A dad's daily habit left his son with a fatal condition "trapping" him in his own home during school runs.
Leon Johnson's doctor thought he "smoked all his life" when he "started to run out of breath horrendously" and "couldn't walk very far" in 2017. He hadn't, but his dad and grandad sat smoking in their terraced house in Litherland, with a wrong turn of the wind blowing black smoke from the coal fire indoors where Leon played with toys.
His handkerchief would turn black when he breathed into it during the days-long smogs of the 1950s. At least 4,000 people died in England from the mix of smoke and fog filling the air when Leon was only three, before the Clean Air Act of 1956 regulated domestic and industrial smoke emissions for the first time. Now 73, the retired engineer spent much of his working life amid the smoke emitted by machines in a time before use of PPE and extractor fans was widespread.
