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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Smell is the most emotional and evocative of our senses: it can bring back memories faster and with more immediacy than a photograph – so why is it so little understood? Armed with a hungry curiosity and a willingness to self-experiment, author Barney Shaw goes in search of the hidden meanings of smells. Using plain words to describe what he finds, he investigates the chemistry, psychology, history and future of this underappreciated sense. Journeying around boatyards, perfume shops and memories, Shaw opens your nose to the world, breaking down "chords" of smells into their component notes and through them revealing new ways of understanding the spaces through which we move. An investigation into the biology, psychology and history of smell, and a search for effective ways to put into words scents that we instantly relate to, but find strangely ineffable, THE SMELL OF FRESH RAIN includes a 200-entry thesaurus of succinct descriptions of common smells.
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THE SMELL OF FRESH RAIN
THE UNEXPECTED PLEASURES OF OUR MOST ELUSIVE SENSE
BARNEY SHAW
To Frances
Contents
CHAPTER 1
The Smell of Fresh Rain
‘In this hall the youth of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of Young England and boiled beef and carrots.’
P.G. Wodehouse – Right Ho, Jeeves
Smells are inarticulate. We struggle to understand what they mean. We struggle to put them into words. It is common to experience what psychologists call a tip-of-the-nose effect: we sniff something; we have a fleeting sensation that we almost recognise the smell; we cannot quite pin it down; and then we breathe in a new breath and a new smell. That smell was on the tip of our noses, but, to our frustration, we did not have time to place it. Even if we can recognise it, it is hard to describe it. We do not seem have a readily accessible vocabulary to describe it, as we would if we were seeking to describe a colour or a sound. There is no common language for smells, and we are driven, like P.G. Wodehouse, to vague, hand-flapping descriptions, using phrases such as ‘sort of heavy’. Or we resort to feeble tautologies such as ‘these capers smell … caperish’. Or we use grand but uninformative words that disguise our inarticulacy like ‘indescribable’, ‘characteristic’, ‘unmistakable’, ‘evocative’, ‘insidious’.
It is not that the sense of smell has only dull things to tell us. It is not like a kick on the shin, which our sense of touch instantly recognises as a kick on the shin, and our memory tells us will get worse before it gets better and there is no more to be said about it. Smells have meanings. They are often charged with emotion. They are often full of nostalgia. They bond us to our nearest and dearest. They often seem to be curiously related to the smell of something quite different, which ought not to smell the same, as if there were connections between things that are hidden and inner meanings that are not obvious to the eye. They sometimes give us a shock of familiarity, or a shock of unfamiliarity. Occasionally a smell will transport us to our distant past – to our first school playground or a warm day in some childhood room – and will bring it alive more vividly and insistently than our other senses can. We often want to pin down what the smell is of, what it is like, what point in our lives it harks back to. The meanings are frustratingly close to hand but difficult to bring to mind.
It is not that smells give us no pleasure. Think of some of the delightful aromas of cooking: of newly baked bread, of grilling on charcoal, of the full-blooded smell of a delicatessen with salamis and cheeses and marinated olives. Think of the smells of cleanliness: of clean linen, of ironing and airing cupboards, of beeswax polish. Think of the scents of Christmas: of mandarin oranges and pine needles and roasting chestnuts. Think of the smells of summer: of beaches and suntan lotion, of mown grass and hay. Think of all the varieties of smoke: the smoke of autumn bonfires, of winter coal, of cigars, of barbecues. Think, should it be your pleasure, of the special smells of very new babies or very old cars, of a timber yard or a building site, of a pub. The variety of delightful smells is almost limitless, and the human nose, however modest we may feel about our olfactory powers, is an instrument of exceptional discrimination.
Many of us are diffident about our ability to detect smells. We might assume that our sense of smell is poor, and that we are defective in this domain. We tend to assume that it takes a special creature – a sniffer dog or a perfume expert – to make sense of smells. We tend to be puzzled by smells and to feel that it is beyond us to understand them properly. But if we do this, we do not give our noses the credit they deserve. Most of us have noses that are really rather brilliant, that can detect minute traces of chemicals that are too tiny to be visible or audible or touchable. Without knowing it, we are using our noses every day to interpret the world around us in the finest detail, and we are unconsciously discriminating between aromas with the greatest subtlety.
