She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs.

David McKie: When fact is really fiction ( The Guardian).Two Orwell Prize winners on fact and fiction in reportage: Neal Ascherson – Ryszard Kapuściński was a great story-teller, not a liar ( The Guardian) and Timothy Garton Ash – Bearing witness is a sacred trust ( The Guardian).

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