A compelling and poignant search for identity through perfume.
Granny Seren told me I had a natural talent for perfume making, and I believed her because she seemed to know what she was talking about and she never lied. It was Seren who introduced me to the idea of a signature scent.
As a university lecturer, Siân didn’t need a signature scent to know who she was. But, prompted by her job loss following restructuring of the humanities division – and the effect this has on her identity – she begins to construct a perfume of herself. Note by perfume note, referencing scent memories and recent events, she rebuilds herself, Scented.
CONTENTS
BASE NOTES
HEART NOTES
TOP NOTES
FOLLOW PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
For my former lecturers in the American studies, art history, English and history departments at Canterbury University, thank you.
And for Frances, my perfume mentor and friend.
The first perfume I ever made was for my granny Seren. It was called Gumnuts and I created it by placing a handful of gumnuts collected from the eucalyptus tree at the edge of her section into a jam jar half filled with water. The fragrance smelt of water but over time the liquid darkened and took on a dank note, slightly bitter, medicinal. I would smell it whenever I visited my grandmother and together we would dab the juice onto our pulse points – our wrists, necks, behind our ears – and inhale.
Granny Seren told me I had a natural talent for perfume making, and I believed her because she seemed to know what she was talking about and she never lied. It was Seren who introduced me to the idea of a signature scent. Some ladies, she said, only ever wear one perfume.
‘One perfume at a time, you mean?’
‘No, they always wear it, it’s part of them. It’s called a signature scent. When they walk into a room you know they’re there because you can recognise them by their scent. You smell them first and that makes you turn around, and then you see them standing on the other side of the room and you think,
“Oh yes, it is you. I thought so.” The perfume makes them visible, you see.’
I wasn’t sure I understood. ‘So, without that one perfume they wouldn’t know who they were?’
‘That’s right. They’d be incomplete.’
‘So if we both wore Gumnuts every day, for the rest of our lives, we would be whole, with no missing pieces?’
‘Yes, but it wouldn’t be your signature. It would be our signature. So, you’d have to think up a new perfume, just for you and no one else.’
‘And then I’d be whole and know who I was?’
Seren nodded. ‘Yes, my love. That’s right.’
Fascinated by what my grandmother said, I became more and more curious about perfume. I consulted encyclopaedias and borrowed library books and read everything I could get my hands on about perfume history, the growers in Grasse and the great perfume houses. I was captivated by the stories surrounding roses, jasmine and lavender, and the exotic names: Galimard, Houbigant, Coty, Guerlain and Chanel. Later, as a teenager I taught myself the basics of blending oils by studying fragrance pyramids, becoming familiar with base notes, heart notes and top notes. I sniffed, inhaled deeply and quizzed myself on scents, and after many years I was able to identify and recall many individual notes and oils, filing them in my memory like words from a new, exciting dictionary.
My perfume-making experiments consumed my weekends. I gathered up empty pill bottles and filled them with my fragrant experiments. I understood that when I sniffed a perfume the first thing that grabbed my attention and drew me in was the volatile and vibrant top notes, but that when I blended a perfume, creating it from scratch, it made more sense to start at the bottom with the slow-evaporating, deeper-scented base notes. By working that way I was able to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the overall structure of the perfume. I could also experience the various temporal shifts leading towards the drydown, the lingering twilight moment before the perfume disappeared.
As an adult I developed my own approach to perfume construction, one that made sense to me and helped to provide a framework for my creations. Base notes anchored my scent and therefore represented my past – my family background, my history and all my memories. These soul notes might not seek attention but they were always there, occasionally flaring up or entering my thoughts when I least expected. The heart notes symbolised all the things that added meaning and purpose to my life on a daily basis: my home, my work, colleagues, my interests such as perfume making and reading. The heart notes represented my centre, and carried my story, linking my past to my future. The top notes were the spark and dazzle, the flourish. They could be sharp and challenging, but they provided energy and they offered hope.
