One wouldn’t normally associate a book on pipes and pipe-smoking with deceit, guilt and posterior discomfort. This is how it happened. It was 1964. I was a scholastically challenged 14-year-old from north London who had just undergone double maths. Still dazed, I’d wandered off to the back of the bike sheds where I came across Howard Payne and his cronies furtively dispatching a packet of Gauloises.