The blog page for the prolific song writer, musician and social chronicler of the human spirit.

SMOG

2/1/2017

New year 2017. Today I walked a while around my old town. I don't get here much. From the shuttered shops and empty spaces it seems, like many places, they are closing it down. So far they have taken everything up to the knees. As I sat drinking a coffee waiting for a phone to be mended I thought back to my childhood and the dirty, busy, mysterious town this once was.

OK it wasn’t so great,
When the winter damp rolled
The chimney smoke over and over
Till the days were a long twilight of sulphur mist,
In which strangers, shuffling and apologetic
Materialised at your side, hunched a little lower,
Then disappeared.
And in the same moment of trickery
An entire trolley bus, sparking and clattering, became visible
Carrying sombre mannequins in hats and scarves,
In a long retreat
Before vanishing to a muffled tolling bell.

When my mother taking our hands,
And telling us not to breathe
Would pull us home
Under the iron bridge smouldering in a fiery glow from
A steam train as it slowed and sighed above
Onto an empty platform
Adding its underbreath to the stinking mustard air.
Past the strange shop windows
Lonely and lost in a melancholy air;
Along the looming giants of furious Plane trees

Into the serious dark of the sidestreet
To the haunted nervous places
Past the ‘rec’, the bowling club and the brook,
Invisble now
Lingering only it seems in the young memory of summer.
Back to home to the worried dog and the cold, cleaner air
Watching the fire kindle in the grate
Pressing my cheek against the tears on the window
I would watch till my still dark father would return.

(c) Steve Bonham 2017

4 Comments

Natalia Wieczork

3/1/2017 12:40:42

This really stuck a cord with me. I recall the thick smog and the dark street where I waited for the bus with my mum. Torches glowing dim in the air. I loved Derby how it was. I think it's a shambles of poor planning now, a town ruined.

Judith Crosse

8/1/2017 11:57:41

I revisited the town of my early childhood recently. Shops were shrunk or boarded up and the Victorian school I attended had been demolished, a flat space surrounded by hoardings.
The high street of grocer, newsagent, toy shop and, best of all, bread shop where I would have a cake on Saturday mornings, were all gone, dead in real time but alive and vibrant in my memory

Bob Croson

12/1/2017 07:37:10

Recently was reminded of the great smog and Winston Churchills role in that. Together with your memories, Steve, I had a flashback to a long forgotten memory. As a wee boy I remember one horrific day when I first understood my father was not a well man. I had staggered home from school in the smog, and then was waiting for my dad. He worked at a bakery in town and caught the bus home normally. In the smog the buses were cancelled. I remember my growing fear as dad hadn't returned, and tearfully looking out the window to the wall of smog. After what seemed an age, he eventually returned from walking home, staggered through the door, and collapsed in a heap. He never went back to full time work from that moment.

Steve

16/1/2017 10:49:18

Hi Bob - that is such a moving and haunting story and uncanny its mirroring of memory. Do you still write - I remember your books
Chug a lug
Steve

Psychologist
Writer
MUSICIAN

Wide brimmed hat. Long dark coat. Guitar slung on back. 21 years on the road. A 100,000 miles and half a thousand hotel rooms. From the Berlin Wall to Atlas Mountains, from Sahara Desert to the streets of Hong Kong: a memory brewed in the long simmering soup of people and place. A man who has learned to watch and to listen, to walk and talk in the ebb and flow of meeting and parting. He is a chronicler of the human spirit in words and music.