The opening paragraphs of A Clergyman’s Daughter describe Dorothy, the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk, waking at 5.30, saying her bedside prayers and taking her cold bath, to be ‘met downstairs by a chill morning smell of dust, damp plaster, and the fried dabs from yesterday’s supper’ (Knype Hill, like Southwold, is by the sea; fish smells abound).
Having fetched her father his hot shaving water, Dorothy goes to church to prepare for ‘HC’, Holy Communion: ‘The church was very cold, with a scent of candle-wax and ancient dust’. There is only one communicant, as usual in mid-week, the decayed, well-off (but chronically mean) Miss Mayfill: ‘A faint scent radiated from her – an ethereal scent, analysable as eau-de-Cologne, mothballs, and a sub-flavour of gin’.
Dorothy prepares her father’s cooked breakfast and is given a message about one of the parishioners’ children dying, of cholera: ‘Well, Miss, it’s turning quite black. And it’s had diarrhea something cruel.’ The rector is eating. He empties his mouth with an effort: ‘Must I have these disgusting details while I am eating my breakfast?’ he exclaims. Peaceful, post-prandial plumes of smoke float upwards from the rector’s pipe. He does not visit the dying child.
Dorothy’s work day begins – ‘visiting’ parishioners. ‘She read chapters from the Gospels, and readjusted bandages on “bad legs”, and condoled with sufferers from morning-sickness; she played ride-a-cock-horse with sour-smelling children who grimed the bosom of her dress with their sticky little fingers.’ One visit in particular mines the pits of smell:
Dorothy knocked at the Pithers’ badly fitting door, from beneath which a melancholy smell of boiled cabbage and dish-water was oozing. From long experience she knew and could taste in advance the individual smell of every cottage on her rounds. Some of their smells were peculiar in the extreme. For instance, there was the salty, feral smell that haunted the cottage of old Mr Tombs, an aged retired bookseller who lay in bed all day in a darkened room, with his long, dusty nose and pebble spectacles protruding from what appeared to be a fur rug of vast size and richness.
The Pithers’ kitchen ‘was decently tidy, but oppressively hot, evil-smelling and saturated with ancient dust’. Dorothy goes to the bedroom to ‘anoint’ with Elliman’s embrocation Mrs Pithers’s ‘grey veined, flaccid’, naked legs: ‘The room reeked of urine and paregoric.’
Having done the round of visits her father should have done, Dorothy, released into the fields, experiences nasal ecstasy. It is orgasmic:
In Borlase the dairy-farmer’s meadow the red cows were grazing, knee-deep in shining seas of grass. The scent of cows, like a distillation of vanilla and fresh hay, floated into Dorothy’s nostrils.
Dorothy pulled a frond of the fennel against her face and breathed in the strong sweet scent. Its richness overwhelmed her, almost dizzied her for a moment. She drank it in, filling her lungs with it. Lovely, lovely scent – scent of summer days, scent of childhood joys,
The anthem to summer scent rises to a veritable rhapsody. But duty calls. Dorothy must go back to the church to make costumes, out of paper and glue, for the children’s annual play – on the execution of Charles I (Orwell had done something similar at the Hawthorns): ‘It was horribly hot in the conservatory, and there was a powerful smell of glue and the sour sweat of children.’
After Warburton’s attempted rape Dorothy’s mind goes blank. She wakes up in a shabby London street eight days later, in ragged clothes. In ‘the strange, dirty sub-world into which she was instantly plunged’, she picks up with street companions, Nobby, Charlie and Flo. ‘Hunger and the soreness of her feet were her clearest memories of that time; and also the cold of the nights, and a peculiar, blowsy, witless feeling that came of sleeplessness and constant exposure to the air.’ The quartet decide to walk to the summer hop fields thirty miles away to find seasonal work: ‘After getting to Bromley they had “drummed up” on a horrible, paper-littered rubbish dump, reeking with the refuse of several slaughter-houses.’ By contrast, the hop fields and the camp around them are redolent with more salubrious odours:
When the wind stirred [the hops] they shook forth a fresh, bitter scent of sulphur and cool beer. In each lane of bines a family of sunburnt people were shredding the hops into sacking bins, and singing as they worked; and presently a hooter sounded and they knocked off to boil cans of tea over crackling fires of hop bines. Dorothy envied them greatly. How happy they looked, sitting round the fires with their cans of tea and their hunks of bread and bacon, in the smell of hops and wood smoke! . . . the bitter, never-palling scent, like a wind from oceans of cool beer, flowed into your nostrils and refreshed you.
The ‘unspeakable’ earth ‘latrine’ was not refreshing.
When the picking season closes, at the end of September, Dorothy finds herself ‘dragged out and kissed by a young gypsy smelling of onions’ and thrown into a hop bin. It’s a ceremony, on the last day of picking. Back in London, virtually penniless, Dorothy takes refuge in a knocking shop, ‘Mary’s’. When she makes her way to her room, ‘A cold, evil smell met her.’ Soon she cannot afford to keep even Mary’s roof over her head. There follows a nightmarish interval sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square. For warmth, she and other vagrants huddle together on a bench:
They pile themselves in a monstrous shapeless clot, men and women clinging indiscriminately together, like a bunch of toads at spawning time. There is a writhing movement as the heap settles down, and a sour stench of clothes diffuses itself.
Mr Tallboys, a defrocked clergyman, rants about the noisome sulphur candles of Hell. ‘Don’t ole Daddy stink when you get up agen ’im?’ says Charlie. Next morning he is drawn to the nearby fishmongers: ‘Kippers! Perishing piles of ’em! I can smell ’em through the perishing glass . . . Got to fill up on the smell of ’em this morning.’ Smell is all they get.
After ten days of the horrible communism of the Square, Dorothy is installed as a schoolteacher at the awful Ringwood House Academy for Girls, Brough Road, Southbridge (Hayes). She is rescued – gallantly – by Mr Warburton, who offers marriage, but she cannot surrender. It is the smell of sex:
A wave of disgust and deadly fear went through her, and her entrails seemed to shrink and freeze. His thick male body was pressing her backwards and downwards . . . The harsh odour of maleness forced itself into her nostrils. She recoiled. Furry thighs of satyrs!
What, then, remains for Dorothy at Knype Hill? ‘At that moment there stole into her nostrils a warm, evil smell, forgotten these eight months but unutterably familiar – the smell of glue . . . The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer.’