A personal plea for those preparing for
in NovemberMy birth year was the year of the Great Smog and despite the coming of the Clean Air Act of 1956, most of my early childhood winter memories are misty, yellowish and cold. I don’t remember clear starry nights but I do remember fogs you could taste the coal dust in and the joy of arriving home from school after the excitement and apprehension of making it from one pool of lamplight to the next in quick dashes through the vapours hanging between.
Then there was the smoke of the back-room fire. This was where we ate, toasted bread and crumpets in the flames, listened to the radio and were later on transfixed by ‘Watch With Mother’ on the BBC on a tiny black and white tv set. We played cards, board games, read stories and Mum sewed and wrote letters on the dining table. It was the warm, beating heart of the house. Beyond that dining room door the hallway, the kitchen, the bathroom and the bedrooms were icy, and the fire in the front sitting room was only ever lit for special occasions and visitors. We wrapped up in winceyette nighties and pyjamas and thick, thick dressing gowns, socks and slippers to make the chilly climb from the smoky, warm embrace of that one heated downstairs room; climbing upstairs to hot-water-bottle warmed beds in freezing rooms.
There was not a smidgen of doubt about my favourite room. The coal might have spat and flared and sometimes blown dirty, black smoke back into the room when the wind was in the wrong direction; clearing the out the ashes in the morning when the room was cold and laying a new fire for the afternoon was a chore and being sent out for coal in the dark and the wet was a misery; but despite all of that I felt, good, safe and cocooned close to the smoky fire. As children we never thought about the damage the coal, which everybody used, was doing to the atmosphere. In fact I’m not even sure that we made the link between the dreadful, sometimes smelly smogs we walked out in and those welcoming home-fires. We hadn’t heard the word ‘pollution’. We didn’t make the link between those smogs - - and the wheezing of adults and sickly friends, even though people died. My grandad died. He wasn’t a smoker and was only in his fifties when he succumbed to ‘bronchitus’ – undoubtedly triggered by working in the smoky inferno of a munitions factory during the war and afterwards those post-war smogs couldn’t have helped either.
The war was something else we didn’t think about, even though the evidence of its recent destruction was still all around us in the form of overgrown bombsites which we didn’t register as such. Most grown-ups had lived through the war and most smoked tobacco, both men and women, although not my mum and ladies of my granny’s generation. It seemed the epitome of elegance to watch women with lip-stick red lips flick fancy lighters (I can still recall the petrol-smell), light up long cigarettes and then blow clouds of cigarette smoke heavenwards. One of my first errands was to run up to the shops to buy my father a packet of twenty ‘Players’ or, as the dangers of cigarette smoke became more apparent in the 1960s, twenty ‘Embassy – tipped’ – they were supposed to be healthier. I loved being useful and no-one questioned why a seven-year old was buying cigarettes.
Everywhere stank of cigarette smoke; our house, the buses, the trains, our car, workplaces, cinemas and of course pubs. Pubs and cigarettes: they went hand in hand from my childhood to when I became a grown up and began enjoying going out and good times. But the best time of all, and the smokiest happy memory was Christmas when the cigars came out. Cigar smoke for me as a child meant Christmas and the gathering together of those I loved most.
Passive smoking was an unheard of concept. I didn’t like the smoke much, just as the diesel and petrol exhaust-smoke from lorries and cars idling in traffic jams when we travelled on outings and holidays made me feel sick. But the memories of those occasions were good; seaside trips, picnics, parties, visits to grandparents and always my father lighting up. He did give up smoking in the late seventies, but too late. It wasn’t an obviously smoking-related cancer that killed him in his fifties, but a lifetime of inhaling tobacco and vehicle-exhaust fumes can’t have helped.
It’s sobering to think that almost every happy early childhood memory is accompanied by a smoky side act of destruction and a smoke screen which preserved our innocence. Whilst we British still soaked up plaudits and admiration for being the ‘workshop of the world’, every particle of smoke from our burning coal, combusting petrol and diesel; every dirty particle from our smoking cigarettes or from the tall chimneys of our industries churning out goods for the world was blown away in the wind. To where? Back then we didn’t think much about where. Today’s children do not enjoy that luxury.
Our past collective ignorance and carelessness threaten our grandchildren’s futures. As individuals now we try to find better, less polluting ways to warm our homes; in Europe we take our clean air for granted; fewer people in western nations choose to, or can afford to smoke and the vehicles on our roads are no longer allowed to barrel along spurting plumes of noxious black exhaust smoke as they go. We think twice about lighting bonfires and create vast landfills for waste instead. And yet that might not be enough. Clouds of man-made smoke still hang over other nations where paraffin lamps light hot nights and vehicles, cast-offs from wealthy lands, belch clouds of exhaust over street urchins hawking cigarettes ‘by the stick’ to survive. The clouds of smoke enveloping those lands are still too dense. The smogs haven't gone away, they have just drifted from western to eastern and southern cities.
Our grandchildren are not the innocents we were. Climate change is their number one worry. I hope that it’s not too late to bring clean air to the whole world and yet … Mankind might have thought it had tamed fire but the happy, hazy smoke-filled memories of my childhood are mild by comparison to today’s scenes of untamed, hellfire smoky destruction beamed across the globe and into our homes. Smoke no longer cocoons family life. Smoke and the fires below threaten to destroy twenty first century family life.
Smoke is a worry for today’s children.
As smoke from Siberian wildfires drifts over the Arctic, warming the North Pole and melting the ice, I hope the grown-ups will take action.
As clouds of smoke from North America’s west coast forest fires blow east, across the Atlantic across Spain and Portugal, I hope the politicians on holiday notice.
As the cradle of western civilisation, Greece, burns I pray that it is not too late for all our planet’s civilisations and that the politicians meeting together in November, in Glasgow, see through the smoke and guarantee the next generation hope and good memories … like I had.
There really is no good smoke.
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