What is the central idea of the vertical ladder

Neither can he go down by the route he had earlier taken going up. The iron ladder attached to the gasometer ends at a drop of 30 feet to the ground. Letting go from there would be like jumping down from the rooftop of a 3-storey building. The boys, laughing, had removed the wooden ladder which earlier had connected the iron one to the ground at the moment they saw him lose courage and started to inch his way downwards. Then they shepherded the girl home. They had assumed, of course, that he'll be able to reach the platform at the top of the gasometer and then go down by the other available stairs.

The language stings, chills and horrifies: something which you wouldn't have thought possible without monsters, killers or ghosts. The author takes you there up with Flegg and makes you feel like a forgotten bottle of water made of glass, hanging out of Flegg's trouser pocket, fearful of the wind, or a jerky movement, anything, that can nudge it out of the pocket and hurl it towards its violent crash to the ground--

"But they were wandering away. There was no retreat. They did not even know he was in difficulties. So Flegg had no option but to climb higher. Desperately he tried to shake off his fear, he actually shook his head. Then he stared hard at the rungs immediately facing his eyes, and tried to imagine that he was not high up at all. He lifted himself tentatively by one rung, then by another, and in this way dragged himself higher and higher ... until he must have been some ten rungs from the top, over the fifth storey of a house, with now perhaps only one more storey to climb. He imagined that he might then be approaching the summit platform, and to measure this distance he looked up.

"He looked up and heaved. He felt for the first time panicked beyond desperation, wildly violently loose. He almost let go. His senses screamed to let go, yet his hands refused to open. He was stretched on a rack made by these hands that would not unlock their grip and by the panic desire to drop. The nerves left his hands so that they might have been dried bones of fingers gripped round the rungs, hooks of bone fixed perhaps strongly enough to cling on, or perhaps at some moment of pressure to uncurl their vertebrae and straighten to a drop. His insteps pricked with cold cramp. The sweat sickened him. His loins seemed to empty themselves. His trousers ran wet. He shivered, grew giddy, and flung himself froglike on to the ladder.

"The sight of the top of the gasometer had proved endemically more frightful than the appearance of the drop beneath. There lay about it a sense of material danger, not of the risk of falling, but of something removed and inhuman--a sense of appalling isolation. It echoed its elemental iron aloofness, a wind blew round it that had never known the warmth of flesh nor the softness of green fibres. Its blind eyes were raised above the world. It was like the eyeless iron vizor of an ancient god, it touched against the sky having risen in awful perpendicular to this isolation, solitary as the grey gannet cliffs that mark the end of the northern world. It was immeasurably old, outside the connotation of time; it was nothing human, only washed by the high weather, echoing with wind, visited never and silently alone."

Everyone who has read and rated this here at goodreads had given this 5 sparkling stars. I certainly find no reason to disagree with this.

From 1930 onwards, Sansom worked in international banking for the British chapter of a German bank, but moved to an advertising company in 1935, where he worked until the outbreak of World War II. At this time he became a full-time London firefighter, serving throughout The Blitz. His experiences during this time inspired much of his writing, including many of the stories found in the celebrated collection Fireman Flower. He also appeared in Humphrey Jennings's famous film about the Blitz, Fires Were Started- Sansom is the fireman who plays the piano.

After the war, Sansom became a full-time writer. In 1946 and 1947 he was awarded two literary prizes by the Society of Authors, and in 1951 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He married actress Ruth Grundy.

As well as exploring war-torn London, Sansom's writing deals with romance (The Face of Innocence), murder ('Various Temptations'), comedy ('A Last Word') and supernatural horror ('A Woman Seldom Found'). The latter, perhaps his most anthologized story, combines detailed description with narrative tension to unravel a young man's encounter with a bizarre creature in Rome.

Sansom died in London.

From the Independent, October 2008:

"..William Sansom was once described as London's closest equivalent to Franz Kafka. He wrote in hallucinatory detail, bringing every image into pin-sharp focus. It was his strength and weakness; it made his stories hauntingly memorable, but his technique often left his characters feeling under-developed.

His style was as cool and painstaking as that of Henry Green, also a wartime firefighter. His 1944 collection Fireman Flower, and Other Short Stories may be his pinnacle. In "The Little Room", a nun waits for death after being bricked up in her windowless cell for an unnamed transgression. To make her fate worse, a meter on the wall marks the incremental loss of the air in the room, and Sansom describes her changing state of mind with passion and clinical precision.

The 1948 novella "The Equilibriad" owes a little too much to Kafka but shares the same strangeness, as the hero awakes to find himself able to walk only at a 45-degree angle. Sansom was also good with an opening hook. One story starts, "How did the three boys ever come to spend their lives in the water-main junction?"

Sansom's publisher described his work as "modern fables", but what makes them so ripe for rediscovery is their freshness and currency. His characters face inscrutable futures with patience and resignation, knowing that they can do little to influence the outcome of their lives. Sometimes terrible events, such as the collapse of a burning wall, slow down and expand to engulf the reader..."

//www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

Christine Brooke-Rose shares short story space with Sansom in Winter Tales no 8, and homages him in The Languages of Love.