Recently I lost my job. After fourteen years as a university lecturer in the American studies department I was made redundant. The humanities were restructured and not only was I shoved aside but the department itself disappeared. Apparently, under the management for change model, it was no longer relevant or economically viable. It had no future.
When I was employed, I didn’t need a signature scent to know who I was. I was a smart, professional, financially independent middle-aged woman. But lately, I’ve felt disembodied and confused, a collection of broken parts, and Granny Seren’s description of the incomplete woman keeps coming back to me.
So, I will create a signature scent. I plan to build it, this perfume of my self, from the base notes up. The method will be simple. Identifying one note at a time, adding and subtracting notes as I go along, I will sniff and test my way to completion. The perfume will gather together all the strands of my life and tell me who I am. And when I have finished I will recognise myself once more. I will be Siân, scented.
BASE NOTES
AS A CHILD, I SPENT MANY AFTERNOONS PLAYING ALONE IN my grandparents’ Waltham garden, a small strip of damp turf overshadowed by the Christchurch gasworks. Granny Seren was short and fat, compact, with bright white hair. She was deaf – a result of being sent to work as a weaver in the Lancashire mills when she was fourteen. The bulky battery of her hearing aid was pinned and tucked into her bra and because of that her blouse had a strange angular outline. I was fascinated by the mystery of my grandmother’s mechanical inner workings, a feature emphasised by the beige-coloured, twisted wire that connected the old-fashioned aid to her ear-piece.
When Granny Seren had time she would join me outside and we would stare in silence at the gasometers with the same kind of bewildered wonderment that movie actors adopt when looking at alien spaceships.
‘It’s so stinky,’ I’d complain.
‘The gas?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah. It reminds me of when we moved to Manchester to live with my aunt after my dad died. The air was so dirty compared to Wales.’
‘I don’t understand how the towers can go up and down. They were tall last week, and now they only reach halfway up.’
‘That’s true, cariad,’ said my granny.
Every single time I visited I asked my grandmother to explain how the gas-holders were able to change height, but she didn’t know and she wasn’t bothered. ‘It’s science,’ she’d say, before leading me inside to the kitchen where a saucepan of black tea sat simmering on the stove.
At the edge of the section was a large eucalyptus that shed long strips of red and silver bark which I sometimes persuaded my grandparents to twirl like a skipping rope while I dashed from one side to the other. When we all ran out of puff we would go and rest beneath the tree, and while my granny caught her breath and my granddad Bert finished a cigarette, I would crush the crisp leaves in my fingers and inhale, filling my lungs with the scent. ‘Inhale’ is really too slight a word for what I did. I’d snort the air th
e way addicts hoover up cocaine through a straw, and I’d encourage my grandparents to do the same. From starting with bark and leaves, it was only a matter of time before I fixated on the gumnuts, prising them open with Granny Seren’s nail file in the hope that fragrant oils would infuse the water in which they soaked.
In my mind, the smell of eucalyptus will always be associated with heat and summer, clean laundry – and my grandmother. A blue shimmering haze, parched, dusty ground, long strips of silver and salmon-toned bark, gumnuts and brittle leaves. This memory of dazzling summer light and heat is false. For most of the day the garden was cast in deep shade and the air was gritty and damp. But the actual gum tree and the laundered sheets were real.
On washing day Granny would poke the hose from her broken-down washer-wringer through the laundry window, directing the soapy water towards the grid below the downspout. The water gushed in spurts, splashing onto the earth, turning the rock-hard dirt into a rivulet of foam and as she worked, Seren would murmur, ‘That’s nice. That’s right.’