I have lived with my sense of smell for years without understanding what it tells me. Instead, I have been puzzled in many different ways. It was a puzzle to me to find a simple smell transporting me 40 or 50 years back in time, instantly and vividly at a single sniff. It was a summer afternoon a couple of years ago. I stepped outside to the smell of fresh rain. A summer shower was falling. Fat rain drops landed on warm tarmac and earth. The gutters were running with water, in which unusually fat bubbles wobbled towards the drain. Rafts of leafy material, the casings of leaves newly shed by lime and plane trees along the street, wavered along with the water and here and there formed temporary dams. The air smelled of rain on newly moistened earth and leaves, a smell which instantly transported me to my childhood.
I was back in that suburban street where my parents had their house, where 50 years ago the fat raindrops of a summer shower made unusually fat bubbles wobble down a similar gutter towards a similar drain. Not only did the smell remind me of the smell all those years ago, not only did it remind me of the look of that childhood street – the fat bubbles and the grey-green granite kerbstones and the Ford Zephyr parked in the street. It revived also in the same instant an internal memory bringing all the senses into action – the sensation of being seven years old, close to the wavering bubbles, with bare knees and scratchy woollen clothes. Like a seed that lies dormant underground for decades until brought to the surface by a plough, the olfactory memory lies dormant in our heads until a passing whiff makes it germinate. The memories of smells seem to last longer and emerge fresher than memories of sights or sounds, while those senses give us memories that become muddled and faded over time, and do not carry so powerful a charge of recollection and meaning.
There are more puzzles about the sense of smell. I have been puzzled that there are many smells which give a nudge of recognition, but which, unlike the scent of fresh rain on warm earth, cannot be placed. The smells of the street, for instance, waft a succession of changing aromas into my nose as I walk along, aromas which I am on the verge of recognising, which are on the tip of my nose, which might be perfume or privet or catmint or fox or rubbish bin, but are just out of reach. It is as if my sense of smell is not quite alert enough to interpret the scents as they waft into and out of my nose, as if it is always just below the level of conscious attention. It is a puzzle that, although my brain is interested in recognising such smells, and is equipped to do so, it does not know how to speak the language of smells. I want to know whether my sense of smell is simply incapable of speaking that language, or whether it is a matter of practice and effort to do so.
I have been puzzled that there are aromas – many of them – which I can recognise at a sniff, and can successfully place, but I cannot describe. I think, for instance, of bracken: the archetypal smell of damp common land in the British Isles, a fragrance that is strong and distinctive and moving. I can recognise the scent of bracken without hesitation; it makes me think straight away of the fringes of open hills and moors where it grows. But I cannot find the words that fit the smell of bracken and distinguish it from the smell of other green things. More than that, I cannot summon up the smell of bracken in my head. The scent of bracken is more evocative than the sight of it, but whereas I am able to summon up the look of the thing, I am unable to summon up the smell. I can visualise a single frond or a hillside of bracken; I can summon up the feel of running a frond of bracken through my fingers; but the smell is just out of reach.
I have been puzzled too that there are smells which I can recognise and place and (after a fashion) describe, and which have affinities with quite unrelated things. Books, for instance, have their scents which are varied and interesting. The smell of a cheap comic is quite distinct from the smell of a paperback and different again from the smell of a glossy coffee table book. It is no surprise that the smell of these books has a component of damp wood and ink, but why should there also be touches of vanilla, of china clay and of mushrooms? There are, it seems, some hidden meanings beneath the main smell of books. I would like to know how to read those hidden meanings.
Bookish smells, library smells, show up two of the gentle pleasures of the sense of smell. First there is the pleasure of that musty scent, faintly sweet like vanilla, faintly grassy, an occasional whiff of leather and of earth. It is familiar, faded and evocative; small wonder then that you can buy an eau de cologne called ‘Paperback’. Second, there is the pleasure that comes because the library smell is telling us hidden facts about the chemistry of books. The bookish scent is the product of several hundred chemical compounds given off in tiny quantities by the paper, the ink, the glue and the binding of books. The compound lignin, which is present in all wood-based papers, is closely related to vanillin, the synthetic flavouring that took over from expensive vanilla imported from such exotic places as the Comoro Islands and Madagascar. As it breaks down, the lignin gives old books that faint vanilla scent. Compounds deriving from pine tar are used to make paper more impermeable to ink, and contribute to the musty, camphorous smell of books. An earthy mushroom odour is caused by other fragrant molecules related to alcohols present in the paper. Another earthy smell comes from the china clay used to give gloss to glossy papers.
Then there are the puzzles of flavour. A runny cheese is one of the most delicious flavours and one of the foulest smells. It smells like damp socks in a gym locker, but it tastes wonderful. However, taste it when you have a severe cold and you will perceive hardly any flavour and hardly any smell. A coffee bean, on the other hand, is one of the most delicious smells, and savagely bitter to taste. These are extreme cases that tell us that flavour, smell and taste are bundled together in our heads in puzzling ways, and that the taste and the smell have meanings that sometimes chime together and sometimes ring quite different bells.
