe. He always had, as far as I can remember. We loved the cosy, tobacco-y smell of him. Absorbed in pipe-cleaning, he threw bits of information, and misinformation, at us. One day it would be about Red Indians smoking the pipe of peace. Another, it would be how Walter Raleigh “lit up” to impress Good Queen Bess and had a bucket of water thrown upon him for his pains. It was a sort of bonding. He did not carry the pipe to school (he was a schoolmaster) and his enjoyment of the pipe was a very domestic luxury.
He had a modest array of pipes, each one with a character. Pipes, he told us, were very personal. They were not to be shared. But, of course, they had to mature, and one of his throwaway stories was that an English gentleman (I think he thought of himself as one, in a kind of way) would buy a good pipe, and give it to the gardener to smoke it till it was “broken in”. Then, only, would he retrieve it; fit another mouthpiece to it and sit back to enjoy a good, seasoned smoke.
A pipe smoker, he said, had more than one pipe. His own modest collection was kept on a pipe rack hung on the wall. There was the straight-stemmed Briar: the “king” of woods. Then there was his Cherry wood pipe that had a silvery, barky, log-like look, with a curved stem and the bottom of the bowl cut at an angle so that it could be set down with the stem up in the air. Father looked a bit like Sherlock Holmes puffing it! Then there was the small, cream-coloured Meerschaum, made from a special kind of German clay, or stone. When it was new, the bowl would be white but, a really well-smoked Meerschaum would be a rich, creamy brown. Father’s was only halfway there, and it had a small bowl as he could not afford a bigger one: there were, some as big as little teapots. These, he said, were smoked by fierce Prussians! This was the stuff of legend: I lapped it all up.
In those days father smoked “Island Pride”, a local tobacco that was the best he could afford. During the world war years, when Kandy became the home to young foreign soldiers, he was often gifted such foreign brands as “Capstan No Name” and became quite addicted to them!
The real drama of “lighting the pipe” began with the bowl being filled with the shredded tobacco. Then it would be tamped down and lit with a match. At one end of the pipe was the lighted match and at the other was the smoker applying suction: as he sucked, the flame of the match would be drawn downwards into the bowl! Magic!
Cleaning the pipe was also a spectator sport for us. First, the charred layer on the inside bowl had to be scraped off. Father had an instrument of sorts for this: after cleaning it he would tap the pipe against the heel of his shoe to get rid of the last bits. Next would come the messy part – unscrewing the mouthpiece and cleaning the stem with his special pipe cleaners. These were long, woolly and pristine white, but became dirty and sticky and smelly after they were used! This was the flip side of pipe-smoking!
Some years passed, a war was ending. Churchill was yet pictured everywhere with his signature cigar but then came General McArthur and I was fascinated by his folksy corncob pipe. I was an inveterate experimenter and I now ventured into making pipes, with inadequate tools, scarce resources and an overriding confidence. Once, just once, I got it all right. Inspiration came from a book, or journal: a large picture and write-up about MacArthur. The next time we ate corn off the cob, I carefully cleaned, washed, and dried the much boiled cob. Next, I set about digging out the woody stem and creating a “bowl” for the tobacco. An old mouthpiece of a pipe was forced through the cob till it reached the “bowl”. A running commentary was kept up so that everybody was aware of my momentous task and finally it was presented to Father. The next day he steeled himself to try it. Presented with a twice-boiled stump of cob, the insides raw, rough and woody and my basilisk eye on him, he gave me a lesson on parenting. Without batting an eyelid he started to smoke it and, after sometime, retired with it to his office room. Later, Mother told me he had found that the pipe gave him a “cool” smoke. I had got it right, first time! I s-t-r-u-t-t-e-d!
(Father would later relate the story to friends, but I never saw the pipe again.)
Some years later, our maternal uncle brought him new pipes from post-war America. This was the time when father’s collection overflowed his old pipe rack.
But the good days were not to last. Something made Mother persuade him to stop smoking. It was tough on him – and us, as he was short-tempered during this “cold turkey” period. He (and we) survived it and the pipes went: first into storage, thence into hiding and, finally, to a kind home far away (where, we do not know).
But I do remember him, and the pipes of yesteryear with affection and, maybe, that’s why I have never smoked one.