The Grey-Green Patches

A coal-fired power station at a small harbour on the Baltic coast on a grey November day, a long tall boiler house of dark red clinker brick with pilasters and very tall many-paned windows in red frames, its walls painted over with large grey-green camouflage patches, thin smoke above the roof, at the quay a low coal barge and a dull grey dockside crane, a covered conveyor bridge rising from the quay to the boiler house, beside it a windowless block of bare grey concrete, flat dark water, low pines on the shore, every wall and crane plain and unmarked, the quay deserted under a heavy overcast sky.