I have another puzzle, set for me by my younger son who was born blind. He has a really unusual mind, which combines a deeply intelligent understanding of classical music with an inability to understand many straightforward things like numbers, relationships and consequences. He is a ‘savant’: someone with severe learning difficulties and an outstanding talent. He cannot confidently add two and two, but ask him to improvise a new Chopin nocturne or a Bach two-part invention and he will deliver a brilliant piece of music without a moment’s hesitation. His question about smell is ‘What does three o’clock in the morning smell of?’ I do not know the answer. Perhaps he is awake and perceiving real smells at three o’clock in the morning; or perhaps his dreams are olfactory dreams, while mine hardly ever convey a smell. In any case I would like to give him an answer.
Out of this string of little puzzles there grew in my mind a conviction that the sense of smell speaks a language that I would like to understand. It offers meanings at several different levels. It speaks of our immediate surroundings and tells us whether they are familiar or unfamiliar. It speaks of our personal past, of comfortable and disturbing experiences we have had. It speaks of our likes and dislikes. It offers pleasures that no other sense can offer. It speaks of home and abroad. It speaks of the inner nature of things and their affinities with other things.
What is the smell of fresh rain on warm earth and vegetation? What are the words to describe it? How could one convey the smell of summer rain to someone who has not experienced it? What are the words that would distinguish this smell from other damp and earthy scents like a boiled potato or a cellar or a damp tea towel? And why should the smell of fresh rain be so evocative, more powerful in reviving a complete sensation of the past than our other senses? And why should the smell of a summer shower have connections to the smell of mushrooms and beetroot and beaches and thunderstorms and cucumber?
You might have thought that someone somewhere would have dug through these questions and come up with some answers. This is, after all, a fairly obvious sense. It accompanies every waking breath we take, and quite probably many of our breaths during sleep. It is found in the most prominent place at the centre of our faces. Although less important to us and less charged with meaning than our senses of sight and sound, it is not so far behind that it should have been neglected. Most people, I guess, would give it a higher place in their sensory array than the remaining four senses of taste, touch, proprioception (the sense that tells us how our bodies are positioned) and balance. Some might argue that taste has a higher place, but I will demonstrate that smell beats taste in our perception of flavour by a long nose.
A search through the literature of smell shows that two aspects of this sense have been well explored. There are many books about perfume: some of them interesting, most of them passionate. Then there is a wealth of scientific articles about the sense of smell – its chemistry, its genetics, its physiology and psychology – but few books for the non-specialist reader. It is a pity this should be so, because there have been major advances in the science of smell in the last few decades, which deserve to be better known. It is only two decades since Linda Buck and Richard Axel won the Nobel Prize for unravelling the genetic code for the nerves that detect smell. On the back of their work, there is now a much better understanding, although not a complete one, of how our brains interpret information about smells, about defects in the sense of smell, about the role of smell in flavour, and much more. For someone like me, who wants simply to understand the meanings of this sense in my workaday experience of life, the literature is too specialist, too much about the perfume laboratory and too little about the everyday.
To be fair, there are a few topics other than perfume that have been dug over. Wine buffs have elaborated a Wine Aroma Wheel to describe all the combinations of aroma that a glass of wine may give off. There are 90 descriptors on the wine wheel, and that is a good sign that smells can be unpicked and described in fine detail. Whisky, beer and cigars have their aroma wheels too. The International Coffee Organisation has created an official list of descriptors for the aromas of coffee beans. And what else? It is astonishing that many things that give off delightful scents in interesting varieties have not been described. I can find no authoritative study of the scents of roses, though many people would immediately think of roses as a source of varied olfactory pleasures. Tobacco, whose primary function is to create pleasure through smell, is considered by its aficionados as a matter of taste and mouth-feel, not scent. Wood, which offers many delights beyond the well-known sandalwood and cedar, has not been considered for its varied smells. And so on.
The expedition I decided to make should, I felt, go into all the territory that the perfume and wine experts have left untouched. It should take my nose into the street, the kitchen, the seaside, the hedgerow, the garage, the city, the church, the farm, the country. It should take my nose to the scents of all the seasons. It should explore the territories of fruits and animals and grains and marine smells and earthy and metallic smells. It should allow me to savour and understand the meaning of such innocent delights as the scent of hot tar, of cinnamon, of lubricating oil, of ripe melons, of brown sugar, of bonfires, of lavender, of old garden sheds, of hardware shops, of beaches, of frying bacon, of gin, ginger, jasmine, juniper and jute.
