MARGINAL COMMENTS
By SALLY GRAVES
TWO or three days ago, many or us who were taking a night walk through London streets noticed the palpable signs of seasonal ,change.• The wind, fresh and frolicsome in early September, carrying no more 'distinct message to the nose than the mild, tired smell of dusty trees, brought a more sinister warning. Now it was Michaelmas night, and the first fogs had laid cold fingers on our throats. These were no country fogs, no honest exhalations of a soil charged with rich. moisture, but the coarse sulphuric breath of chimneys and factory stacks. Year after year we have been suffocated by our yellow Novembers, and only with intermittent • complaints. But this year, and not for the first time in history either, definite steps are being taken to defend the public from a yearly menace. The National Smoke Abatement Society, meeting last week, has brought out some surprising statistics. The effect of fogs on public health appears to be marked and serious. And their effect upon London architecture seems to have been even more catastrophic. I do not refer to the • sober suit of grime that covers, suitable enough, the business quarters of the City. But fogs brought in red and yellow brick, cast out uneconomical stucco, and condoned the squat warrens of Balham and Camomile Street.
• Not even visiting film-stars, generous in their praise of what seems thoroughly static in London—the police- men and the Houses of Parliament—can find a good word to say for our peculiar winter institution. • But I have met conservatives of the peculiar type that •• London breeds whose civic pride draws an especial contentment from present discomforts. They are still 'aMorous of the raw twilight of the pea-souper, and the -adVenture of walking by instinct within the eireuniference of a few yards. But these are for the most part happy. residents in London's high places, Notting Hill, Campden Hill, and Hampstead. Put them in Middlesbrough, to the windward of Imperial Chethical Industries' new • factory, and they would very soon pipe a different tune. For here whole streets have been evacuated, the workers driven unwillingly out of their houses by the poisonous 'reek of sulphur. Those left behind walk quickly through the streets with handkerchiefs tied round their Mouths and noses. No official communiqué or radio message announced this civil war. 'There was no incident, and, as yet, very little complaint haS been made to a higher authority. No gas-masks have been distributed, although the poisoned air is lying heavily on the 'town.: , A new desolation is being Made, and a new natural element brought into being.
The Manichean cosmology postulated a kingdom of vapours somewhere on the under-side of heaven, a kind of-damp hell populated by malignant ghosts. , Here it is, or will be, in Middlesbrough. An enemy city, .a new type of Fritz Lang Metropolis, perhaps even a Wellsian underworld of sub-human anthropoids, might set itself up unless the society sitting recently in London can play: Prometheus, bring down the price of electricity, or catch the escaping . fumes in some new scientific contraptions The society .has .an honourable ancestry, for John Evelyn temporarily forsook the shrubberies at Sayes Court and the shocking enticements of Whitehall to apply himself conscientiously to the problem of London fogs. The result Of his office-work was not striking but suffi- ciently agreeable. The row of lime trees in St. James' Park is supposed to be the result of his research, but whether he arrived at this solution by scientific deduction, or whether he planted it as a kind of compensation, I cannot discover.
Previous page
