Only Five Leaves Left

Once upon a time, only labourers, style-conscious inverted snobs, and impoverished eccentrics used to roll their own cigarettes. Smoking tobacco was an unremarkable and universal habit – not to smoke was the unusual choice – but the way you did it was a strong marker of social status. The men digging a hole in the road or laying bricks on a building site would be smoking "rollies" along with their ultra-strong and super-sweetened tea; anyone else bought their twenty cigarettes – or, back then in post-War austerity Britain, sometimes just ten – ready-made in a packet. [1] Unless, of course, they smoked cigars or, worse, a pipe: both vile and antisocial habits capable of clearing a room, the pipe strongly associated with (male) teachers and academics. As I have remarked before, to open the door of any teachers' common room at lunchtime before the 1970s was like opening a fire-exit to Hell, allowing a multi-branded fug to billow out in a suffocating, toxic pall.

For everyone, though, from brickie to Oxbridge don, your choice of brand was an early form of consumerist self-expression: I can't think of any other single product stocked in such diversity and with such attention to distinctive packaging as tobacco. Cigarette packets and tobacco tins were little masterpieces of exuberant graphic design and typography, boosted by dubious advertising slogans and tempting collectibles for the young in the shape of cigarette cards. For hand-rollers a two-ounce tin was a permanent, decorative, and air-tight pocket vault in which to keep your half-ounce refills of tobacco, rolling papers, and perhaps even some filters or one of those hammock-style rolling gizmos for the hopelessly cack-handed.

In Britain, the brand Rizla dominated the market for hand-rolling papers. To the extent that – like Hoover or, um, Durex – the brand was synonymous with the product. You asked for a "packet of [colour] Rizlas", where [colour] was your choice of three: red for standard weight papers; green for standard weight papers with two corners cut off to enhance rollability; and blue for a lighter weight of paper, the nimble-fingered sophisticate's choice. There was also an orangey-yellow for the unspeakable liquorice-flavoured variety, although why anyone ever thought those were a good idea is beyond me.

Surprisingly few people seem to have realised that these ubiquitous papers were actually a French product in origin, or had worked out that the attractively typographic name "Rizla" placed alongside a large cross (in heraldic terms, a "cross potent") was, in fact, a play on the name of the manufacturers, Lacroix – la croix being French for "the cross" – who made "rice" papers (riz in French). Thus: Riz Lacroix became Rizla + ... QED.

Things changed with regard to who hand-rolled their cigarettes when higher education was opened up to anyone capable of benefitting from it. In the 1960s, many young people from all social classes found themselves temporarily impoverished as students and discovered the advantages of “rolling your own”. As did those who had adopted the fashionable student lifestyle – studenticals? – often funded by "signing on" for state benefits, which in those days were sufficiently generous to be like living on a very modest trust fund. Without this support for motivated idleness, the creative scene in pre-1980s Britain would have been very different.

Aside from the obvious attraction of economy, there was also the anti-bourgeois cachet that hand-rolling seemed to endow, not least in beery, folk-singing, left-wing circles. Nothing, it seemed, said "boycott apartheid South Africa", or "nuclear disarmament" as much as a badly-made ciggie, plus a duffle coat, a chunky-knit sweater, more pints than was wise or necessary, and a boisterous chorus of “The Wild Rover”. Perhaps to some rolling your own signified the unalienated labour of the artisan, but for most it simply gave a vague sense of solidarity with the hole-diggers and brick-layers. All together now... "I spent all me money on whisky and beer!"

© 1974 Fiona Thompson

Then, as the decade progressed, Reefer Madness took a hold on our impressionable young people. Many youngsters who otherwise would probably never have become smokers – the health hazards of tobacco were well-established by the 1960s – became habitual hand-rollers through a desire to take part in the new “underground” subculture. Or at least the part of it that involved getting pleasantly stoned rather than horribly drunk. Why? Because in cold, rainy Britain, cannabis usually came in the form of solid resin – smuggled into the country in improbable quantities from the Middle East – and this was generally prepared by crumbling it into tobacco contained in an improvised sheet made by sticking three papers together, with a rolled cardboard "roach" stuffed in one end. Part of the top torn off a Rizla packet made a handy roach, so the display of a mutilated packet became a secret handshake between members of the Stoner Community, as we'd probably dignify habitual potheads these days.

Other social changes were reflected in hand-rolling, too; subtly at first, then rather less so. For example, for many years a packet of Rizlas had contained a little printed slip that emerged as you came towards the end of the packet which read "Only 5 leaves left"; a nicely-judged and discreet hint, like a polite cough. It was pleasant to think that the guys digging a hole in the road appreciated and deserved this courtesy. However, towards the middle years of the 1970s this gentle nudge was replaced by the blunt imperative, "Time to buy another packet": it seemed that hand-rollers were now deemed too dense to take a hint, and a little bit of poetry and politesse had gone from the world. Then, worse, Rizla started making "king-size" papers, which was embarrassing, frankly, in its opportunistic knowingness, and rather too much like your parents deciding that jeans were quite comfy to wear, after all, and buying a pair in M&S. (For my rant about jeans, see the post Bar Tacked At Points Of Strain).