As I made my preparations for exploring the sense of smell, I unearthed some prejudices which may have inhibited others from making the journey. One prejudice is that this sense is too primitive for words. Smell, according to this prejudice, is the main sense of inferior creatures – hagfish scavenging in the depths of the ocean, snakes in their holes, minnows in streams. Several philosophers have placed it amongst the lower senses, inferior to intellectual senses such as sight and hearing. The 18th-century German philosopher Kant for instance said:
To which organic sense do we owe the least and which seems to be most dispensable? The sense of smell. It does not pay us to cultivate it or refine it in order to gain enjoyment; this sense can pick up more objects of aversion than of pleasure (especially in crowded places) and, besides, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell cannot be other than fleeting and transitory.
No, Herr Kant, I cannot agree with you. Smell is a sophisticated sense that deploys a very large array of specialised brain cells. It is the sense which discriminates most sharply between the known and the unknown. It communicates more directly with the brain than any other sense. It is the source of the most vivid memories. It is the sense which gives flavour to our food. The pleasure it gives, especially now that we live in a hygienic, well-drained world, far exceeds the aversion. Above all, it is the sense that puts us at ease with our environment. It is the sense that tells us that we are at home or abroad. For many people, the moment when they fully appreciate that they have left their home country is when they smell foreign cigarette smoke, foreign disinfectants, foreign cooking, foreign metros. The moment when they are sure of being on safe ground is when they smell their home. It is well known that Kant never moved from his cold home town on the Baltic, and so never exposed himself to such pleasures. Probably he suffered from a permanent sniffle, living in that cold, damp climate, and perhaps his sense of smell was impaired.
There is another prejudice that inhibits people from exploring their sense of smell. This is the belief that animals are so much better at smelling than humans, and that we cannot hope to be in their league. Indeed, I suspect there is a belief that the sense of smell is atrophying in humans: that our ancestors probably sniffed like dogs when they first took to the savannahs; that they lost the need to smell when they stood up and lifted their noses from the ground; that modern humans are left with a feeble relic, as unimportant to our lives as our little toes. Darwin took this view.1 Freud went further and asserted that the more civilised a society, the less attention it paid to smell. But it is known that he had grave problems with his nose.2 He anaesthetised it by sniffing cocaine and underwent several bouts of surgery, so perhaps he, like Kant, started with a personal prejudice.
It is true that many creatures have olfactory senses that perform tasks humans cannot perform, but that does not mean that the human sense of smell is feeble (and there are plenty of animals that cannot track and hunt the way humans do, by sight rather than scent). We have olfactory powers that perform tasks many creatures could not manage. Bloodhounds can pick up scent trails that are days old, and can tell in which direction the trail was laid; but there are probably no dogs that can discriminate, as humans can, between the scents of Grenache as against Syrah grapes in wine, or between the odours of petrol and jet fuel. Carrion eaters like vultures can scent minute concentrations of the smell of putrefaction at great distances. (Gas engineers in the USA have been harassed by turkey vultures mistaking the smell of leaking gas for carrion.) But I doubt that vultures could distinguish Earl Grey tea from PG Tips from tea made with milk that is slightly off, all of which would pose no problem to a human being. Mice can tell by smell which female is on heat. But I doubt they can distinguish the smell of lager beer from bitter, or Balkan from Virginia tobacco. The plain fact is that different creatures have evolved olfactory senses with very varied functions, and that humans have an excellent sense of smell for the purposes that matter to us. It is a myth that our sense of smell is defective because we cannot track by scent, or that it is redundant since we took to standing upright, or that it is third rate because our senses of sight and hearing are dominant.
There is indeed one thing that we humans do, with our modest noses and our sense of olfactory inadequacy, that other creatures do not do. It is called ‘retronasal olfaction’ (something I will explore in more detail later), and we do it many times a day without realising we are doing it. It is possible that we would be justified in thinking ourselves superior in our sense of smell merely for this one talent.
There may be another factor at work – prudishness. The fear of dodgy smells was a major worry for Kant, and may be a worry for others today. Americans, usually so bluff and direct, are cautious about smells. In the USA the word ‘smell’ is most often used as a disturbing verb rather than a neutral noun – some people smell, others use deodorant. Even the word ‘odor’ signifies something to be controlled – one’s home should be ‘odor-free’ and one should buy products that ‘neutralise odors’. The acceptable words are ‘aroma’, ‘scent’ and ‘fragrance’, words that seem coy to the English.
