On a lovely London Day just before Christmas we were killing time in Waterstones Piccadilly before going to see a matinee of The Mousetrap. Unusually for me, we found ourselves on the sci-fi and horror floor. Not my natural home but with books it’s always good to be open minded. I was drawn to a small display of ‘Tales of the Weird’ and was soon in an armchair reading the introduction of ‘Into the London Fog.’
London is geographically prone to fog as it sits in a river basin of clay surrounded by hills. Centuries before the industrial revolution, writers were commenting on this miasma of mist and dampness that frequently pervaded the city. Then from the birth of factories and industrial machinery, sulphuric soot was added to the mix creating this dirty yellow haze, perfect of course for hiding, for disappearing quickly and for generally creating an atmosphere of dark mystery, secrecy and somehow always a suggestion of evil and of bad deeds.
I have recently visited the Courtauld Gallery to see Monet’s pictures of the Thames, always in a wintry fog. He apparently only liked to visit and paint in London when the weather was poor! I’m not quite sure what effect his cataracts had on this whole strange set up. ‘Without fog, London would not be a beautiful city,’ Monet maintained. This fascinating introduction told me that it was Henry James who first coined the phrase ‘a pea souper’ to describe the London fog. I am fond of pea and ham soup which is an inviting green but in the last 2 decades of the nineteenth century when James lived in London, pea soup would have been very yellow, being made of split peas. It would have been associated with poverty as it was very cheap to make and thus a staple food of the poor. Charles Dickens of course makes great use of the unhealthy, unpleasant nature of fog in several of his novels.
In the 20th century war time blackouts once again added to the atmosphere of danger and dirt and in itself, fog became a literary trope for degeneration and a city in a very bad way.
The Clean Air Act of 1956 brings the smog (smoke and fog together) into my living memory. As with any parliamentary Act, things do not change immediately. I have clear memories of my father wearing a mask when he travelled on the commuter train from Sevenoaks in Kent to his office in London. This would have been in 1958 or 1959, so there was no sudden disappearance of smog.
Then it was time to leave the comfy Waterstones armchair and replace the book into its display. Very fortunately, the book appeared once more, wrapped under the Christmas tree and then I read the collection of stories of strange happenings in various parts of London. The authors are many and varied: Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Nesbit and E.F. Benson among others. There is something strangely comfortable about reading weird stories, nothing too, too awful here, in the warm of one’s home on a wintry afternoon. They go well with a glass of ginger wine or a pot of tea, whatever you choose.