Going Home In Gateshead 1952

GOING HOME IN GATESHEAD 1952 Boy and mother walking home. Sounds muffled, closed intimate silence. It was snowing. Street lamps’ light of warm orange blazed a trail Of modern life across the sorry, inner city of Gateshead. Orange snow covering every horizontal surface. No wind, just silence and orange snow. Away to the north the industries of the Tyne Were metamorphosed. The leviathan gas-holder drum looked like An enormous christmas cake with beautiful icing Layered on its gently curving, shallow-domed top. Valleys filled for miles with ropeworks, Papermills, steel plants and power stations - All disguised now in orange snow. Coke ovens sending up mushroom clouds Of white-hot steam every half hour, As twenty-ton loads of red-hot coke were cooled by dowsing. Oven doors two miles away over the valley would open - The glare of the coke’s fiery furnace was a peep into hell itself. Momentarily, it was all gone, in a snow-cloud from the Pennines, And the steep, shabby streets falling down to the Tyne Seemed to plunge themselves into an orange oblivion, As the snowfall enveloped two tiny figures walking slowly home. The boy turned his face up to catch flakes on his tongue And let them fall into his eyes, lost in an orange make-believe world.