Word: soote
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...landing at Ton San Nhut, only a ten-minute walk from the International Voluntary Services house. During the day I tried to get to know Saigon and imagine what it might look like without its oppressive cocoon of sandbags, barricades, rolls of concertina wire and black exhaust soot (military traffic has created so much air pollution that I wonder why the VC don't wrap their weapons in oil cloth and sit tight for two or three years while emphysema kills off all the city people in Vietnam--a new aspect of the war of attrition theory). Concertina wire surrounds...
...sobbing woman in a soot-stained house dress picks through the burned-out ruins of her house. A mud-caked G.I. wearily slumps into his foxhole and mutters that war is hell. A phalanx of policemen plows into a mob of shouting demonstrators and drags them off to the patrol wagons...
...them a lesson about his powers-and about the reality of the supernatural-he turns soothsayer and predicts that the editor will be beheaded by a woman. The Devil saunters off, accompanied by a scarecrow figure in checked trousers and a cat "the size of a pig, black as soot and with luxuriant cavalry officer's whiskers." The prophecy is quickly fulfilled when the editor is decapitated under a streetcar driven by a woman...
Skelmersdale--called Skelm--is the new town to the north. Skelm used to be a mining village. Small huts dot the side streets, soot stains mar the windows, and houses tip at crazy angles because of the mines below. Since World War II, the mines have been going out of business one-by-one. Unemployment has soared and wages fallen...
...utter solitude in an atmosphere where the dripping of a faucet is a dramatic event. Her only companions are "the whisperers," unheard voices who speak in her cobwebbed brain, alternately providing her with companionship and terror. In the gritty industrial town in which she lives, time settles like the soot as she goes about her monotonous routine-a visit to the library to warm her feet on a radiator pipe; a stop at the police station to record the most recent threat by her voices; an interlude at the National Assistance Board for her pitiful dole...