In the mid-1970s I was in the fourth year of an all-boys grammar school in Essex. It was a good school with a good local reputation, and my group of three friends and I were well-behaved and quite bright academically. At that age, with cigarette and tobacco adverts all around, we became attracted to the idea of trying smoking for ourselves. Of course, we were too young to legally buy cigarettes. However, in those days almost every newsagent had a vending machine outside their premises where you could buy small packets of cigarettes just by inserting the correct coinage, thus
