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.
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