 Ghosts of the Fog
Read H.V.Morton's biography
St Paul's Cathedral seen
through the smoggy haze of a 1920s afternoon. |
Men are
like flat figures cut in black paper. All things become two-dimensional.
Carts, motor-cars, omnibuses are shadows that nose their way painfully
like blind beasts. The fog has a flavour. Many flavours. At Marble
Arch I meet a delicate after-taste like melon; at Ludgate Hill I taste
coke.
Everywhere
the fog grips the throat and sets the eyes watering. It puts out clammy
fingers that touch the ears and give the hands a ghostly grip.
Children
alone love it. They press small faces to windowpanes and watch lights
like little unripe oranges going by in the murk. A taxicab becomes
something ogreish; a steam-lorry is a dragon spitting flame and grunting
on its evil way. Men who sell things in the streets become more than
ever deliciously horrible. They never arrive normally; they loom;
they appear, freezing the blood, howling their wares like the lonely
wolf in a picture book.
I go
out into the fog and enter an incredible underworld. The fog has turned
London into a place of ghosts. At one moment a man with a red nose
and a moustache like a small scrubbing-brush appears with the suddenness
of an apparition. There must be millions of such men with exactly
similar moustaches, but this one is segregated from the herd. He seems
unique in his isolation. I am prepared to believe he is the only one
of that type in the world. I want to examine him as a learned man
examines an insect on a pin. He seems a rare and interesting specimen.
I want to cry 'Stop! Let me appreciate you!' But no; in a flash he
goes, fades — disappears!
There
comes a girl, pale and beautiful—much more beautiful than she
would be on a fine day, because the eyes are focussed on her alone.
She has the allurement of a dream, or a girl in a poem.
What
is this in Oxford Street? Two motor-cars locked together. Fifty grim,
muffled ghosts stand round watching and blowing their noses. On any
day but a foggy day it would be a mere nothing: an excuse for a policeman
to lick his pencil and write in a book. To-day it is a struggle of
prehistoric monsters
in a death-grip. So must two clumsy, effete beasts of the Ice Age
have fought locked in each other's scaly arms.
'Hi,
there, put a bit of beef behind it.. . . Come on, mate —
heave!'
Deep,
angry voices come from the grey nothingness. A girl ghost says:
'Oh,
isn't it awful? My eyes smart like anything."
Two big
yellow eyes bear down on the scene. Men ghosts jump about in the road.
They shout, they wave a red light, the monster with the two blazing
eyes swerves, there is a vision of a red-faced man in a peaked cap
and his gloved hands on a steering wheel:
'Keep
your rear lights on, can't you! You ought to be in the cemetery. .
. . that's where you ought to be and that's where you'll blinkin'
well end!'
He passes
on with his message.
*
* * * *
In Finsbury
Square a crowd of ghosts watch ten devils. Men are putting down asphalt.
To-day they are not men: they
are fiends pushing flaming cauldrons. The roadway is a mass of tiny,
licking, orange-coloured flames. The devils take long rakes, and the
little flames leap and flicker and fall over and between the prongs
like fluid. Red-hot wheeled trolleys, with a blasting flame beneath
them are dragged backwards and forwards over the roadway, heating
it, licking at it, and roaring like furnaces.
The wind
blows the flames this way and that way, lighting up the faces of the
men, glittering on their belt buckles and making their bare arms fire
colour.
The ghosts
stand with white faces watching. More ghosts come. One little ghost
has a peaked cap and an urgent message in a patent leather pouch.
He stays a long time.
*
* * * *
Near
the Bank I come face to face with the greatest optimist of this or
any other age. Here is a man entirely obscured by fog standing on
the kerb making a tin monkey run up and down a piece of twine. Think
of it! If you are sad or broke or
things are going wrong, think of this man selling tin monkeys in a
thick fog.
'How
many have you sold?' I ask him. 'Fower,' he says.
Four
tin monkeys sold in a thick fog. Marvellous! Incredible!
from The Heart of London 1925
Also by H.V.Morton CENOTAPH,
AMONG
THE KINGS and BEHIND THE WINDOW
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