Mouth odour; body odour; foot odour; the risk of breathing in when in a crowded lift; the risk of eating beans; these things provoke social unease, or, the humorous adjunct to social unease, a snigger. Worse, they encourage writers on perfume to display their down-to-earth qualities by bluff accounts of psychological experiments to test whether women or men are better at identifying smells from old underwear (women are better), or whether mothers can identify their babies from their nappies (they can), or whether armpit swabs are attractive to the opposite sex (sometimes, although not in expected ways). Such experiments, usually conducted in university psychology departments and using first-year students as the subjects, are of doubtful validity, and seem to pander to the prejudice that smells are dirty.
For some people, there is another inhibition to thinking about smells. This inhibition stems from the very success of perfume and wine buffs at describing their particular subjects. The language of perfume marketing and wine lists is, for some people, language they could not possibly use themselves. They assume that this is the language to be applied to all smells, however down-to-earth. ‘Floral heart notes are combined into voluptuous chords that are sultry, sophisticated, radiant, narcotic, exotic’; ‘ambery orientals have a spicy top with a vanilla base’; ‘a Chypre based on the contrast between bergamot and oakmoss with generous top notes of citrus’; ‘heavy-earthy with a rich undertone of precious wood notes’.
This is not language that we could apply to freshly laid tar or fried bacon or seaweed or new-baked bread. We need language that is much less exotic and precious, that is more accessible and down-to-earth, that requires no special knowledge of obscure products like oakmoss or ambergris. You may think it a forlorn hope that we can find such a language. After so many millennia of human speech, we should surely have found it by now. It is my contention, though, that we already have the language to describe smells, and that it requires just a little extra concentration and a little technique to put smells into words. What we can describe has meaning; what has meaning gives pleasure.
It is a surprise to find that some people have succeeded in coming to grips with the sense of smell, and that they accord it as much importance and as many words as their other senses. There are for instance tribes living in equatorial rainforests who give the sense of smell the status that we give to our sense of sight. For them, living in dense vegetation with no long views, smell is the sense that best gives them information about things at some distance – ripening fruit, flowering trees, animals high in the canopy which may be invisible but are detectable by scent. Some of these tribes in the Amazon, the Andaman Islands, or Papua New Guinea weave the sense of smell into their entire understanding of the world.3 Some tribes define life as the condition of having active smell, and death as the condition of having no smell. They also describe the changing seasons in terms of smell, the geography of the forest, the alienness of other tribes. Even in our more visual world there are people who have no difficulty describing smells. That is obviously true of the professions whose products have valuable aromas – distillers, perfumers, brewers and coffee blenders. It is also true of a few great writers who have recognised that smells carry a powerful emotional charge and who take the trouble to describe them in simple words as an essential part of bringing their imagined worlds to life. Such writers are few, it is true, and they have made a particular virtue of putting sensations into words. They are vastly outnumbered, however, by the writers who dodge the problem of describing smells, and shelter behind the indefinite – ‘that unmistakable, indescribable smell’.
As to the smell of fresh rain itself, there is a scientific account. In 1964 a pair of Australian scientists called Bear and Thomas published an article in Nature called ‘The Nature of Argillaceous Odor’.4 In it they coined the word ‘petrichor’ to describe the smell of fresh rain: from the Greek petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). They identified that one of the main components of this distinctive smell is an oil trapped in rocks and soil, which is released when it rains. This oil is secreted by some plants during dry periods, and serves to halt the growth of roots and to prevent seed from germinating. In moist areas another ingredient in the smell of fresh rain on earth is geosmin: a chemical produced by soil-dwelling bacteria known as actinomycetes.
So the smell of fresh rain is in fact a blend of tiny, invisible, airborne chemicals given off by plants and bacteria in the earth. As we will see, most smells in nature are a blend of diverse components, and it is difficult to sort them out. As we will see too, some of the components are given off by quite different sources, and they create unexpected associations in our heads. Geosmin, for instance, is a component in the smell of fresh rain, but we can also detect it in the earthy smell of beets and spoiled wine.
This account seems like the end of the story. Putting a chemical word to a smell has an air of finality – no more need be said. But it is not the answer; it is just a label for a chemical. We do not talk in chemicals, we talk in plain words, and in describing smells we make use of comparisons to things we have encountered in plain words. We want to know what a smell tells us about our environment, about our personal memories, about the associations that it evokes, about what the smell is ‘like’, more than we want to know about its chemical composition. On top of that, the scientists’ account is not even a complete description of the mix of chemicals that make a smell. When the composition of a scent is analysed, it is typically found that dozens or even hundreds of different types of chemical are being sniffed, and that quite an insignificant subtraction or addition of components will alter the character of the smell. So we recognise smells not as a mix of separately-identified components, but as a ‘chord’ that makes an odour we can recognise, a smell with a meaning. Not petrichor and geosmin, but the smell of fresh rain. James Joyce, one of the writers who understood the sense of smell, has this description of rain on earth which I find poetic: ‘the rain-sodden earth gave forth its moral odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts’.
