Poetry reigned when pea-soup descended softly from the air
PALL JOHNSON
In my youth the final week of November was the time when autumn ended, the last dead leaves swept away and the winter fogs began in earnest. Fogs have always interested me because they were the first weather condition invented by man, and the first abolished by him. Fogs are a consequence of dirt, a point grasped by Shakespeare who has his witches in Macbeth 'hover through the fog and filthy air'. His hags were urban horrors, transplanted into the healthy Scotch countryside by the Devil.
My father thought the worst place for fogs was Manchester, where an almost continuous drizzle in Edwardian times made liquid the coal-dirt air. He came back, as a boy, from sailing round the Horn in a three-master, to walk into the Albert Memorial outside Manchester Town Hall in a blind fog and break his nose, which became elegantly Roman in consequence. My mother rated Potteries fogs as the most impenetrable. There was a place at the top end of Tunstall called the Sytch, once a stream-fed valley around which had been concentrated 500 bottle-shaped pot-banks, plus a colliery or two, all belching dense clouds of smoke into the still air at firing-time. The separate plumes joined into one stygian, thick vapour 200ft above the surface, which hovered for days or weeks depending on the weather, being thickened into a soup-like consistency by coal-dust from the heaps, ashes from the spoil-volcanoes, clayand lime-dust from the pits, and a kind of mustardy sweeping from the straw and thistles which were all that remained from the old fields and woods. This poison gas, perhaps the worst kind of pollution Britain ever underwent, even at the depth of the Industrial Revolution, smote you wet on the cheek and dried there, causing 'blackheads', and it forced itself into your lungs like molten lead or pewter, leaving in your aching throat a taste, not indeed of ordinary soup, but of a hell-broth mulligatawny, strong enough to blow the head off a colonel in the Bengal Lancers.
But I loved the fog effects. At night the Sytch glowed with hundreds of dull red fires, which blazed up periodically as fresh coalslack was added, casting multicoloured shadows upwards into the hovering cloud of black, tinting it with indigo and crimson lake, with veins of chrome and lemon, royal purple and episcopal lilac, so that the sky looked like an enormous bruise inflicted by vengeful man on a fleshy giant who had locked his arms around the Earth. The scene was criss-crossed by innumerable private railways, whose goods and shunting engines, called the Prince Albert, the Duke of Cambridge and Ladysmith, set up their own hellfires and ejaculations of white steam quickly turned to charcoal grey, and meandered their way clanking and whistling through labyrinths of signals which peered, red, green and orange, through the dense gloom. Enormous operations were afoot. Invisible men worked and sweated somewhere in the mist, pulling levers, opening furnace doors through which shot serpents and bolts of flame, and everywhere stoking coal in prodigious quantities to keep this vast fireworks display in being and to feed the ravenous fog-banks. To me, this was a panorama of the highest romance, aching for the brush, I have seen nothing like it since, except once in the early Fifties, flying high over London in one of the new Viscounts, when I glimpsed perhaps the last of the great London fogs, not exactly black or brown or green but all three at once, as it stretched from High Wycombe to the Essex marshes, enveloping London like an army blanket, a thousand feet thick and 50 miles long.
It is said that the great fog of 1783 shrouded all western Europe, from Granada to Stockholm, but this must have been caused by volcanic action, like the Krakatoa dustcloud a century later. The truth is, London 'particulars' or coal-fogs were the biggest the world ever saw, lasting from c. 1550 to the 1950s, when the Clean Air Act and smokeless fuel abolished them for ever. Foreigners, especially painters, acknowledged their quality as works of art. They clothed ugliness in strange garments, veiled raw commerce in oriental sub-tones, made rivers and their banks especially into magic waters. Atkinson Grimshaw, who had begun by painting mist in the Lake District, then specialised in moonlight on damp cobbles, finally admitted that 'a dockside in fog' was the most beautiful of subjects. Claude Monet agreed: 'Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is the fog that gives it its magnificent amplitude — its regular and massive blocks become grandiose in that mysterious mantle.' Fog induced Whistler to stay in London, haunt Chelsea and Battersea, first to etch, then to develop his Nocturnes. He worshipped the Thames as Hindus idolise the Ganges, especially on a foggy evening when 'the mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us'.
There was something appealing even about London 'particulars'. Provided you knew your way around, and so had nothing to fear from getting lost, there was sheer poetry in the streets. Fog, like mist in the mountains, magnifies. Everything appeared monumental, even gigantic. You wandered through a John Martin cityscape shrouded in dun-coloured sheets and lit by the occasional sacrificial flares of the street lamps. Men loomed at you like Cyclops, with torches instead of a monstrous eye. Sometimes a mysterious stationary colossus puzzled you, until you realised it was a mere life-sized statue, dripping. Broklingnagian women brushed past with enormous yellow faces. Cars were furred, mechanical brontosauruses, wheezing and spluttering like sickened beasts. There were disturbing optical illusions, with umbrellas looking like the moving wood of Birnam, and roadworks, their warning signs invisible, like the great pit in the Kimberley diamond-field. Gargantuan children let off sparklers like H-bombs, and hotchestnut vendors had braziers which gaped like the portals of Hell, Around these distorted images there was deadly, muffled, often total silence, so footsteps could not be heard, cries were strangled, traffic hushed, and dogs, when they were not cowering in the shadows, barked without a sound emerging.
And how cosy it was to get home to the warmth and safety of the hearth, shining coals — the cause of it all — crackling cheerfully in the grate, a kettle hissing on the hob, the Bakelite radio pouring forth Lilac Time or Richard Tauber singing 'By a Babbling Brook', toasted muffins and currant buns, Co-Op tea, a slice of Fuller's walnut cake to be eaten and John O'London's Weekly to be read. The curtains, relics from the blackout, were thick and closely drawn, but you knew the fog was still there outside, isolating you from the rest of the world and leaving you king of your Betjemanite castle. 0 frabjous joys of the mid-century before the fogs lifted for ever and London was exposed, cleaned up, scrubbed and polished, modernised, round-the-clock service, all you could possibly desire for a flash of plastic, but — somehow — not as welcoming as it used to be when the soup rolled down from the air.
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