My mother, Nita, had energy and vision and my father, Pete, had a sense of humour. Nita encouraged my father, who was a doctor, to carry out major renovations on our bathroom and Pete, who played along with all my mother’s suggestions, went to work, roping me in as his assistant. The revamp coincided with the period in the seventies when the carpets throughout my childhood home were orange or brown shag pile, and the curtains and chairs were either purple or acid-yellow upholstery velvet.
The enormous free-standing cast-iron bath was dragged out and in its place we installed a built-in rectangular plastic bath, a shallow, three-quarter-length model fitted to its edge with dark-brown shagpile that slowly rotted and moulted over the years until it finally went bald. I helped to paper the walls and ceiling, brushing paste over lengths of the brown, orange and white wallpaper my mother had chosen while Pete swore under his breath as he tried to make it stick to the ceiling.
I can remember my father’s face becoming tighter and more rigid as we went along so I tried to distract him with questions or statements intended to impress. ‘Did you know that the air is full of smell molecules?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Well, they go up your nose and then these things called olfactory receptor … things, can’t remember now … they recognise thousands and thousands of smells …’
‘That sounds a lot.’
‘Thousands, then. The olfactory reception neurons – see I remembered – send the information to these bulbs at the back of your nose and then they send that information to your brain and your brain goes, “I know what that is. That’s bacon.” Do you know what “olfactory” means?’
‘Yes.’
‘It means something to do with the sense of smell.’
‘Does it?’
‘You should try using it at work. If someone came in with a nose bleed you could really frighten them by saying they might have olfactory troubles.’
‘Hmm.’
The final hurdle with the wallpapering was trying to cut and fit the paper around the taps, which my father had not bothered to remove before papering. He was past the stage of being open to interesting scientific facts so I tried encouragement.
‘It looks really good, Dad, like in the magazines.’
He replied with a grunt.
‘I could put on more glue, eh.’
‘No.’
‘We could use PVA instead of paste. I’ve got some in my pencil case.’
‘No.’
‘It’s good where you put the paper round the taps. I like how it looks like starfish spikes where you cut it. You can hardly notice the gaps. We can patch them?’
Silence.
‘I love it. You’re so good at fixing stuff. It’s great, heaps better than it used to …’
‘Shush. It’s best you don’t talk any more.’
Nita placed stacks of House and Garden and bunches of dried flowers on the carpeted space at the head of the bath and, as time went on, the magazine pages wrinkled and stuck together and the flowers sprouted cobwebs and every time we shifted either the magazines or the flowers swarms of silverfish appeared, scuttling for safety, or slipping down the steep sides of the bath into the bottom, where they always died.
There were no shelves in the new bathroom cabinet we built under the sink. The pine louvre doors with white porcelain knobs – part Cornwall cottage, part Scandinavian chic – opened up to expose the plumbing and a large battered jute basket that contained everything from Vim and toilet rolls to lemon-shaped Bronnley soaps, bath salts, supplies of the medicinal shampoo my father made on prescription, hot-water bottles, dried natural sponges, crepe bandages, Dettol, potpourri and mouse poison.
The smell I most remember is that of my mother’s hair removal cream, Veet. Only back then I think it may have gone by the far jauntier name, Veet-O. On first sniff, the thick, pale pink cream was similar to baby lotion: a powdery, lightly scented floral-musk that could be described as ‘non-offensive’. But whereas baby lotion maintained its sweetness or innocence, Veet turned nasty. Its smell gained momentum and expanded, filling not only the bathroom but the entire floor of the house. The sweet opening appeared to rot and turn sour, like vomit, and before long the notes used to disguise the hair-removing chemicals took on an unsanitary aspect reminiscent of the smell surrounding the old metal incinerator units that were placed in the school toilets for the disposal of tampons and pads. The scent of Veet brought to mind bodily functions. It was unclean, like the scum and hairs floating on the lukewarm surface every time it was finally my turn for the bath water.