With such small straws in the wind the full-on late-capitalist consumer society – in which nothing would be sacred, out of bounds, or incapable of appropriation and exploitation – was heralding its arrival. For many of us born before 1960 there was a distinct “before and after” located somewhere in the 1970s that separated what we might call, in Blakean terms, the years of innocence and those of experience, between the three-paper DIY counterculture of army-surplus greatcoats and charity-shop dresses and the commodified off-the-peg youth fashion trends of the High Street. You might say that so-called "punk" was a doomed attempt to regain that lost innocence. But it was already too late for many: those years of the late 1960s and early 1970s had been a massive creative vortex that threw up so much that was new and wonderful, but which quickly went into reverse and became the plughole down which too many "boomers" vanished, their descent sped by drink, drugs, and a stubborn refusal to play by the new rules.

Which brings me to the sad story of singer-songwriter Nick Drake. The poetic and, as it turned out, prophetic title of his first album Five Leaves Left – laid-back to the point of somnolence – is clearly one those nudging insider references that, if you got it (or, more likely, had it explained to you [2]), meant you could feel you were in with the in-crowd. But his tragically truncated life was a parable of the times: the story of how a sensitive, talented misfit could for a short time shine brightly, but never brightly enough to attract commercial success. Many thousands, like me, will have heard and admired “Time Has Told Me”, his track on the cheap Island Records "sampler" album Nice Enough to Eat, but very few went on to buy the album. Quite apart from anything else, for regular teens in 1969 full-price LP records were far too expensive to be a speculative pocket-money purchase; we still lived in a 7-inch "singles" culture. Then, after a couple more commercial failures – and despite the best efforts of friends, fellow musicians, and his record company – he declined into a paranoid, lonely, and ultimately terminal medicated sulk, dying of an overdose of antidepressants, whether deliberate or accidental, while in retreat back at his parents’ house. Sadly, he didn’t even make it to membership of the 27 Club.

I smoked my last ever roll-up in December 1989 – one of the few New Year's resolutions to endure beyond February – but what better metaphor for the bitter-sweet melancholy of later-life reflection is there than to realise you have lived long enough finally to have drawn the equivalent of that slip reading "only five leaves left"? With any luck there may well still be a fair few good years left for you, if dismayingly fewer than the original full complement, but – contrary to the blunt metaphorical untruth of that later version of the message – there never was and never will be the possibility of buying another packet, not even for those later generations so obsessed by fitness, diet, and "wellbeing". You might think you can identify as immortal but, as another early 70s casualty and full founder member of the 27 Club put it, no one here makes it out alive.

So we more fortunate "olds" who made it through those youthful years relatively unscathed, whether through luck or judgement, had better take the hint, and make the most of whatever is left in our one and only packet of days, striking each off the calendar with a mindful mix of regret and gratitude, and with the occasional glass raised to the "absent friends" who didn't make it this far. And, perhaps, always with a little background buzz of apprehension that the habits and excesses of youth may yet exact a price that was never exactly hidden in the small print of the contracts signed so blithely with various patient demons so very long ago.

© 1974 Fiona Thompson

1. Thereby hangs a tale. On our first (and, in my case, only) trip to the USA in 1980, I was still a hand-rolling smoker. However, for whatever reason, I thought it would be more appropriate to buy regular cigarettes in America, so at the first opportunity I went into a shop and, in the British fashion, asked for “Twenty Marlboro, please!” The guy gave me a quizzical look, disappeared out the back, and came back carrying two bricks of ten Marlboro packets: that is, 400 cigarettes. It seemed no-one had bought cigarettes in tens in living memory in the USA, so specifying the size of packet required was both unnecessary and confusing.

2. This sort of homespun hermeneutical decoding was the essence of playground folklore. I remember that in 68/69 a local Stevenage rock band went by the name Vinegar Tom. It was explained to me by one of my more hip classmates that "vinegar" = "acid" (true enough), and "tom" (Tom Mix) was rhyming slang for "fix" (it's not), so the band's name meant "acid fix", even though nobody ever took a "fix" of LSD (although Google tells me that "acid fix" is now a type of facial care product). So I was duly surprised when I came across this illustration in a book on witchcraft in 1970:

Others had spotted this name, too, most notably playwright Caryl Churchill. You'd imagine there must be some connection to the rather more successful band Vinegar Joe (launchpad of Elkie Brooks and Robert Palmer) but in fact it seems this was the nickname of a WW2 American general. Curiously, "Grizzly Greediguts" (see Familiar No. 4) was still current as a term of abuse in my childhood.