Coke

[poliphilo]

The air smells faintly of coke.

Not cocaine or coca-cola, but coke as in Coketown- the processed coal they still allow you to burn in smokeless zones.

The smell of a 1950s winter.

Only then the reek was sharper and harsher. Everyone was burning the hard stuff. If weather conditions were right we had visitations of that thick, sulphurous, man-killing fog that Dickens called a “London peculiar”.

Up on Croham Hurst. Snow on the ground, fog among the trees and me alone and terrified of ghosts. Of one ghost in particular. The ghost of an Edwardian lady rider who’d gone done the slope at full tilt and broken her neck. Friends said that if you scrabbled among the scree you could still find stones with her blood on.

There’s a sound that goes with the smell. It’s the sound of sacks of coal being emptied into the concrete bunker in the back-yard.

(The coal man had a horse and cart)

A sliding roar that ends in a whisper.

Comments

[four-thorns.livejournal.com]

(The coal man had a horse and cart)

this sounds so wonderfully ominous... this whole post is so well written. i wish i had been around to see such things. when i was a kid i used to love to run out to the mailman's truck and get the mail, because the mailman smoked a pipe and it smelled like vanilla. i had never smelled vanilla before.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

No-one smokes a pipe anymore. It's a shame. I'm not too keen on cigarette smoke but pipe tobacco is a completely different matter.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Oy; my mother smokes a pipe! (As does my father, but that seems to surprise people less than the sight of my mother, wearing her short, tight faux-leather jacket in a vivid shad of purple, with her pipe...)

I have often considered purchasing a pipe myself, merely for home use, at it would seem too pretentious for a student of literature to walk around with a pipe... -Especially on days of bad weather, when I have to make concessions to the cold and damp and stick on the tweed jacket!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Pipes and tweed jackets go together. Your jacket is just crying out for you to spill fluffy ash down its front.

I'd love to see a picture of your mother with all her gear.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

My mother make heads turn, even when I took her to Camden; home of the "I try so hard to be different"-freaks... (That's where she bought the jacket!)

[ibid.livejournal.com]

My father still does and there is a shop in my homwtown that sells them!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Maybe there'll be a come-back. I rather hope so.