My sister works in a perfume shop in Brighton, where they stock the perfume David Bowie wore. “Do you want to know what David Bowie smells like?” she asked us—opening the bottle. It smelled of pineapple, and smooth platinum, and quietly purring through New York, in summer, in an air-conditioned car, if your heart were made of emeralds. We sprayed ourselves with the smell of David Bowie, and walked around town, drunk, pretending to be David Bowie, which is an excellent and cheap hobby for the young to engage in, and one I can thoroughly recommend.
I have forty-seven perfume bottles in my bedroom, and every plant I grow in my garden must be scented. Even the trees, with their oozing amber sap, which you can cover your fingertips with and inhale. I love how scent can overwhelm you. It can make you utterly, brilliantly dumb. I like to be completely undone by it. Crushed. Made small.
There was a conversation on Twitter a couple of weeks ago—started by a writer called @mooseallain. You know—from the Hertfordshire Mooseallains—about what smells reminded people of their childhood.
Some were beautiful: “My mother’s perfume—when I smelled it, I knew everything would be all right.” “The smell of moss and wood when you’re climbing trees.” “Erinmore, and Old Holborn tobacco smoke—in sweet blue folds, through the living room.”
Others were so specific, small, and true they were like tiny plays: “Pencil shavings at the bottom of a school bag.” “Savlon on skinned knees.” “The smell of sweat, released by the heat of the iron on my dad’s work shirts.”
And some were just like a shopping list of a child’s life in 1986. “Matey bubble bath, Pears soap, calamine lotion and my dad’s Old Spice cologne,” one read: everything an eight-year-old would encounter, in one tiny bathroom cabinet.
The idea was a beautiful way to while away an afternoon, and the whole collection is now on Storify—a catalogue of smells that children were intoxicated and overwhelmed by in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Cola cubes. Their dad’s leather gloves. Chips. Plasticine. A newly opened packet of Panini stickers. Privet. Vimto, in a glass, on a pub table. The wooden seat of a swing heating up in the sun.
Who doesn’t want to think of the smells of their childhood? Childhood—when you have five senses working overtime, and your memory is just a big white bag waiting to be filled. And it stays filled: What adult now does not still essentially freak out over mown spring grass, or autumn bonfires; rotting seaweed, or the blind, white, echoing smell of first snow?
These smells smell just the same as they did the first time around: they never change, they never fade. They are a note that plays over and over in your life. They are the quickest route back to being just three feet tall—overwhelmed, in love with, or awestruck by, the world.
Were there fewer smells back then—or more? I cannot tell. Sometimes, it feels like my childhood world was made entirely of coal tar. Coal tar in the creosoted fences, covered in tiny spiders. Coal tar in the thick, medicine-y syrup of Vosene, and coal tar in coal tar soap. Coal tar in the tarmac being poured, black, onto the road: my mother and me the only ones who liked the smell—loved the smell—pausing at roadworks and sniffing it, lasciviously, as the rest of the family walked on, pretending to choke. Coal tar fills your lungs, and your head: it’s the smell of things getting done, being mended, being cleaned. It’s the smell of working-class estates in the 1970s and 1980s.
There were other smells, of course: the packed lunch box smell, of plastic, bread, crisps, an apple starting to ferment. The tin of Roses being opened on Christmas Eve—half chocolate, half squeaky, jewel-colored cellophane. Heinz tinned ravioli being heated on a gas hob, in a caravan, at dusk—door open to the Welsh mountains outside, and the rushing black river at the bottom of the valley. Kids running barefoot back through long grass, in the almost dark, to eat the hot, orange, tin-flavored squares.
The very specific smell of 1988—the year my parents bred Alsatian puppies. Puppies, mixed in with Jeyes Fluid—another coal tar smell!—and shit.
We kept the puppies in the old coalhole, and every time we opened the hatch, the ground would suddenly disappear beneath an ankle-high wave of tiny bodies, hysterical with wagging, and barks so small, the sound was bark bark bark. And they would lick your face, with their tiny milky new-earth-smell tongues, and you would think, “This is the newest and most alive thing on earth,” and you would squash them a bit, between the palms of your hands, because you were so excited.
I’d far rather think of the happiness of childhood smells than the sadness. Because the simple fact is there are things that you loved as a child you will never smell again—and that will make your heart ache if you dwell on it. People you knew—your nan, your granddad, the soft-lapped auntie who died—you will never breathe them in again, that unique mixture of their perfume and habits and bone. Not even the richest man in the world can re-create what it’s like to have his face pressed near to those who have gone, and to inhale. The absence of a scent can make you tearful with longing—or, on the other hand, just ruin a summer.
The year my father sheared all our lilac trees down to three feet high—“To invigorate them!” he said—they did not become invigorated, after all.
Every other summer, we had lived surrounded by their wild, drunk, intoxicating froth—it filled the house like light, birdsong, and magic—but this year, they sat, squat and sulky as a bathed dog, and steadfastly refused to bloom. The air remained plain, and undrunk. The house felt dark, and silent. And it was not summer without the smell of lilac. It was not summer at all that year.