At Christmas a few patients, their families, or the pharmacist near his Brighton practice used to present my father with gifts to pass on to my mother, usually things like soap, bath salts or talc sets. As far as I could tell, he was never given anything to keep for himself – perhaps that would have seemed too familiar, lacking in respect. Apart from the soap, these presents were rarely used but the sight of them in the basket under the sink convinced me that they were the perfect solution to my own problems of finding birthday and Christmas presents for my mother. I shopped for her at the local chemist. It was a short bike ride from home, part of the Shirley shops that then included a dairy, a newsagent, a bicycle repair shop and a drapery cum school-uniform supplier. The shelves at the chemist had everything I could want: Potter and Moore talcum powder, Morny French Fern soap, Meadowsong deodorant, Holly Hobbie soap dishes and boxed sets of Lenthéric Tweed, Just Musk and Tramp perfumes.
The item that caught my eye, however, was packaged in the most exquisite shade of light turquoise, a colour that resembled blackbirds’ eggs. This pale blue-green immediately struck me as modern and fresh and despite having no idea what the product inside smelt like, I was sure I could imagine its scent based only on the colour of the outside. Experience had taught me that yellow smelt like lemons and honeysuckle, purple like musty violets or lavender, pink like roses and baby lotion, green like ferns and lily of the valley, and brown like coal tar or beer. It made sense, then, that this product, with its unique colour and unfamiliar name, had to smell exotic, tropical, like nothing I had encountered before. Fenjal. The soap came in a hard plastic shell that gave it an air of luxury. The bath crème was packaged in a turquoise bottle with square shoulders and a nipped in waist. The scent, as I recall, was a clean jasmine. The smell didn’t make me gag. It was pretty.
At that stage in my childhood, fragranced products either smelt bad (Veet) or nice (Fenjal), and I didn’t understand the difference between being pleasant and being interesting. Fenjal was strangely characterless, as if the jasmine had been scrubbed, dressed up, and told to behave – like the kittens in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Tom Kitten. Like polite kittens, Fenjal lacked spirit; from beginning to end the scent didn’t transform, it merely faded.
Sometime around the late seventies my parents’ close friend became manager of the Christchurch duty free shop, the closest thing to overseas travel that I knew. As a result my mother became the recipient of unwanted perfume samples, including a number of Guerlain mini perfume bottles. Inside geometric patterned black and white boxes, each small bottle was crowned with a rounded, cabochon-style cap of deepest sapphire blue. Within each bottle was a millilitre of golden-amber juice. The perfumes were called Mitsouko, Nahema and Shalimar. My mother shoved them, like everything else, into the basket beneath the sink.
With its absence of floral or feminine imagery, the plain zig-zag design on the packaging gave no indication of what to expect from each perfume. The names themselves meant nothing to me and so, with nothing to guide me, I carefully uncapped and sniffed each bottle. The first, Nahema, seemed rose-like. But, more than that, it conjured up a colour and texture, a very deep crimson velvet. I carefully placed the bottle on the edge of the bath and reached for Shalimar. This time, no colour came to mind. Now my thoughts went to food. I could almost taste this scent: it was like burnt custard poured over tinned apricots. Custard and apricots, that was Shalimar.
Mitsouko w
as next. Once again I went through the ritual of carefully unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my nose to inhale. This time I sneezed, almost spilling the contents over my hand. I sniffed again and nothing came to mind: no colour, no food, no texture, no shape, nothing I could locate within my experience or put a word to. It was as if someone had created a smell that hadn’t existed before. It was abstract, but structured. I placed my middle finger over the opening and tipped the bottle, capturing a small drop on my skin. I sniffed again. The perfume changed with each sniff and this time I thought I could detect dead flowers, stale orange juice that had been left out on a kitchen bench, and something dark and fusty. Its overall ugliness repelled me, reminding me of the rotting brown shagpile at the foot of the bath. Although it didn’t strike me as something I would want to wear, I dabbed a bit on my wrist and neck.
I remember I pocketed the Nahema and Shalimar but threw the Mitsouko back into the basket under the sink.
