Nearly everyone has heard something about the great smog of winter 1952. It must have happened just a couple of weeks after I returned home from Tangmere. It lasted for several days, because according to my grandmother, there was just not enough wind to blow it away. So we just had to keep the lights turned on at midday. as we huddled round our coal fire to keep warm. Probably families all over London were doing exactly the same, which did not exactly help matters.
It was a fact of life in those days, that almost all adults that lived in London, suffered from bronchitis during the winter months. My mother and grandmother were no exception and would bring up great gobules of green phlegm at regular intervals, while we sat round the fire in the evenings. Nobody thought anything of it. There were no paper hankies either, so the winter wash would always feature a separate container, being boiled on the stove, for snotty hankerchiefs. One of the last questions I was always asked as I started out for school in the mornings were 'Josephine, have you got your pocket hankerchief?' Indeed I had a whole selection of them - children's ones with bright prints and cartoon characters on them.
In spite of all the bronchitis around nobody ever spat in the street. That was regarded as the height of bad manners. The London underground did not have to feature the English equivalent of the Parisian 'Ne pas cracher' notices. They were totally unnecessary. Not so today! I think our footballers have a lot to answer for in that respect. Don't they realise, that whatever they do, there are hundreds and thousands of kids trying to emulate them!
The appearance of fog and smog over London in winter was as predictable as the fact that it would always rain directly my grandmother had hung up her washing outside in the garden downstairs. Mostly, the fog was mostly more or less white, like the shirt or socks of the unfortunate child in the old advertisements whose mother didn't wash with Persil. I used to enjoy how it would envelope everything I was usually so familiar with, and impart an air of mystery and isolation. Even sounds would seem muffled, and landmarks like letter boxes with GR embossed on the front in elaborate letters would suddenly and unexpectedly pop up right in front of you.
But the yellow flashing of the spherical, lollipop-like belisha beacons on either side of the new zebra crossings was reassuringly visible from some distance, which was just as well really, as the cars that were still about, few as they were, had time to slow down and look if anyone was crossing. But even the swish of their tyres on the road surface was more subdued than normal as if they were all trying to keep quiet. In fact that was how it was in London during a bad fog. It was just as if there was an gravely ill person trying to sleep upstairs, and the world was making a huge effort to be as quiet and as unobstrusive as possible. It was peaceful.
It was not so peaceful, however, in the late afternoon of December 5th. I'm afraid I cheated here and looked up the exact date. I just remember, that it was that miserable part of the year when the excitement of Guy Fawkes was over, (and I had used up the packet of sparklers that I was allowed for the occasion,) and we had not yet started putting up Christmas decorations. It was four-thirty and time for us to go home from school but the fog had been getting steadily thicker all day. By mid-afternoon all the lights were turned on and by the end of the afternoon it was dark.
Just off the hall there was an area with a polished stone floor where we had our milk in the mornings and where the locked library cupboard was kept. All the kids who usually walked home by themselves and had no-one to fetch them huddled together here, feeling like little orphan Annies. We were not going to be allowed to go home on our own, that was definite. I remember my pleading fell on deaf ears.
Eventually, a father who lived further at the bottom end of my long road, and had come to collect his own daughter, found himself in charge of a whole group of us, and was instructed to see us all home safely.
I can see myself now. That winter, and the next one too I would wear a grey wool coat with a velvet collar, that my grandmother had sewn for me on her hardworking treadle machine. Scarves, hats and gloves were always knitted by my mother and this time, she had knitted me a fair-isle beret which had a very complicated pattern with many differently coloured wools, that had taken her ages to make. Brown lace-up shoes and knee-length socks, secured with an elastic garter under the turnup, completed the ensemble. I was a well-dressed child, and in those austere post-war times, when it was very hard to find good-quality ready-made clothes, to be well-dressed in inner London, was the exception rather than the rule.
It really was a pea-souper this time, and it was a novelty, even for us, to put your hand up quite near your face, only to be able to see the vaguest outline. Apart from stumbling up a kerb and nearly bumping into a doorpost I got home safely. Even my own house seemed unfamiliar and unrecognisable, until I had actually opened the low, wooden gate and had started to climb the eleven stone steps that led to the double front door. The little party of the remaining children continuing on its solitary way, was soon enveloped in the fog. As I turned to wave goodbye, they were already gone.
I can't remember whether we had school the next day, but we probably did. School went on, come rain or shine.
That fog lasted four days, during which time public transport practicallyground to a halt and the hospitals were overflowing. Over four thousand, mostly elderly and vunerable, Londoners died of of bronchial and related illnesses during that time.