Note that there is a touch of stagecraft in the naming of some chemicals. Geosmin is simply a Greek label for the smell (osme) of the earth (geo). We find the same trick again and again: for instance with cadaverine or asparagusine or putrescine. These names mean nothing more than ‘the chemical that smells of the smell in question’.
My expedition of discovery into the sense of smell would, as I saw it, not be a heavyweight scientific expedition, burdened with measuring equipment. Rather it should be a personal, lightweight expedition – just my nose and a sense of curiosity about all the different aspects of the natural and man-made world which offer interesting scents. I would as far as possible take my nose off the beaten track of perfumes and wines, and head into unmapped territory. I hoped to return with a rough map of the territory and a rough way of describing the many smells I would encounter. It was not likely that mine would be a map that was complete and satisfactory for everyone. Our sense of smell is too personal for that, our olfactory blind spots are too numerous. Each of us is sensitive to different smells to varying degrees. The associations conjured up for each of us by smells are personal and difficult to share with others. But at least my expedition might encourage others to tackle the puzzles of smell more thoroughly.
First, in the spirit of all expeditions, I had to get my nose in training. I decided to start in a place whose scents and associations and whose very air would be fresh to me.
CHAPTER 2
The Salty Tang of a Sea Breeze
‘Sea Breeze – Always mysterious, vast and deep, the sea has been celebrated in song and story through the ages. This fresh, crisp, exhilarating scent captures the clean salty tang of a brisk sea breeze’.
Internet advertising for fragrant oil
I decided to start my exploration at a sea port. In search of first-hand experience of seaside smells, I took the train from London to Portsmouth Harbour. For those like me who love the sea and ships, Portsmouth Harbour is an exciting destination. It combines the solemnity of ocean-going ships with the tacky cheeriness of seaside places and the faded glory of the Royal Navy, which has used the harbour as one of its main bases since Tudor times. Being beside the seaside would give me chance to clear my head of the habitual smells of my London home with some fresh sea air. It would test my ability to grasp the fleeting scents of a working port and it would give me a first chance to interpret the meanings of smell.
The station platforms at Portsmouth Harbour are built out over the water. Between the rails you can see the green heave of water and tatters of seaweed hanging from the station’s metalwork. You expect the first smell as you step down from the train to be the sea – a salty tang. And the first smell is indeed the sea – but it is not salty and not tangy in the expected way. The smell is mineral and muddy and seaweedy. The dominant smell is chalky, no doubt from the shells of small crustaceans and molluscs, and from the chalk of the coastal hills which has made the water an almost Venetian pale green. With the chalk, there is a sour, rich mud smell with something cabbagey and oily about it. It is an English Channel smell, and quite different to the scent of the Atlantic and different again to the Mediterranean.
Standing on the platform, obstructing the other passengers hurrying to the exit as I fumble for a description of the sea’s scent, I am brought face to face with one of the first difficulties of olfaction. It is no use sniffing on and on, in a desperate hope that the smell will reveal itself if I concentrate hard enough and sniff often enough. Quite the reverse: repeated sniffs rapidly dull my appreciation; after three or four sniffs I have become habituated, and I have ceased to register the smell. ‘A single natural sniff provides as much information about the presence and intensity of an odour as do seven or more sniffs’, wrote the Australian psychologist David Laing,5 who conducted the definitive research on sniffing. Sniffing longer and harder does no good either. The first fraction of the sniff does the trick, and a longer sniff just confuses the mind. In fact, scientists have measured the time it takes to register an odour: the first 160 milliseconds are all it takes until the brain has perceived the smell and is reacting to it. That is a sign of how fast the neurones – the electrical wiring of the brain – take to transmit a sensation, and how little is added by prolonging the process.
So, although it seems that more sniffing is better, that more effort, and greater concentration will be repaid with better perception, the opposite is true. Short exposure, followed by a change of smell, allows one to appreciate the original smell better. That is why people in the perfume industry refresh their noses between smells. Perfumers have variously used ammonia or camphor or coffee beans to refresh the nose during long smelling sessions. Coffee beans are now standard issue in perfume retailing, and are part of the stagecraft of selling a luxury product. In ordinary life, we do not have these accessories to hand, and must find simpler ways of refreshing our noses.