Several hours later I was standing over the boiling kettle, making a cup of tea for my parents, when I got a hit of the most incredible smell. I think now that the steam from the kettle must have realised the scent in all its complexity, and it suddenly brought to mind the smell of the cupboard beneath the stairs, a dark cellar where we stored a range of things including tramping packs, boots and parkas, through to old National Geographic magazines as well as the fermenting equipment for my father’s home brew and the strange concoctions of stout that exploded from time to time, leaving everything reeking of dark, malty beer. It was this combination of earthiness, cool stone and plaster, old carpet, hessian sacks, beer, wine, paper and the scent of campfires and bush held in our outdoor clothing that was now playing against my senses.
I poured the tea for my parents, then ran upstairs to the bath room, retrieved the perfume from the basket and took it to my room, where I hid it inside the stuffing of a small grey rabbit that was coming unstitched at the seams. I had made a real perfume discovery, oakmoss, and it was love.
Notes from a seventies bathroom: Veet, jasmine, rose, citrus, vanilla, oakmoss.
Of these notes oakmoss is the one I return to time and time again. Perfumes created from the citrus-orange bergamot, the resin gathered from the sticky flowering plant Cistus ladanifer, and oakmoss – a lichen that grows on oak trees – are referred to as chypres, and they are characterised by their complexity, their earthiness, their unwillingness to conform to stereotypes of femininity. They don’t bring flowers to mind; rather, they are skanky. Historically chypres tended to appear and gain popularity during periods following war or social or economic unrest. Mitsouko was developed in 1919, and although not the first chypre in production, it created a benchmark in perfume for modern, strong, independent women. A chypre built around oakmoss is probably what I need.
At the start of the seventies I began getting teased at school for being a Pom and talking funny. Despite being born in New Zealand, I had my father’s Mancunian accent, so words like ‘grass’ rhymed with ‘ass’ rather than ‘arse.’ In the playground classmates would circle me and call out words they wanted me to pronounce.
‘Say “pass”.’
To annoy them I’d reply, ‘Parse.’
‘Say “castle”.’
‘Carr-sel.’
‘Say “plant”.’
‘No, you say it!’
‘Say it or you’ll be sorry.’
‘Plarnt.’
‘How do you say “grass”?’ They would taunt me until I got so angry I’d yell, ‘Grass like you, ass’ and take a swing at them, at which point they’d yell, ‘Pommy, go home’ and run off.
‘I am home!’ I’d yell after them.
‘You’re a Pommy bastard!’
‘No I’m not!’
‘Yes you are! Pommy bastard!’
Their words always surprised me. First, because I had never felt ‘Pommy’, and I had no concept of home beyond the old house where I lived, which was less than five minutes’ walk from school. And second, because this rudimentary introduction to nationalism happened to coincide with a very important moment in my life, my reinvention as a French orphan. Having spent many Tuesday evenings in the old brick library in the middle of town researching perfume in encyclopedias and advertisements in glossy fashion magazines, I decided that I no longer wished to be anything but French. I adopted a new name, Madeline, based on the books of that title, and in the privacy of my room began speaking fluent French, an entire language built upon the ten or twenty words I remembered from a phrase book on my mother’s bookshelf. In order to be French I had to sound French, and I based my accent on two characters from television shows I regularly watched: Corporal LeBeau from Hogan’s Heroes and Lisa Douglas, the character played by Eva Gabor on Green Acres.
Being French suited me. At school it became a shield that protected me from all the attacks I had become accustomed to. Now, when classmates demanded, ‘Say “fast”’ I no longer had to attempt the awkward sounding ‘farst’ but could respond with a shrug of my Gallic shoulders and the elegantly superior ‘Je ne comprends pas’. This infuriated the bullies but at least it meant they now thought I was simply stupid and weird. This was easier for me to deal with than having to negotiate questions of identity related to being a contemptible ‘Pom’. In effect I had traversed the black and white territory of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and found myself in the no man’s land of crazy and unknowable, a grey area outside easy classification.
At home, being French allowed me time alone to experiment with perfume. As long as I continued to do my chores and homework, my new identity was initially accepted with little comment. In fact, my mother went so far as to weave phrases into our conversation, greeting me with ‘Bonjour! Comment allez-vous?’ when I returned from school or asking ‘Quelle heure est-il?’ when she began thinking about dinner.
