noticed them. The smell of the fog was really just an intensification of the smell of any winter’s dusk at tea-time when everyone was lighting fires at once and sending up a million London chimneys the scent of pine kindling and the cool tarry yellow smell of cheap coal. It faded a bit after an hour as the grates warmed up and combustion became more efficient. For me, that smell went with the mournful sound of ships’ foghorns and hooters coming up from the Port of London.
– Do I make it sound harsh and industrial? Too much in the lee of satanic mills? Maybe I haven’t done justice to the gardens, then. As I said, they were where you saw the county of Kent fighting back against bricks and asphalt, and people took great pride in them. A lot of the gardens both front and back had mature trees in them, often big old plums and pears left from the orchards that had been built over when my father was delivering geese as a boy. Even so, Eltham was already full of exotica, especially those suburban staples like hydrangeas, laburnams, buddleias and monkey-puzzle trees. Not one of them native to Britain. As for domestic animals, quite a few people kept chickens. That, as well as the tradesmen’s horses, was why you could go on finding corn chandlers in high streets like those of Eltham and Sidcup until well after the Second World War. The one in Sidcup just by the Black Horse Inn was owned by a man called Patullo Higgs, I remember. Gypsy name, I should think. Another of those Blackfen families, no doubt, who sent their women from door to door with wax flowers and lucky white heather. We kept chickens, sometimes rabbits, even the odd goose for old times’ sake. That’s why there were often farmyard smells mixed in with all the coal and gas fumes and one could hear cocks crowing in the morning above the groaning noise the trams made going up the hill from Well Hall.
– A lot of insect life, too. I began collecting moths as a boy and took thirty-six different species from our own back garden. Old Lady, Red and Yellow Underwing, Cinnabar, Silver Y. A few hawk moths, mainly Lime and Privet from all those hedges, little Hummingbirds that fancied the flowers in people’s rockeries, Small Elephants which liked honeysuckle and rhododendrons. And once, great day, a rather sad and battered Death’s Head, probably from a potato patch or beehive in an allotment up the road. Plenty of butterflies from all the buddleias, though never (and how I hoped and yearned) a Camberwell Beauty. A transient, alas, a migrant. Hopelessly rare. Those rockeries, by the way, often contained few genuine rocks. Instead there were lumpsof fused slag which you could get from the gasworks down in Greenwich. They were odd colours: firebrick orange, black, hectic purple; full of bubbles and craters like lava. If you smashed them with a coal hammer you could smell gas. Ash paths in back gardens. Of course. What else to do with clinkers from the kitchen boiler? Fascinating, that juxtaposition of the rural with the industrial. After all, half the residents of these newish suburbs had come from the country. The irony of today’s London is that it has long since left off being an industrial city, yet despite all those garden centres and that modish environmental concern nobody has a clue about rural things. In those days in Eltham back gardens you’d see a row of runner beans next to a cinder path. Rhubarb leaves frothing from the tops of tall old chimney pots set in the earth. A compost heap of horse dung rotting nicely in a frame made of the old lead gaspipes they dragged out from under the floors when they wired the house for electricity. They left the pipes in the walls, of course. Too big a job. So you had these little stubs pushing up behind the wallpaper where the gas mantles had been capped off … I’m surely boring you?–
*
Perhaps, Jayjay (I feel and then suggest out loud as the tractors of Tuscany clank and blare on and on in the distant
– Do I make it sound harsh and industrial? Too much in the lee of satanic mills? Maybe I haven’t done justice to the gardens, then. As I said, they were where you saw the county of Kent fighting back against bricks and asphalt, and people took great pride in them. A lot of the gardens both front and back had mature trees in them, often big old plums and pears left from the orchards that had been built over when my father was delivering geese as a boy. Even so, Eltham was already full of exotica, especially those suburban staples like hydrangeas, laburnams, buddleias and monkey-puzzle trees. Not one of them native to Britain. As for domestic animals, quite a few people kept chickens. That, as well as the tradesmen’s horses, was why you could go on finding corn chandlers in high streets like those of Eltham and Sidcup until well after the Second World War. The one in Sidcup just by the Black Horse Inn was owned by a man called Patullo Higgs, I remember. Gypsy name, I should think. Another of those Blackfen families, no doubt, who sent their women from door to door with wax flowers and lucky white heather. We kept chickens, sometimes rabbits, even the odd goose for old times’ sake. That’s why there were often farmyard smells mixed in with all the coal and gas fumes and one could hear cocks crowing in the morning above the groaning noise the trams made going up the hill from Well Hall.
– A lot of insect life, too. I began collecting moths as a boy and took thirty-six different species from our own back garden. Old Lady, Red and Yellow Underwing, Cinnabar, Silver Y. A few hawk moths, mainly Lime and Privet from all those hedges, little Hummingbirds that fancied the flowers in people’s rockeries, Small Elephants which liked honeysuckle and rhododendrons. And once, great day, a rather sad and battered Death’s Head, probably from a potato patch or beehive in an allotment up the road. Plenty of butterflies from all the buddleias, though never (and how I hoped and yearned) a Camberwell Beauty. A transient, alas, a migrant. Hopelessly rare. Those rockeries, by the way, often contained few genuine rocks. Instead there were lumpsof fused slag which you could get from the gasworks down in Greenwich. They were odd colours: firebrick orange, black, hectic purple; full of bubbles and craters like lava. If you smashed them with a coal hammer you could smell gas. Ash paths in back gardens. Of course. What else to do with clinkers from the kitchen boiler? Fascinating, that juxtaposition of the rural with the industrial. After all, half the residents of these newish suburbs had come from the country. The irony of today’s London is that it has long since left off being an industrial city, yet despite all those garden centres and that modish environmental concern nobody has a clue about rural things. In those days in Eltham back gardens you’d see a row of runner beans next to a cinder path. Rhubarb leaves frothing from the tops of tall old chimney pots set in the earth. A compost heap of horse dung rotting nicely in a frame made of the old lead gaspipes they dragged out from under the floors when they wired the house for electricity. They left the pipes in the walls, of course. Too big a job. So you had these little stubs pushing up behind the wallpaper where the gas mantles had been capped off … I’m surely boring you?–
*
Perhaps, Jayjay (I feel and then suggest out loud as the tractors of Tuscany clank and blare on and on in the distant
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