Smoke, Fog, Lung, and Work or Peasouper

 The war had ended. There was no further a need for pilots, so I was grounded and became an RAF Photographic Intelligence Officer.

Having missed the years I should have been at school because of the war, I used the "grounded" time to acquire enough qualifications to become a medical student at St Thomas's Hospital.

Having joined the RAF when I was old enough in 1942, I had to await my turn to be demobilised after the war had ended (first in first out).

Just before that date I was found to have contracted TB in the lung. There was no cure at that time. I must have acquired the affliction in 1947 when the winter was exceptionally cold and both fuel and food were rationed (even for those in services).

So, after being invalided out of the RAF, I started to become a medical student. But after more spitting of blood, it had to be the conclusion of my medical ambitions.

Then came the start of what turned out to be a seven-year process of being screened every week or so, and having a thick needle shoved between my ribs to allow air to enter an induced gap between my ribs and lung. This was thought to "rest" the lung, and was as unpleasant to put up with as it sounds.

Being invalided out of the RAF entitled me to a Council flat. This consisted of two minuscule rooms above the railway lines outside Victoria Station.

It was still the age of steam trains, coal burning, smoke and dense fogs. Below my window, steam engine drivers kept their engines boilers in readiness by the continuous burning coal. This meant more smoke. From my abode, the general noise of railways was punctuated by the occasional shock-inducing blast from the release of excess steam. 

Inside my studio room I kept warm by burning coal in a small grate, thus adding to the atmosphere that could become thick fog. One of these "peasoupers" as they were called, was so thick that the only way of navigation outside was to walk with one foot on the pavement and the other in the road.

I needed to move to cleaner air, and did so by buying a bombed-out house in the Fulham Road and restoring it (less the top floor, because of the cost) to become a comfortable place in which to live and work.

In the meantime I went to the Central School of Art to paint with Bernard Meninsky and then to the Old Vic School of theatre design. 

Now working as a scene painter at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and then designing and constructing sets for repertory theater and touring shows, and creating sets for television (black and white then - actually various greys). I still managed to paint landscape that sold well from several of the best London galleries.

It seems extraordinary that breathing in the dirty air of that period, and coping with the building work and food rationing, not to mention the almost weekly high dose of screening radiation involved with the chest pneumothorax, that far from killing me I seemed to have thrived on it. 

(A119 (A1)