The Transporter

Which sense is the most powerful generator of memories? Although we might think that sight or hearing would be the most obvious contenders given that we rely so heavily on them on a daily basis, it is in fact smell. Studies have proved that smells are more likely to be evocative of a time and/or a place than either a sound or a picture associated with that place or time. I'm going to stretch this a little to include taste which, obviously, is very closely associated with the olfactory sense. In that way, I can demostrate the power of smell/taste as a transporter back to a point in the past by reference to Proust's 'À la Recherche du Temps Perdu', a spawling work which starts with the narrator's 'involuntary memory' as he calls it being triggered by the taste of a madeline cake: on tasting the cake, he is taken back to his childhood and the madelines served by his aunt. Proust, presumably without the benefit of evidence from research studies, understood the power of the olfactory and taste senses to recreate a time and a place so strongly, in such a real way.

When it happens to you, it is quite spine-tinglingly...'shocking' would be the word I would use: I am so taken aback at the completeness of the memory recreated by a smell or, more likely, a combination of smells. I have three examples - two from the past and one from only a couple of days ago.

Gardening
Just after Elaine and I left University, we found a council flat in Brixton. It was a one bedroom flat in a concrete sprawl called (ironically!) the Angell Town Estate. This place would go on to generate a very mixed bag of memories itself: it was our first 'proper' home and I was playing in a band throughout our time there (good memories) but we were broken into three times and mugged twice, once on the doorstep of the flat (definitely not so good). One day in the summer, I was pulling weeds out of the concrete trough that formed a window box on the edge of our first floor balcony. Elaine was inside putting together some lunch. The windows of the flat were open as it was a warm, sunny day. The weeds mainly consisted of clumps of grass that had taken up residence in the window box and, sometimes, in attempting to pull out a clump of grass, the grass would break off in my hand leaving the roots in place but releasing that unmistakable 'freshly-cut grass' smell in the air. At that moment, the aroma of ham salad sandwiches combined with that of the cut grass and I was taken back to a summer's day when I would have been seven or eight, my dad mowing the lawn of the house in Ealing, me collecting grass clippings and mum making ham salad sandwiches. Everything was there - I could visualise the back of the house, feel the warmth of the sun and hear my mum ask if she should bring the sandwiches out to us.

Hardware
Fairly soon after we moved to Ramsbottom, I was heading into Bury to go the B&Q for something. I can't recall what it was and I also can't recall whether or not I had already tried the hardware shop in Rammy. At Holcombe Brook, as I started to head for Longsight Road, I notice a 'proper' hardware store, the kind that has all sorts of goods displayed outside the shop from galvanised bins and wooden stepladders through to brooms and rakes. I thought I'd drop in and see if they had what I needed. As I approached the door, I noticed a sign on the glass declaring that the shop stocked paraffin. As I stepped across the threshold - boom! - the smells of the wood, of the metal of screws, locks, hasps and so forth, of the dust in the air and, most importantly, of the paraffin, all combined to take me back to Ealing once more. We used to have a paraffin heater at that time and I was often sent to the hardware shop on the high street to collect a gallon of paraffin (no worries about a child buying and handling flammable liquids back in the day!). That shop of my childhood smelled exactly like the shop I was now standing in. Again, the memories - plural - evoked were more than those associated with buying paraffin: it was the wider childhood memories related to that trip to the hardware shop - the coldness of the room that necessitated the use of the heater, trimming the wick on the heater so that it didn't smoke, even the tool used to trim it!

Wholefoods
We went into a whole food store in Brighouse last week. It sold orgainc veg, bread, pulses and grains bagged on the premises (I would guess) as well as non-food items such as 'natural' cosmetics and cleaning products. As we stepped through the door, I was immediately transported back to The Balham Food & Book Co-Operative in 1985, the first place I worked when it became clear that music superstardom wasn't going to happen quickly enough to provide actual money in our lives! That mix of the smells of the veg and the bags of pulses, herbs and muesli combining with the floral notes of the soaps and all mixed with the faint aroma of earnestness dragged me back 30 years in an instant. That sudden arcing of a spark between the 26 year old me in Balham and the 56 year old me in Yorkshire suddenly brought a smile to my face.