I was born nicotine-stained; it's true.


My mother was a nineteen-year-old dancer and had been smoking since the age of ten, when she first went on the stage with a children's troop after the end of World War I. My father had been given a classical education in a prestigious Catholic college in England, to find himself with a wife and no skills whatsoever to make a living (his family had disowned him when he announced to them his marriage to an eighteen-year-old chorus girl).


What to do? M...


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