All the passengers had by now left the platform at Portsmouth Harbour, and I was still standing puzzled, searching for the salty tang of the sea. Certainly the air has a tang. But it seems more the feel of sea air than a smell. It is the feel of chill and freshness from a September breeze blowing across the harbour. It is not the smell of salt, except in the imagination. In researching smells, I have been forced to conclude that refined salt has no intrinsic smell; it is a taste on the tongue, and if we think that we smell it, that is usually by association or because a small dusting of the salt has been breathed through our noses onto the taste buds on our tongues. No, the smell of the sea is not salt, nor yet ozone, it is mostly dimethyl sulphide, a by-product of plankton, and its smell has a touch of the offensive cabbaginess of sulphur.
Out at sea, a sailor will not notice the smell of the sea: where the dimethyl sulphide gas is emitted in mid-ocean, it rises into the marine clouds and is distributed around the planet. He will only notice it on approach to land, where it is caused by the reaction of dimethyl sulphide with seaweed. The tang of the sea should more properly be called the tang of the shore.
Out of the station, past the sweet, light smoke of cigarettes, past a thin thin man whose thin thin cigarette smells sweeter still and more grassy, down to the jetty for the ferry, to cross the harbour from Portsmouth to its sister town of Gosport. The ferry boat looms across the harbour, a stubby, low vessel with rounded bows and stern, like a nautical dodgem car. It sidesteps an ugly little tanker – Jaynee II – trundling out of the harbour with a smear of fuel oil exhaust behind it. Out of a neighbouring quay a seven-storey ferry manoeuvres with a rumble of mighty marine engines echoing in lumpy metal. As it turns to clear the harbour entrance, it shows its strange shape – it faces both ways being symmetrical fore and aft – and it shows its name: ‘St Clare’.
The Gosport ferry arrives, touches the floating jetty with a shock, followed by an aftershock as the jetty rebounds off its uprights. I step on board over the rubber lip of the ferry boat. Onboard there are some of my favourite smells. There is a smell of varnish from the wooden benches around the inside – resinous, warm and sticky. There is an engine-room smell of rich, deep fuel oil like a mineral molasses with a sulphurous edge, a scent of lubricating oil, sweeter and lighter, dripping from every vibrating joint, and the permanent stuffiness of hot air. Up on deck, where I position myself near the stubby square funnel, there is the utterly moving smell of marine fuel exhaust – rich and homely, a blend of stewed fruit and seaweed and hot metal – alternating with the sour freshness of seaside air. It smells like every sea voyage I have ever made.
This sense of familiarity and nostalgia is one of the most telling effects of the sense of smell. It connects me to my other sea voyages, long and short, portentous and trivial, emotional or matter-of-fact, across the Mediterranean or across a Cornish estuary. Familiarity and unfamiliarity are sensations that so often accompany the act of olfaction that I am driven to conclude that they express one of the central functions of the sense of smell for human beings. More than any other sense, smell has a special power to evoke memories. It owes this power to its location: close to the emotional centres of the brain and its structures for laying down long-term memories. More than any other, smell is the sense that puts us at ease with our environment, that tells us what is familiar or unfamiliar. It is the sense that reassures us that we are on safe ground and eating safe food, or, conversely, in the presence of the unknown and dangerous.
This trip across Portsmouth Harbour is one of the shortest maritime voyages of my life, perhaps 700 metres of chalky green water from Portsmouth to Gosport. But it is long enough to evoke the solemn emotions of a real sea voyage. I am moved by the moment of departure from the jetty when it seems we are in motion and not in motion, when the first inch of separation becomes a foot and then a yard of swirling water. I am moved by the sensation when, clear of the jetty, one looks over clear water and feels the solemn presence of the sea, by the judder of the little ship’s metalwork, by the lumpy paint and flakes of rust, by the sight of a seagull at home on the unhomely sea. Perhaps most moving of all the sensations, though, are the smells coming in gusts from the funnel and the wind.
The voyage is over in a trice, and I step off the boat in Gosport in search of a boatyard. I have a particular boatyard smell in mind – sweet sawdust, rich tar, grassy rope, intrusive paint. The reality is quite different. Modern chemistry has replaced the old smell of the boatyard, which would have been familiar to a Victorian, or a Tudor and even a Viking boatbuilder alike, with new smells. Fibreglass, nylon rope and modern paints are not a patch on the old materials for smell.
