Bring back the good old smells, but leave out the garlic!

PAUL JOHNSON

L

st week a fine bouquet of white roses was delivered. Before the messenger had run down the steps of my house, the blooms were filling the hall with their soft scent. I mention this because it is so rare. Where have all the smells gone? Flowers are now cultivated for their longevity, appearance and size, and their perfume has been bred out of them. Some still keep their fragrance — sweet peas. the best of all now. I think, lilac, honeysuckle and jasmine, which Shelley called 'the sweetest flower for scent that blows'. But the tuberose which he linked with it has gone odourless, with the vast majority of flowers you buy or even pick. My childhood memories are of the overpowering smell of a florist's shop. or waking up in the country in midsummer with all the windows open and finding the bedroom redolent with garden bouquets. Flower smells were strong in those days; they clung. Tom Moore could truthfully write:

You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.

Nothing is more evocative than smells. Suetonius has the Emperor Vespasian — who first taxed public lavatories and after whom, until recently, the Paris pissoirs were called — say. 'Money has no smell.' How wrong he was! I recall the first time I sold a piece to a New York magazine and was paid with a thick wodge of newly minted $100 bills. I can inhale their rich, plasticiney whiff even now. In the late Forties, it was not only the light of Provence or north Italy which was entirely different when you woke up in the sleeper: when you stepped on to the platform at Nice or Ventimiglia or Domodossola — magical names! — the smell of the south filled your lungs and senses with intoxication. Now you have to go to Asia or Africa to sniff the difference (though I must admit Istanbul harbours choice pongs). And airports smell the same all over the world, of that deadly aroma, anti-smell. They remind me of Fr Ronald Knox's remark. 'This room smells suspiciously of never having been smoked in.'

Where will it all end? It is not just Authority which is killing smells, on the specious grounds that odours signify decay or disease; we are killing our natural body-smells too. In England 93 per cent of women and 88 per cent of men now use deodorants daily. I admit I do not miss the Thirties stink of the lumpenproletariat going about its business; nor do I savour the occasional mephitic wave of multiculturalism on the 52 bus. But

it cannot be right that we should all smell of chemicals, however benign. Women especially should have a detectable aroma of their own not wholly composed of eau de toilette but expressive of their individual bodily persona. For such delights I turn to Robert Herrick, the great muse of smell, especially when he is dwelling on the lubricious olfaction of his girlfriend Julia:

Wo'd ye oyle of Blossomes get? Take it from my Julia's sweat: Oyl of Lillies. and of Spike. From her moysture take the like: Let her breathe, or let her blow, All rich spices thence will flow.

He asks 'Wo'cl ye have fresh Cheese and Cream?/Julia's breast will give you them.' And he adds, 'And if more, each Nipple cries/To your cream, here's strawberries.' His quiet eroticism climaxes with his ten lines 'Upon Julia Unlacing Herself. When she loosens her bodice, says he, the 'passive Air' is filled with musks and ambers, camphor, storax, spikenard, galbanum, like the scent which 'fills heaven and earth' when `to Jove great Juno goes perfumed'. I had exactly the same experience when, aged 15, I first stood in close proximity to an amorous woman disrobing. As she was a bold farmer's daughter of 18, who had taken me in hand, there was no whiff of aloe vera, merely the ardent pungency of female youth. Strawberries and cream indeed!

Why should not people smell of themselves? The results are often memorable. John Betjeman records that Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn of Camberley exuded 'mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells'. Baroness Budberg told me, and everyone else, that H.G. Wells smelt of honey, though when I checked this with another of his lovers, Rebecca West, she said sharply, 'Yes, honey-skunk. I recall when I first went into the set of rooms on Kitchen Staircase, taken by a friend of mine at Magdalen in 1946, and caught a distinctive redolence. I asked, 'What's that smell?' The reply came: 'Don't you know? That's Oscar.' They had been his set, 70 years before. (They are now a sanitised `Function Room'.) Lloyd George smelt not of goats as his enemies maintained but of 'tweedy champagne', so Beaverbrook said. Work that one out. And then there is the case of St Hilarion, who could determine a man's vices simply by sniffing his person and his clothes. This primitive Sherlock Holmes could also, so St Jerome claimed,

detect virtues by such a method. But that one is less willing to believe.

Men and women, I admit, have always used artificial aids to mask smells that they don't like. Burning flesh was regarded as peculiarly distasteful, even in deep antiquity, yet it was common, as sacrificing animals to the gods was ubiquitous. Incense was introduced to make such rituals less noxious, and high priests and priestesses sprinkled their bodies with mixtures of sweet-smelling flowers and oil. Hence the word perfume or per fumum, 'through the sacrificial smoke' (or so it is said). Mrs Rodd always said, 'Say scent, not perfume', the latter being, she maintained, 'a mark of suburban gentility, unless [laughing] you pronounce it in the French way'. A grand French lady once told me that scent should be 'just enough so that you miss it when it is not worn'.

Good smells are distinct, individual and intellectually evocative. They serve to link together memory and music, half-forgotten visions, books and experiences just below the surface of recollection. I have only to hear the first ten bars of Swan Lake to sense the slightly dusty smell of velvet seats in an old-fashioned opera house. Mendelssohn's 'Hebrides Overture' brings back to me the blend of herring and heather-honey, salted by sea breezes, which transport me to Kyle of Lochalsh. The smell of a pile of new books has me back at school on the first day of term, and the distribution of textbooks: Hall and Knight's Algebra, Liddell and Scott's Greek dictionaries. Half-forgotten smells are the peculiar richness of the royal-blue ink in one's first Parker pen, or the whiff of Blanco or Brass°, which has me, in an instant, back in Bushfield Camp outside Winchester, preparing for Adjutant's Inspection. We carry institutional smells with us all our lives. And buildings have smells, so that, in a really old house, slowly added to over long ages, you can detect whether you are in the 17th-century core, or the 18thand 19th-century extensions, by an underlying aromatic essence.

Yet in the general attempt to banish smells, one condiment is increasing its power. I mean garlic, that sovereign enemy of civilisation and good order, or odour. Even Herrick drew the line there:

Jane is a girle that's pritte; Jane is a wench that's wittie; Yet, who wo'd think.

Her breath do's stinke, As so it doth? That's pittie.