My mother used to talk about when a distant relative Uncle Wag came to stay during the war (WW2 for her generation). She didn’t talk about the war much, but then Lincoln was itself not hugely affected, receiving just the odd few bombs.

Wag came for a few weeks, I think probably as respite from the blitz in London. He used to sit in the living room smoking his pipe.

The big thing about Uncle Wag was that he was delighted to be able to smoke his pipe in the house. At home in London, he had to smoke outside. If his wife found him smoking inside she would throw the pipe out of the window!

Most people smoked pipes or cigarettes then, but not my mother. The health hazards were unknown or kept quiet. I wonder what the equivalent might be today – I suspect it’s those dreaded pesticides that are sprayed on all our food crops, but I could be proved wrong. They seem to be doing a good job of killing off bees.

The picture is not Uncle Wag, but Bing Crosby,
taken at around that period by Franklin D. Roosevelt,
via Wikimedia Commons