August 2010
Ignoring for the moment the sixth sense - which there are some who claim to possess - there are five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.
We regularly communicate by sight and hearing and our touch and taste buds are constantly being stimulated throughout the day; but smell? Smell is something that just ‘is’. We seem to accept at a subliminal level the normality of the everyday smells about us, and only become aware of this amazing ability when an unusual or more powerful smell occurs.
But, such is the nature of smells, creeping up quietly behind us, and then suddenly thrusting itself into our consciousness, that it is capable of overwhelming us, of creating evocative connections that can take us back to significant moments in our past, so quickly and so powerfully, that it can transcend all of the other four senses put together.
Now, my sister has the ability to remember extraordinary detail from our childhood, but it all remains just a huge blank to me. I can remember odd snippets of my primary school days, but even they are few and far between, and nothing before those halcyon days exists within my memory . . . or so I once thought!
The memory I am referring to was of a traumatic incident from a very early age, at which a particular smell pervaded, a smell so unusual that you would expect it to be most unlikely to be encountered again in my adult life – but, sometimes, there is a smell so similar that it can seize the brain, carry us back through the decades and place us right back at the exact spot again.
Now, I could simply tell you what that memory was, but that would make for a very short story; instead, I will recount the circumstances which brought this incident back into my mind with such stunning clarity.
It started in the summer of 1965, when I was eighteen and at a time when the Thurrock District Service Crew occupied a great part of my life. To those who have never been involved with the Scouting Movement, this term will be meaningless, so let me explain: first come Cubs, then Scouts, then Rover Scouts, (and a chance to wear long trousers for a change), and then age carries you out of the Movement . . . but not quite! There is always a need for people to work behind the scenes and let off the fireworks, erect the assault courses, cook the sausages at Jamborees – enter ‘the Service Crew’.
In our group were nine boys and three girls (all of whom were officially ‘Boy’ Scouts!) – amongst them, my girlfriend, Judy. As a group we met every Friday night at our hut at Condovers Scout Camp Site in West Tilbury to plan future events, play cards, smoke and generally put the world to rights . . . and then we would all climb aboard my old blue Morris 1000 van and drive to The Ship at East Tilbury, where we would drink and make merry where the landlord did not think it peculiar for one table in his bar to be singing camp-fire songs (though not necessarily with the official words!) at the tops of their voices.
It was therefore inevitable that at some point one of the group would suggest that we had: ‘A week away together.’
We drove to Thames Ditton boatyard, where we boarded a huge wooden motor cruiser, most likely a relic from the Dunkirk Small Boats squadron. It was ancient, heavy and basic, but we were used to Condovers, so this became our floating hut for the week as we chugged up the Thames towards Lechlade.
Now, British summers are notorious – and this one was no exception – it poured down for half of the week, and much time was spent in the cabin below playing the card game known as ‘Hearts’, although we had our own pet name for it, which was derived from the expletive used when the Queen of Spades was placed on your winning trick!
These games were interrupted at regular intervals, when the lonesome soul nominated to steer the boat called down, ‘Lock Ahoy!’ and we all swarmed up the narrow wooden staircase to man the ropes. No, I am not suggesting we had to climb the rigging to release the sails, but someone had to leap from the slippery wooden deck onto the slippery muddy tow-path to loop the mooring ropes around the bollards and stop several tons of wooden boat from going precisely what it wanted to go.
Now, there were only two girls on board, and one of them was my girlfriend, the other was unattached. A group decision was therefore made at the start that we two were the most suitable candidates to occupy the Master’s cabin, with its double bed, while the rest were spread around the rest of the boat wedged into small single bunks, tucked away in odd corners. (I hasten to add that she was my fiancé at the time, and that we were living in the euphoria of the Swinging Sixties at the time!)
The cabin was not as grand as it sounds, it was in fact quite bijou, but it was comfortable. Above the head of the bed was a wide, shallow cupboard recessed into the wood panelling, rendered useless for storage by the fact that the bottom shelf had long since dropped into the abyss which was the bilge.
Down there lay a rich soup of sea-water, oil and other smelly things beyond the pale of human imagination. The combined effect of all of this . . . stuff . . . was an odour so familiar that, the first time I opened those cupboard doors, it hit me with the force of an Exocet missile!
Instantly I was a small child again – two, maybe three years old at most – visiting a neighbour’s farm in Devon with my mother. There stood rows of vast corrugated iron Nissen huts, each one holding thousands of battery chickens in their cages; rows and rows of cages, stacked one above the other. This precious flock had to be protected from the ravages of British winters (and quite a few British summers as well!), so paraffin heaters were distributed evenly along the walls.
That strange combination of the paraffin, the dust from the feed grain and the chicken shi . . . droppings! . . . was unique and stuck so deeply in my memory that it had every chance of never being found again – until, that is, the strange odour from that cupboard in the Master’s cabin on the boat, which was eerily similar, hit me.
And why, you might ask, was this chicken farm so traumatic for a small boy? Well, the farmer had a dog called Jip, a large black dog who was generally friendly to the human race, including small boys; to everyone, in fact, with the exception of foxes, which was how he earned his keep. This dog bounced playfully up at me, scratching my cheek, and I remember as clearly as if it was yesterday, sitting in the protection of my mother’s arms, sobbing into her chest – while all around me that unique smell wrapped the memory securely away in the deepest recesses of my mind, only to be re-awakened some fifteen years later.