My grandmother prided herself on being the seventh child of the seventh child, and many of the stories she told me centred on her firm belief in her own psychic and magical powers, passed down to her from her mother, and her mother’s Irish mother, who was, in Granny Seren’s words, ‘a proper gypsy queen’. One day, after listening to one of Granny’s more outlandish tales, I must have expressed a hint of scepticism that took her by surprise. In the story a young Seren rode a horse to a glade carpeted in hyacinth and bluebells, which she gathered up into large bundles and placed in a silk bag. She then delivered it to a wise witch who wanted the flowers for a magic potion that would transform the colour of cows’ eyes from brown to blue. The only part of the story I found unbelievable was that my granny could ride a horse. Given that she was more or less the spitting image of the grandmother in the Giles cartoons that Bert laughed over, it was unimaginable to me that she could get up on a horse, let alone ride one.
Rather than being offended by my response, Granny Seren took me by the hand and whispered, ‘Come with me. I’ve something to show you.’ She led me into her bedroom, a dark place with black mould on the ceiling, and made me sit on the bed while she went to her tall cupboard, lifting down a shoe-box from its shallow top shelf. Inside the box, carefully nestled in thick tissue, was a small glass bottle with a silver top. The colour of the glass was remarkable: it resembled a fluorescent yellow-green highlighter pen, though I could not have made that comparison in the 1960s. Through the glass I could see a small amount of liquid, which shifted slowly like thick syrup from one side to the other when the bottle moved.
‘You may hold it but be careful,’ said Granny, in a theatrical tone of voice that gave me shivers. ‘This perfume bottle was given to me by the witch and it has magical powers.’
I believed it. It looked magical.
‘The bottle you are holding is made from uranium glass,’ she continued. ‘It glows in the dark.’
‘How does it glow in the dark?’ I asked.
What happened next was even harder for me to believe than the horse story, the witch or the magical bottle. Seren simply shrugged and said, in her ordinary voice, ‘I don’t know.’
‘But how can you not know?’
‘Well, I never asked,’ she said.
And that was that. Granny placed the bottle on top of her dressing table, gathered up the box with its tissue and left the room.
I must have sat on the bed for an hour, waiting for the glow. Nothing happened. From that day on, I’d ask Granny if she had seen the glass glow and she’d reply, ‘No. The time has not yet come …’ or words to that effect. I spent hours sitting in the dark, watching, but never once did anything happen.
My sister Carrie was born when I was seven years old. Because she was a restless, colicky baby, I spent even more time at my grandparents’ place in order to give my mother a break. Perhaps because of our age difference, and the fact I was away from home so often, I found it difficult to bond with Carrie. When we were together I noticed her smell, a mixture of baby powder and acrid, milky vomit. It was a smell I associated with sickness, hers. I’d talk or sing to her but she would cry and I never knew how to make her stop. I think I was scared of the force of her emotions compared with my own. She was loud and demanding whereas I was quiet. She drew people into her orbit and was often the centre of attention while I preferred quiet spaces and solitude. Later, she was outgoing and extroverted, surrounded by noisy groups of friends and drawn to team sports. As an older sister I loved her and admired her confidence but we were never close.
Seren died from lung cancer when I was nine, and shortly afterwards my granddad got a job making ovens at the Atlas factory off Manchester Street. At the start of the seventies, when he worked at the factory, an advertisement appeared on television for ‘new look’ Atlas cookers. The ovens were modern, but from the advertising you’d almost think they were futuristic. They featured a lift-up door, tilting hob, porcelain finish, electric sockets and easy to clean features. By contrast, Seren and Bert’s stove was ancient. It had three hobs, rusting around the edges, and a small oven with a temperature gauge on its door. When the oven was turned on at the wall it hummed and vibrated and, for that reason, I was never allowed to touch it.
After Seren died my granddad had to learn to cook. I stayed with him often enough to know that once a week he’d make a big pan of porridge that he poured into a roasting dish and placed in the oven to keep. Every morning he would take out the roasting pan, slice off a wedge of porridge and fry it in mutton fat on top of the stove. He’d serve the porridge on a plate, eating it with a knife and fork between negotiating his pieces on the chessboard permanently set up on the table beside him. He ate slowly, and by the end of his breakfast he had usually managed to enter his next move onto one of the cards of his postal chess games.
