Time Flues                   

 

My early years were spent

Gazing out on a scene,

A mixture of mills and mines,

With their chimneys and smoke stacks,

And hillocks of freshly hewn coal.

 

Chimneys standing proud,

Reaching, seemingly, right up to the sky,

Like the grandest pipes of a cathedral organ,

Built of blackened stone,

Playing a worn-out tune,

And casting their shadow on the

Folk and the village below.

 

We had cooling towers at the

Power station that stood down

In the valley, billowing out the clouds of steam

That floated over the town.

 

Clouds that gathered, as they drifted along,

The grit and the dust and the grime

Blown from the mines and the spoil heaps

That had formed, over who knows what length of time.

 

The spoil heap by the park spoiled our view

With its grit and its dust and its grime     

Drifting onto the washing

That Mum had pegged out on the line.

 

The grit and the grime and the coal dust,

As though ‘ magnet-drawn’ to my neck

Meant a regular wash with a loofah.

I washed, and then Mum came to check.

 

Our house, a back-to-back,

A ‘one-up-one-down’,

An insignificance. One of thousands

Dotted around the town

 

Each with a chimney

That belched out, 9 months a year,

The dirty and the sulphurous smoke

That buggered up the atmosphere,

 

That came from burning the dampened coal

That fed the fire.

(Put another lump on!)

A future generation’s funeral pyre!

 

Bedtime? Fires burned through the night

Fire-grate banked with nutty-slack

Pouring out its night-time smoke

Just as filthy, just as black.

 

The night-time smoke that in the daylight

Descended onto the clothing                  

That Mum had pegged out

And onto my neck, that needed washing

At least once a week.

The dirty and the sulphurous smoke

That, mixed so beautifully

With the mists, hanging close by the river,

Produced the thick and swirling fogs,

Or choking murderous smogs.

 

Now the power station and the mills and the mines are gone,

And with them, their chimneys, their smoke and the smog.

Gone are the coal-fired houses,

With the washing lines that stretched across the street.

My children’s children will never know

How to start a fire with twists of newspaper;

A bundle of firewood, and a shovelful of coal.

Future generations will never know

What a draw-tin, or poker, or ‘coil-oil’ is.

Will they care? I think not.

 

And who pegs clothes out any more?

(A tumble dryer’s a must)

Even though the air is clear of

The grit and the grime and the dust.

 

p.s. I still wash my neck, at least once a week.