With my pocket money I bought a jar of coconut oil from the local chemist and began a series of experimentations making ‘le parfum’. The first of these, named Le Bouquet, I made by adding carnation petals and lavender heads to coconut oil and heating it gently before straining it into an almost empty bottle of almond essence. The resulting blend smelt of almonds so I wrapped it up for my mother because I knew I wouldn’t wear it. I was a little more careful with my second scent. For this one I made a paste of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon taken from the food cupboard and mixed it with orange juice before adding it to the melted coconut oil. I called it L’Hiver and gave it to my mother as a way of easing my conscience over the almond perfume. One day, not long afterwards, I discovered the small perfume jar was empty and when I pressed my mother she admitted to having added it to a fruit cake she had baked for a morning tea.
Of all the ‘parfums’ I made, the one I was most proud of was called Joan of Arc. It was the first time I had based a perfume on a story and it marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with translating narrative into scent. I worked from an old book of children’s stories and made notes of the aspects of Joan’s life that sparked a smell response. For her childhood I wrote ‘barnyard hay’. Her religious beliefs and visions of saints suggested incense. The Siege of Orléans made me think of dirt, mud and blood. But, of course, it was the fire that really captured my attention, that and the little detail of her ashes being scattered in the Seine. To represent the heat of the fire I raided the pantry once more, collecting packets of black pepper, cayenne, paprika and chilli powder. Next I scraped charcoal dust and ash from the barbecue, adding it to my spice mix. After that I took a scoop of water from the creek that ran past our house and added several drops to my dry mixture. Finally I added it to softened coconut oil and gave the finished result to my father. He applied the perfume when he came home from work and I recall my intense disappointment as the black greasy smear formed a streak across his wrist. He held his arm up to his nose and sniffed and then, to my surprise, he applied a second streak, rubbed his wrists together and asked, ‘Am I doing it right? I’ve never had a proper perfume before.’ I was so grateful for hi
s kindness and the way he told me it was too precious for everyday use, that he would save it for special occasions to make it last longer. He was true to his word.
My year of being French ended when the flotilla of protest yachts led by the Fri set sail for Mururoa Atoll in 1973. In a moment of sudden irritation, my mother turned on me and asked why I was masquerading as French. Had I never heard of atom bombs or the Cold War? Why did I think she had moved to New Zealand in the first place? Had I no respect for the people of the Pacific? Was I really that stupid? It was a tirade that left me dumbfounded. Nothing in the world was worse than my mother’s disapproval and so, overnight, I went back to being myself. Neither British nor a proper Kiwi like my classmates, but definitely not French.
Notes from a place called ‘home’: lavender, carnation, mixed spices, charcoal and ash.
In fact, my parents never called themselves Poms or used the word ‘home’ to describe England. They never went back to visit or for a holiday; the country very rarely featured in our conversations. Pete, in particular, seldom expressed any interest in the place where he grew up. He didn’t talk about his childhood, and rarely, if ever, mentioned his family, who still lived in Manchester and were strangers to me.
My father intended to retire on his sixty-second birthday and my mother made loose plans to mark that date with a trip to Britain, before they grew too old to enjoy travelling to the places they had known and loved as a young couple. The special birthday was in September 1996 but on the fourth of July he returned home from work in agony and went into hospital. He was told he had stomach cancer and died twenty days later.
Pete was very neat in his ways, without being fanatical. When he came home from the surgery, he always tucked his bag into a dark corner beside the foot of the stairs. He placed it carefully, so that it stood upright and was always parallel with the bottom bannister. I doubt he ever took much notice of the way he lined up his bag; it was something he did automatically. On the day he came home sick, he dropped his bag in the hall and staggered up to his bed. The bag was on the rug, at an angle to the stairs, in a place it had never been before. It stayed there until after Carrie, by then a medical student, arrived to take him and my mother to hospital and then I carried it across to the foot of the stairs and placed it very carefully in its rightful place. It remained there for the next five years.
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