Fog Season Arrives Early in London

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 232, 20 December 1927, Page 12

Fog Season Arrives Early in London

Clocks Back an Hour Again After Wettest Summer ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY After the wettest summer on record, [ England has put back its clocks for an hour in token of the arrival of winter (one must have some means of differentiating between the two seasons) and .London, rather earlier than usual, has snuggled into its blanket of fog, writes (Juy Innes in the Melbourne "Herald.” i The first 0 g was accompanied by usual street collisions; the impact of two pairs of trains, fortunately without fatal results; the death of two railway officials who were overtaken on the line by an electric train which they neither saw nor heard; and a murder in Richmond Park, which may or may not have been due to depression caused by weather conditions. London is bearing it all philosophically, as usual, aware that fogs have their humorous as well as their tragic aspect. Indeed, paradoxical as it may seem, they bring sunshine into the lives of some of us. . . . I was walking along the Strand after a dinner at the Savoy, where the speakers had not all risen superior to the surrounding gloom, when I felt a friendly grip on my arm. It came from the hand of a well-known author and amateur of the real London, who was abroad in the dank night for a purely aesthetic purpose. He knew that, owing to the wet summer, the plane trees which are London’s pride had hardly shed a leaf, and he was anxious to study their appearance, as they were silhouetted against the fog by the bright lights of the Thames Embankment. As he returned from making his orisons to Nature, our meeting took place, and a libation was poured in an old-fashioned and dreamy hotel where Charles Dickens had found and perpetuated the Fat Boy in the pages of Pickwick. London is like that. Going Home by Guesswork This first fog of the year was merely a grey one. One found oneself wrapped in a moist shroud of intangible cottonwool which stung the eyes and made the world invisible. It was not a yellow fog, or “London particular,” nor was it a black fog, which makes one feel like a Jonah in the inside of a whale which has died of influenza. It hung most thickly about the l hames, the and the streets immediately adjacent; and it was like a Ban Francisco fog, in that it had inlets and bays wherein visibility succeeded to invisibility. It fell to my lot to escort a lady home from a dance later in the evening and we entered a taxi in Cromwell Road. Immediately we had cast off all moorings with the known world, and soon the driver was hopelessly lost. He clung, as if to his hope of salvation, to the red tail-light of a crawling motor just ahead; but soon lie lost it. With a pronounced list to starboard, his port wheels climbed the edge of a traffic refuge in the middle of the road when he thought he was closely following the kerkstone on the other side.

Freeing himself, he drifted like a four-wheeled ghost past an interminable line of stranded buses, hugging the sidewalk for comfort and company until a man should come with a lantern to lead the convoy into clearer weather. Then ho drew up in the small of the back of one of London’s competently imperturbable policemen, and was asked where he wanted to go. The ensuing dialogue showed that ho was headed duo east, when due west was the course he should have followed, and, narrowly escaping forcible entry into a private garden, he ’bouted ship, and, with the assistance of two helpful civilians, who materialised from the fog. he and his machine coughed their way into a lighter area and safety. A Royal Progress But this was nothing to the nights when all traffic is stopped; and the huge flares in the centre of the road, like the burning braziers beside the Cenotaph in Whitehall, are completely invisible four feet away; and the stinging mist penetrates even into the underground stations: and wise people stay at home and do not venture abroad. One does not see nowadays such a romantic incident as James Bone chronicles in his "London Perambulator.” of King Edward, accompanied by two of his gentlemen and a police guard bearing links, as in Georgian days, walking home from a dinner party to Buckingham Palace because the fog forbade any other means of pa ssage. Rut even nowadays a foggy night in London has its excitements and its silhouettes. This, say the weather experts, is to be a year of frequent fogs, even at noon-day; and not for three years, when electrification will be almost complete, may anything approaching immunity be expected. But London’s coal-smoke, even now, is less in volume than it used to be, and there are hardy old boys who say that the fogs nowadays are nothing like the fogs of their youth. Even so, blind man’s buff in a taxi still has its excitements. Dreamland-on-Thames And the fog can turn a prosaic London street into a dimly battlemented and castellated thoroughfare of romance, making the metropolis, as O. Henry said, "a ragged purple dream.” The sound of traffic dies down and almost ceases; a few motor horns, “like horns of Elfland faintly blowing,” are heard in the indefinite distance; and the electric advertisement signs, thank God, are black out. Probably, despite the increased use of electricity, London, when the right conditions prevail, will always have its fogs; for the marshes lay about its site, and the river encircled its wintry peninsulas, before it boasted a house.