up there were the speeding piebald clouds with their wind-flattened scored and scoured keels and their high towers swept into frothing cones and plumes above the bunched-up main bodies of vapour, swollen with rain

beyond the clouds the blue field of sky burned with a higher marbling of pure white at the very outer edge of sight

below was the tangled green, brown, grey and London-Brick red smear of the Surrey Side and further still beneath the dark, moving, metal slab of the Thames