East Kilbride taxi driver reveals how heartbroken passenger saved his life by making him quit smoking

A taxi driver has revealed how a heartbroken passenger saved his life by making him give up a two-packet-a-day addiction to smoking.

Niall Walker, 66, of East Kilbride village, had smoked since he was 16 because it looked cool in movies.

“I was chain smoking, so addicted to nicotine that, even if I woke in the middle of the night, I would reach for a cigarette,” he said.

“There wasn’t a picture of me without one.

“When the woman passenger saw my smoking paraphernalia in the car, I made the standard quip that I was trying to stop, then she started crying.”

Angry and heartbroken

Her husband had recently died from lung cancer, years after she pleaded with him to quit smoking.

The driver, a father of four and grandad to another four children, said: “He had died a few months earlier of lung cancer and she was angry and heartbroken because she had warned him for years to stop. Like all smokers, he never thought he would get cancer.”

And, she told the Lanarkshire taxi driver, the diagnosis came just as they retired and were free to enjoy life, holidays and financial freedom after years raising their children.

© Andrew Cawley

Throughout the 14-mile ­journey from Newton Mearns to Knightswood, the woman sobbed inconsolably. Walker said: “She became very upset and described in graphic detail how he sat her and their two grown-up kids down to tell them he had stage-four lung cancer and had months to live.

“Even at the end of his life he insisted on her taking him outside the hospital in a wheelchair with his bottle of oxygen to smoke.”

As the taxi pulled up outside the woman’s home, he says he had a heartbreaking image of his two youngest children, sons aged just nine and 12, and their reaction if he had to tell them he was dying.

“Like many drivers, I have pictures of my children tucked behind the sun visor, and looked at them realising how selfish I was to keep smoking and encourage cancer. I emptied all my smoking gear into a nearby wheelie bin and swore that, if I loved my children, I would quit now.”

He admits he suffered the most brutal year of his life with nicotine cravings. Only the image of his ­children crying kept him away.

He said: “One of the reasons I had not quit was that my mum lived to 90 and had advanced dementia. Bizarrely, I thought dying earlier would spare me that, not knowing smoking can cause dementia.”

‘I owe it her’

He says the woman got into his cab some months later and he told her she had probably saved his life. “I gave her a free journey to Knightswood because I felt I owed it to her, not just because of my life but the thousands I had saved on not buying cigarettes.”

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About one in eight Scots smokes, according to a report by the Scottish Public Health Observatory earlier this year. The same number of expectant mothers are smokers at the time of their first antenatal appointment, it adds.

“Scotland compares favourably to European Union countries in terms of male adult smoking prevalence, but the position in relation to females is less favourable,” the report says.

While, over the past 40 years, smoking in adults has declined across Britain, it has generally been higher in Scotland than in both England and Wales, it continues.

“I had tried giving up some years ago by swapping cigarettes for the occasional cigar but went back to the old favourites,” added Walker. “If you cannot quit for yourself then please do it for your family.”