In the same week, mentally retarded, aristocratic Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron announced a ban on green energy. Despite the island of Britain having limitless free natural power available from the seas and winds, the Tories are bowing to a small rump of equally low IQ NIMBYs (not in my back yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) who are mummified on the Tory back-benches in the House of Commons and The House of Lords, who don't like the look of Wind Turbines on land or sea and so thoughtlessly spurn all green energy. They prefer that the hoi-polloi, the plebians, the great unwashed Subjects of The Crown, accommodate massive and filthy coal and gas burners, in their postage stamp sized back yards. Or face the perils of immense, ugly nuclear power plants that slowly kill their smelly untutored unemployable children with hidden slow burn cancers. Or all subsist without electricity.
But - perhaps the modern citizen doth protest too much. I and others are old enough to remember real smog; the Victorian smogs that cloaked the crimes of Jack The Ripper and annually killed off tens of thousands of weaklings right up the Clean Air Act in 1956. That was an anthropogenically caused (man-made) "natural phenomenon" that, when we tired of digging graves and funerals, we quickly fixed by banning the burning of coal. As we similarly could do to limit Global Warming. Any road up - here is some real smog, that emanated from the dark satanic mills and back-to-back hovels that once made Manchester, England, the wealthiest city on Earth.
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CHAPTER
TEN – Smog and Vertigo
The
impenetrable winter smog that fell in the dark early evenings was
very exciting.
We
had all managed to get home safely through the streets without being
able to see our hands held up in front of our faces. Long woolly,
double knitted scarves, in red and white bands, were inverted to make
head hugging balaclavas at one end, with the other end wrapped
several times and tightly round mouths and noses for warmth and air
filters, the end being tucked into the neck of a tightly buttoned
gabardine. Sound was deadened before it could travel even a few
feet. Lampposts served as reliable landmarks in an otherwise
featureless dark sea of cloud and chemicals. We could taste the
bitter soot, from countless coal burning chimneys, in the wet cold
soup as it clung to our clothes, making everything filthy and clammy
to touch. The mile or so walk from school in that impenetrable
darkness was hugely exciting - hand over hand along suddenly
unfamiliar garden walls - navigating across streets that mysteriously
seemed ten times wider than in daylight, with no landmarks nor even
sounds to guide us to the safety of a pavement.
The
school had disgorged a hundred and fifty or so, five to eleven year
old children alone into that dark oily smog to make their way home as
best they could. They were wrapped mostly in dark navy gabardines,
swathed in those popular double wool scarves, most with blue hands
and fingers but some boasting woollen or even fabulous fur backed
gloves, with one or two deeply envied boys sporting leather
gauntlets. Most wore black lace-up shoes, some crept stealthily like
Red-Indians in white or black summer cotton pumps or swaggered along
in swashbuckling wellies with the white cotton interiors folded down
to the ankles. At the school gates they dispersed into the gloom to
go their separate ways, disappearing in seconds from each other and
from the world. Little groups trailed together along silent and
cloaked suburban roads, guessing at the direction. At each junction
the groups divided and smaller parties groped along walls and
pavements towards, they hoped, their homes, reassured briefly by a
sudden lamppost looming by a recognisable wall before blindly
creeping another fifty yards to where they hoped the next light would
be found. The lampposts always surprised the fumbling travellers,
leaping into view just six inches from their frozen noses, casting a
feeble yellow or blue glow on the slowly stirring smog, but failing
to illuminate the ground. Our breathing made the improvised woollen
masks wet, but it was more comfortable to keep the warm poultice of
the scarf hugging the mouth and nose than to pull it aside and suck
in the cold, cloying blanket of filthy fog. No cars or buses
threatened the slow crossing of streets. No anxious parents appeared
out of the blackness, waving torches and proffering comfort and
guidance. No one came and no one was expected. The children managed
the journey alone and hugely enjoyed their small adventure.
I
made it back to Birch House and crept around the garden in that pitch
darkness for a time, enjoying the privacy and silence, before hunger
and cold drove me into that brooding construction.
At
that time of year it was dark by four-thirty and in that weather all
honest people were in their homes by six. Even Father had made it
back from Manchester, full of brief bluff comments, thrown out to his
personal, private watchers in the high dark corners of the kitchen,
which left no doubt as to his manly skills and courage, a foretaste
of his amazing rallying and racing skills yet to come, in cleaving
his way instinctively through the smog while lesser mortals abandoned
their cars and fumbled their way along the miles of impossibly dark,
muffled pavements.
The
smog even seeped into the kitchen, making the light dimmer and
casting an imperceptible shadow over the table. The coal fire warmed
the room, adding its slow exhaust of smoke, carbon, tar and sulphur
to the overburdened atmosphere, burning slowly and dully in the grate
as the smog pressed down the chimney and choked the draught that the
fire needed. By now Julie had been born, though she was too young to
be up at the table for tea. The rest of us sat at the kitchen table,
including Father, still happy with memories of our adventures
outside, and we waited in unaccustomed quiet while Mother heaved and
juggled with pans full of potatoes and piles of plates in the cold
condensation of the scullery. The meal was sausages, fried eggs and
mashed potatoes; a firm favourite, which ensured that not a scrap
would be left.
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