The porridge was incredibly greasy from the fat he used and so salty that it made me gag. As a treat, therefore, he added a dollop of jam to my serving but it really didn’t improve the taste. I have no idea how he managed to eat it day after day; maybe being a smoker helped. Perhaps cigarettes cut the saltiness, or maybe he’d damaged his tastebuds as a result of his pack-a-day habit? Without fail there would be a strand of grey hair in the porridge. The tip would surface as I ate and when I pulled on it the hair would detach itself slowly in a thread of greyish gloop. If I couldn’t eat what was in front of me, Bert would take my plate and scrape the leftovers out for the canaries he kept in an aviary attached to the back of the garage.
After feeding the canaries we would often make a circuit of the flower beds: two strips of rose bushes either side of the front path and a small circular bed cut into the lawn at the back. Since Seren’s death Bert had become more interested in roses, especially those that offered a connection to ‘home’ such as the fragrant red rose of Lancaster. For a short time his rose hobby happened to coincide with my own interest in the blooms. At school we were being read Helen Keller’s Teacher, a paperback with an image of Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, on the cover. In the illustration, Annie held the child’s hand under a stream of water pumped from a well while tapping the letters W.A.T.E.R. into her palm. It was a pivotal scene in the story but not one that made the greatest impression on me. I was far more interested in trying to negotiate my way around the rose beds by scent, with my eyes tightly shut. I was certain Helen Keller could have done it so I saw no reason why I shouldn’t give it a go.
I walked slowly, one foot shuffling forward, my arms extended in front of me like a character from a classic horror movie. As my foot perceived the edge of the path I would lean forward and sniff, often losing my balance in the process.
From nearby I’d hear Bert exclaim, ‘Steady on. Watch the garden’, and I’d have to remind him to not talk because I was trying to be deaf as well as blind. He would grumble quietly for a bit but then my stumbling around would get the better of him.
‘Careful now, don’t go puttin
g your great big foot on the “Slater’s Crimson China”.’
‘Shush. I need quiet. I can’t smell my way around if you keep talking. I have to concentrate.’
‘That’s a special rose,’ he’d say. ‘Probably the first to reach New Zealand.’
‘With the Chinese?’
‘No, with the missionaries.’
As I became more familiar with the paths and better at peeking through almost-closed lids without being detected by my eagle-eyed granddad, I would call out scents. ‘This one smells like jam. This one is sweet. And this one is …’
‘Just right,’ joked Bert, who never took my experiments as seriously as I did.
At Christmas one year, Bert passed me a lumpy parcel wrapped in newspaper and when I opened it I discovered, to my delight, that it contained an old World War Two gas mask. ‘There you are, kid,’ he said. ‘You can wear it when you help me with the blood and bone.’ While I stood by in my gas mask, Bert made fertiliser, mixing potash with dried blood, iron sulphate and sulphate of ammonia. His ‘secret ingredient’ was Epsom salts, taken from the bathroom cabinet, but I was always far more interested in the large sack of dried blood kept inside the door to his garage. He liked to tease me that he had brought it out from Manchester with him and that it contained the blood and bones of an Englishman. I believed he would bring dried blood all the way from England, via Panama, but I doubted the blood itself was from an Englishman. From my limited knowledge of world history and events I assumed it had to be from a foreigner.
I never got the opportunity to get to the bottom of the blood and bone story because one day, when I called in on the way home from a friend’s, I discovered Bert dead, lying on the floor by the oven. A knife covered in porridge was next to him, and a frying pan of porridge still on the hob. He’d been electrocuted.
Notes from my grandparents: gas, eucalyptus, soap, oats, rose and blood. It’s a start, I suppose, though not the notes I would normally consider for a perfume base. They lack the weight and depth I desire for my foundation. But, I won’t dismiss them out of hand.
Scented Page 1