Open Writing

I suppose that all our senses have the potential for awakening memories, but none more so than hearing and smelling. Certain smells have the power to transport me to some part of my past life like a time traveler. Wood smoke takes me immediately to the garden of the house where I grew up. My mother was the gardener, with unenthusiastic and inexpert help from the rest of the family.

Back then, when no thought was given to pollution, she always had a garden fire, and never let it go out, even in the face of wartime blackout regulations. It was a pretty boring fire for a young boy, with never a flame or even a glow – just a gentle column of blue smoke that had a wonderful potpourri smell of rose prunings and sage and lavender, or whatever plants and weeds she had been thinning out that day. After a day in the garden, her hands, her hair and her clothes had also absorbed the smell.

When she rubbed my chest with camphorated oil to treat my frequent chest colds, the combined smell of the oil and the wood-smoke on her hands held all the fascination of exotic spices for me. Nowadays, the only time I encounter the smell of wood-smoke is when I am near a pizza restaurant. Instantly, the sights and sounds of the strip shopping malls where most of them are located fall away, and I’m wandering the paths of my mother’s rose garden, or picking pole beans for dinner.

Other smells are just as affective, but command less pleasant memories: the acrid smell of cordite, stored in my brain from my time in the army; the pungent smell of hot steel being quenched in an oil bath; the stench of a coke oven; all the hydrocarbon smells of a refinery, and the very peculiar smell from my schooldays, of empty, unwashed milk bottles and chalk. In those days, schools and hospitals had their own disquieting aromas.

When I was quite young, before World War II, my parents always took an annual vacation at an English coastal town, usually Llandudno in Wales or Blackpool in Lancashire. We stayed at the same places each time, and always walked from the train station to our lodgings, our luggage having preceded us. Neither house we stayed in was very close to the sea, but I would catch the smell of the ocean almost as soon as we stepped off the train, and my excitement would build until I caught the first glimpse of it.

Though smells are quite powerful recollectors, for me it is sounds that have the power to delve into my remotest memories and immediately retrieve them with vivid images. Mrs. Evans’ house, where we stayed in Llandudno, was tucked into the lower slopes of Great Orme, a large outcrop of limestone rock whose sheer cliffs rise seven hundred feet from sea level.

The cliffs were home to perhaps thousands of seagulls of different species that wheeled in the up-draughts, and called constantly in an echoing cacophony, reflected from the cliff face.

My bedroom looked out to Great Orme, and the call of the gulls would pull me out of bed at first light to climb as far up the cliff as I could, all the while being dived on by the agitated birds. The closer I got to their nesting ledges, the closer they got to parting my hair. To this day, all I have to hear is one gull call as I awake on my boat, to feel the thrill of that childhood experience.

The mental archive of sounds that I draw on for time travel are many and varied, but some stand out. The cry of sea birds is probably top of the list, with a barking dog in the distance at night being a close second. As a child, I occasionally stayed with my maternal grandparents who lived in a particularly unpleasant and violent part of the city I grew up in. Everyone had a dog, sometimes for sport, but often for protection.

Many owners kept their pets outside in doghouses, and mostly the dogs didn’t bark unless they sensed an unfamiliar intrusion into their territory. But once a dog raised the alarm, it was soon taken up by others within earshot, and the point-counterpoint would continue until either an angry shout from the owner of the instigator quelled it, or the intruder, if there was one, left or was dealt with.

Lying in bed in my grandmother’s darkened house, my imagination would run riot with all the dramatic possibilities of what might have caused the barking. Sometime the morning would bring an explanation, with news of domestic violence or a drunken fight, but seldom of a murder or a break-in and theft as I had imagined. These people didn’t have much worth stealing. But just as the gull cries take me back to Wales, a barking dog in the night still has the power to make me feel danger.

I will likely never hear again the other sound I treasure, but just thinking about it takes me to rainy nights as a child. A railroad line passed about a mile away from my home, and about five miles away was a rail marshalling yard where freight trains were assembled. Normally we couldn’t hear the trains from our house, but on rainy nights, when the wind was out of a certain quarter, we would hear them start out from the yard, loaded with guns and tanks and munitions.

The engines that hauled the trains were steam-driven, and relied on good traction to get moving onto the inclined gradient of the main line. The engine would start out with a slow and deliberate puff…puff…puff…puff, followed by a long staccato series of puffs as the drive wheels lost traction on the wet rails. Then the agonizing sequence would be repeated, again and again until eventually the train gained enough momentum to keep rolling.

Lying warm and comfortable in my bed while the chilling rain beat on the windows, those boyhood nights were filled with tense anticipation. Would the train make it this time? When it failed I would urge it on with all the persuasion my young mind could muster, but often I would fall asleep, not knowing if or when it succeeded in getting underway.

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