The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes

It is funny how words from a song, a poem, a passage, can be the catalyst to memories.  This morning I was sampling the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot and reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  In the opening lines, there is this:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

It yanked me back to London of my childhood and young adulthood.  It is hard now, I suspect, for most to recapture just how dark, dingey, and dirty was the city.  And all towns and cities in England.

Home fires and furnaces were fed with coal and cars emitted rich plumes of particulates, gases and fumes.  In the late 1960s, coal was slowly replaced by clean natural gas.  By the seventies and onwards, vehicle emissions were reduced 99%.  Sometime in the seventies London began a systematic cleaning of the great Victorian buildings which I had only known as dark gray or black.  I recall being astonished sometime in the late 1970s to discover just how beautiful and colorful was the stonework of the Museum of Natural History, once the scaffolding came down from its cleanup when the grime of decades was removed.  I had only ever known it as a very dark building.

In the summer of 1979, I had a summer job as a courier in London.  I rode a bicycle all over the city, carrying travel documents, tickets, passports and visas from travel agency to client to embassy and back.  A great way to learn the city and a thousand interesting experiences.

Some days were beautiful, warm and sunny.  Others, cold, wet, and dour.  Some were foggy. And always, dirty, dingey, and grimy.  

And every evening I would take the train home to Woking, walk into the house, and the first thing was to wash off the days grime.  I could draw a white cloth across my face, leaving a gray smudge.  Washing my face in the white porcelain sink left a rim of soot and dirt from my face.  Lord know the condition of my lungs.

Something about Eliot's yellow fog and preparing "a face to meet the faces that you meet" brought it all back.