Cigarettes

an Art of dying fragment

Growing up in Sweden and cutting one’s cigarette-smoking teeth in that over-taxed country, one gets quite used to tobacco costing a long arm and a longer leg. And, buying a 20-pack of Prince at the Copenhagen railway station before we boarded for Germany and beyond, I discovered that they were even more expensive in Denmark. A 20-pack (they also came in 10-packs, which does testify to a cost issue) of Prince were about ten Danish kronor at the time, a small fortune for me, as for anyone poor and without income.

That said, one miraculous thing I discovered arriving at Flag, was that cigarettes, which you bought and stocked up on while sailing the wide and beautiful tax-free sea, cost about two dollars a carton. That’s about ten Swedish kronor a carton. A carton.

Once we left Casablanca dry dock and headed west for Madeira, I (who had never bought a carton of cigarettes in my life) now bought two of them huge things — both non-filtered Lucky Strike (which reminded me of our own Swedish John Silver cigarettes, which the ship’s canteen did not carry and had zero plans to carry, no matter what pitch my pleas).

Now a proud and still a little disbelieving owner of two cartons of Luckies, and I hadn’t even spent half of our weekly allowance. This was just too good to be true, but true nonetheless.