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

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

Wow, you paint such a vivid, lovely image. I am almost there with you, smelling everything, walking through the fog, feeling the chill as I walk down the cobboles to where the coal man stands with his horse and cart. Astounding.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

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. This is as good as any Blackwood I've been reading! Very atmospheric and vivid.

[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.

[mtl.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this posting.

I could almost smell and hear this!