The little pipe bowl, without stem, I think is the oldest my Dad owned. On the metal cuff it says K&P Petersons with a hallmark which suggests silver but is in fact nickel - with three nickel-mount markings of Shamrock, Wolf Hound and Round Tower.
It has a burnt smell, not of tobacco but of scorched old wood. It is burred and surprisingly unmarked. This must be one of my Dad's early pipes. He gave up smoking pipe tobacco around the late nineties when even pipe smokers couldn't argue that it's effects were conjecture. It was also because of his grandchildren being born and the second hand smoke evidence.
The laying pipe has the single word "Plumb" on the plastic stem. The stem is still turned to the side showing the position it was left in by him and betraying how he would smoke it at the side of his mouth; so he could speak and continue to puff. This has a wider bowl. I remember this being a quick hit pipe. A little moment pipe - when you need a smoke, but have other things looming. I presume the wider bowl means that the nicotine comes more quickly rather than a long, slow draw. the wood is dull, unpolished by palm.
The pipe on the left is another Petersons with the additional word Kinsale. There is no silver or nickel. The bowl is shiny, but that is the finish and not because of my Dad's large hairy hands. There are dinks, and dents but these are small and only seen when you hold it up to the light. Within the bowl, at the very depths, there are tobacco strands; I tap lightly and a few fall out. My Dad smoked these - the loss is suddenly raw and present. A memory of him with his pocket knife probing and scraping the remnants of a good smoke out before repacking and re-layering then embarking on another, what seemed to my young mind, an almost endless, languid pleasure. The stem is pale and grimy - the tip knarled a little by my Dads false teeth. This click and clamp comes back to me over the sound of my radio five years after he has passed.
The right one has no markings. This has the dullness of greasy hands, dust and time. It too has a bowl of burnt, fossilized tobacco. The stem is faded. This one is the mid-term one, the one most used, the long smoke, one with a deep bowl where great care would be taken. Dads thick fingers would push down the leaves, sometimes while they were alight to really pack them down. I can see him, his eyes on the television, a cup of steaming tea on the coffee table, sitting on the settee watching a movie or sporting event; something he could lose himself in.
When he gave up pipe tobacco, he treated himself to an "occasional cigar" but this was rare. The smell of pipe tobacco or a good quality cigar caught on a street corner or near a pub brings those memories back to me. He would stride across the fields like an organic steam engine, puffing slowly. The pipe would hang at the side of his mouth, gripped by jaw muscles, holding my mothers hand, the dogs loping out into the meadow and returning to check on them while we trailed behind.
How close are those shadows and memories that they can be retrieved with stale tobacco and old pipes.
