By the time I was an adult, I’d practically forgotten that we ever lived together, having formed new memories of delicious visits to her married home in Manchester, where the doors were painted bright yellow and poppy red and sky blue and there was a different kind of cake for tea every day. We’d shop for outfits for my Sindy doll, and I still have them, hidden at the back of the linen cupboard, kept safe in case I had a daughter. I get them out now when other people’s daughters come to visit, and we spread the dolls and their stories out over my big bed, as we drift backwards and forwards in time.
It wasn’t until my university sent me to France for a year that the days of nail varnish and scarves came back. I was thrilled to get my first choice of a swoonsomely beautiful university town in Provence, and, hatbox over my shoulder, I hopped on the bus headed towards the beckoning Mediterranean. But though the weather was warm, the people were decidedly chilly, and I was left to find myself somewhere to live, settling eventually for a depressing, damp studio flat, where the bobbled, tobacco-yellow bed sheets were ripped right down the middle and repaired with a hundred safety pins. Teetering on a borrowed ladder, I whitewashed the walls and painted the shutters pale green; I bought local fabric and made bed sheets and a cloth to cover the narrow table where I sat each evening. But the rent was so ruinous I barely had enough money left over to feed myself, so dinner was often a bit of cheese rind or half an onion fried in the dregs of the oil. I smoked Gitanes furiously to quell the rumbles, and saved my centimes for a glass of vin rouge in the boulevard cafes with a series of anxious young people I’ve never seen since.
I could never afford to buy anything for myself, but I liked to linger in the chic boutiques, trying on creams, squirting myself with perfumes out of reach of my empty, smoky pocket. For a full nine months, the sun blazed down on me, at odds with the dour townsfolk, who, when the sun finally set, became even more mean-spirited, spitting insults at me as I’d pass them in their tastefully-lit midnight streets.
20 years later, I can still picture the shop where I first took a sniff of Eau de Cologne Provençale. I’d been wandering around the market, suffering from a particularly painful strain of homesickness, trying to eke out a letter from home, by reading only a few lines at each bench I came to. The shop was for tourists, floors piled high with traditional shopping baskets, shelves stacked with hessian bags of Herbes de Provence and decorative bottles of slick, green olive oil. The oil and herbs in the supermarket round the corner were fresher and nicer, but wouldn’t look quite so good in the kitchens of Hertfordshire and Connecticut. There in the corner, past the lavender bags and the soaps shaped like lemons, was this rather unpromisingly old-fashioned Eau de Cologne. It looked like the kind of scent that desiccated spinsters dabbed on handkerchiefs before tucking them into cardigan sleeves. But one spray and a window opened that has never since shut. A little research tells me the cologne has top notes of bergamot and cool lemon, the woody aromas of marjoram, rosemary and orange blossom, all tied up with a base note of sweet orange. I don’t know which plant was the key, but wham, there I was, back in Marianne’s bedroom, running my fingers through the silk, wearing strings of jet beads and listening to the scratch and hiss of her favourite records. When she washed her hair, she used to splash German cologne into the rinsing water, and its top notes must have trailed after her, like the fringes of her scarves.
I couldn’t afford to buy the Eau de Cologne that day, and ever since, I’ve been searching for a perfume that will take me back to that place. I rub rosemary leaves, I sniff at my precious bottle of neroli, I sprinkle sweet orange on my kitchen cloths, and I almost get there. Always almost, but never quite.
My mother, too, was the baby of her family of six, her father having died, working on American railways, two weeks before she was born. By the time she was five, her mother had died from exhaustion, and the children were dispatched to an orphanage before much crueller homes were found for them. During the war, with a transient population and fractured communication, some of her siblings disappeared, never to be reunited again, with vague notions of their whereabouts surfacing from time to time. Somehow, my mother survived this harsh start, helped by nuns much kinder than those we see in our bleak dramas. She started teaching in the hometown of a school friend, and Pat, an only child, begged her parents to let my mother stay with them in their family home, a place of unheard-of luxury for my bruised mother. Pat’s dad Joe owned a construction company and every Christmas, he’d receive swanky gifts from business associates. One of the most prized was a silver cigarette box, shaped like a limousine, around six inches long. Joe liked to hold dinner parties, and after the last spoonful of pudding was dispatched, the coffee pot and the limousine would be placed on the dining table. Everyone smoked in those days, and they’d push the car around the table. The guest would open the boot to take a cigarette, then taking a tiny dipstick from a car radiator filled with lighter fluid, they’d strike it on the emery running board. My mother loved to smell the dipstick, but every time she did it, a lump would form in her throat, and she’d feel a sadness that she couldn’t place, a nostalgia for something she’d buried under the horrors of her childhood. She often tried to catch it unawares, as if by rushing up to the limousine and grabbing the dipstick, she could trick her brain into unlocking the memory, but it didn’t work, and the lump remained stuck in her throat.
Until one day, she tried again as she was looking out of the window, leaning over the table, with the sun shining in, and in the spark of the light, it came back to her. Like Proust, whose famous madeleine only took him back to his childhood when he washed it down with some tea, the scent was only activated for my mother when she caught it in a shaft of sunlight and was sent tumbling back in time.
She was four years old, her mother still alive. It was a Saturday afternoon, and she’d fallen asleep in the red velvet rocking chair by the range. My mother looked like Shirley Temple in those days, a mass of pale blonde curls and chubby cheeks that are hard to match with the dark and slender woman she became. She must have looked too sweet to waken, so when her brothers and sisters tumbled out of the house for the highlight of their week, the children’s cinema matinee, her mother let her sleep on by the fire. But when she woke to silence, and realised the nature of her betrayal, she was utterly devastated. It wasn’t just any old film that day; it was the first colour film that had come to the town, a film about a man with a blue suitcase, its name now lost to us. Her mother tried to comfort her, but her misery was complete, and she tore out of the tenement flat, down four flights of stairs and out towards the cinema at the end of the street. As she was running out of the close, she looked up and saw the sun shining through the remains of a shower. There was a patch of garden by the door, just big enough to grow some flowers, and the sun shining on those damp blooms produced a smell that she wouldn’t catch again till the silver limousine was pushed round the table to her 15 years later. I don’t know why the flowers smelled of fuel, but they did. With that scent in her nose, she looked to her right and saw the first children beginning to trickle out of the cinema.
Studies on the power of smell to unlock memories show that the memories associated with smell tend to be older ones, and since smell is our oldest sense, the one we developed before sight or hearing or even touch, that’s not surprising. Even bacteria can smell the chemicals in the air around them, and we all evolved to respond to the scent of the substances which surround us. A child lacking in descriptive powers and the ability to make sense of her surroundings must record her life somehow. Sometimes things get filed under lighter fluid, sometimes they get filed under bergamot. It’s no coincidence that what both my mother’s elusive scent and mine have in common, is that they take us back to a time when we were the smooth-cheeked babies, the adored and snuggled pets, to a time when everyone was still together, safe in one place, before life and marriage, sickness and disaster sent us spinning off into distant corners, never to return in quite the same shape or form.
