‘My grandad worked in a steel factory after fighting in Burma. After work one day, he got lost in fog on the way home, sat down on a bench and cried’
In my part of Sheffield, during the winter months, there is this thick fog that shrouds the streets. This photograph is one of dozens I’ve taken in Firth Park fog over the years, and always evokes a story my mom told me about my grandad, who died when she was 12. He’d returned from the second world war after fighting behind enemy lines in Burma, and was back working in a steel factory. After finishing work one day, the fog was so bad that he couldn’t find his way home, so he just sat down on a bench and burst into tears. I wonder: did the fog also symbolise a feeling of being lost in life for him? It does for me.
From the vantage point of 2020, perhaps this image chimes with the Black Lives Matter moment, or the unpeopled streets we’ve become so accustomed to, but I see it as a relic from the rubble of Tony Blair’s Britain; it was taken just three months before New Labour lost the 2010 general election to the Tories. What began as an optimistic, forward-thinking vision for this country had slowly soured, following 9/11, the ensuing wars on terror and in Iraq, and the global financial crisis, when it turned out that unfettered free-market globalisation couldn’t solve all our problems. David Blunkett, New Labour’s home secretary and MP for Firth Park’s constituency at the time, said in 2002 that local schools were being “swamped” by asylum seekers. He was talking specifically about some of my friends when he said that – kids, not creatures.