ABSTRACT
London in the 1950s was a grey and choking place. The great smogs came down and pushed their way into our body cavities. My tongue lay thick with ash and my ears were as stopped as Pompeii. If I pushed my hand out in front of my face it disappeared into another universe, an uncanny one, where ghosts clamoured for attention. Burning had spread them in the air, and they clogged up our lives in muffied quiet. They fell to earth on our tongues so that we could only call to each other through great caverns of silence, the living and the dead, with mouths that only approximated speech.