I walk along the perimeter fence of Gosport boatyard with very little reward, just the occasional sickly-sweet smell of buddleia growing in untended corners, and the whine of an electric sander. It is difficult, this smelling business. In the normal run of life we give a low level of attention to our noses. We are constantly alert to what we see and hear, and find it difficult to switch those senses off. But our sense of smell is rarely at the forefront of our minds; more usually it is just below our threshold of attention and it takes a conscious effort to register what we smell. We give most of our attention to sights and sounds, which convey meanings that are immediately important to us, while those other senses, like smell, which convey less accessible meanings, are given less attention. Indeed, as we shall see, if the sense of smell were to be put in the centre of our attention, it might get in the way of the kind of thinking to which our brains are so well adapted. Furthermore, any smell that attracts our attention is fleeting: we have no sooner breathed it in than we breathe it out again, and the next breath is accompanied by a different smell. In the gusty air of the seaside, the wind brings a hint of seaweed and then snatches it away; a flicker of wood shavings, and then it has gone; a half-breath of sour mud and then nothing.
Then I get a scent that shivers my spine. I seem to recognise it, but I cannot place it. It seems to have come from somewhere in the memory, but I cannot associate it with any particular episode. This is the tip-of-the-nose effect which we experience so often, of a smell that we almost recognise, but we cannot quite pin down, a smell we can almost describe but the details of which seem to elude analysis.6 The smell is aggressive, bitter-sweet, akin to the smell of gas and of glue. I guess it must be epoxy resin, used to patch the fibreglass hulls of boats.
At a loss, I stand wondering what to do next and twirling a strand of dry seaweed in my fingers on the edge of the boatyard. Suddenly there is a bloke in oily overalls, who wants to know what I am doing. Does he think I am a spy, studying equipment on Royal Navy ships; or a suicide contemplating my last walk into the water? He is certainly puzzled by my explanation that I am investigating the sense of smell. ‘What do you want to come to Gosport for, then? I’d have thought there would be better places for smelling.’ I try to explain about the smells of the seaside and boatyards, and the delights of rope, tar and paint. He introduces me to his two mates, also in oily overalls, and all three of them give me the indulgent look of people dealing with a friendly sniffer dog. These are boatyard workers with a chunky mobile crane for lifting boats out of the water, and together we have a good sniff at it. The three of them take to the business of sniffing their crane with good humour. ‘I’m getting the heady fragrance of diesel, vintage 1999.’ ‘Mmm, a fruity, raspberry note.’ ‘That’s not the diesel, mate, it’s your overalls.’ ‘A trifle young, perhaps, this lubricating oil.’ ‘A cheeky young Esso.’ They have caught the effeteness of wine lists, and are enjoying applying it to their dirty old crane. Lubricating oil, synthetic rubber, diesel, well-known smells. But also a new smell: it is hydraulic fluid. I am allowed to sniff a ten-litre can of the stuff – it is a sweetish, light mineral oil with a pronounced touch of apricot and fig. I feel more than a little like a dog, lowering my nose into a can and sniffing, watched by three smiling men.
Back I go towards the ferry terminal and the seafront shops. I pass a succession of fast-food cafes, each with a couple of electric wheelchairs outside, and each with a ventilator announcing to the street its particular aroma of used cooking oil. Were I Sherlock Holmes I would write a treatise on a hundred different odours of cooking oil, as Sherlock wrote a treatise on a hundred varieties of cigarette ash. Coriander-flavoured smells announce a take-away curry shop; a vinegar flavour announces a fish and chip shop; and so on. I decide to experience the smell (but not the food) of McDonald’s. Like most complex smells, this one comes in many layers, and each one can be unpicked. The dominant odour here is vinegar: bitter and invasive. Under that is burnt vegetable oil, whose cloying syrupy warmth is halfway between mineral oil and compost. Under that is potato: not crispy fried potato but a soggy, muddy, beetroot smell. In occasional wafts I also smell strawberry, Brylcreem (many Gosport men have old-fashioned slicked hair) and turpentiney, powdery perfume. The people in this McDonald’s have a look that I associate with broken nights – heavy upper lids to their eyes and a dark line below the eyes – but maybe it comes from the diet.
I am beginning to learn how to distinguish the smells of the seaside and what words fit those distinctions. I had launched my expedition uncertain whether I would be able to make any sense of smells, and even less sure whether they could be put into words. Now I am sure that it is worth the effort: there are meanings in smells that can be brought to the surface, and there are differences and resemblances that can be put into words. Some odours are complex, with several layers; others are simpler. Tar and marine mud and impregnated wood and natural rope are complex and layered; vinegar and cigarette smoke are simpler. Some smells are rich; some are thin. Fuel oil is rich; lubricating oil is thinner. Some are sweet, some are bitter, and many are bitter-sweet or sweet with an edge. Our noses make much more subtle distinctions between the varieties of bitter and sweet than do the taste buds on our tongues. Cannabis smoke is sweet; epoxy resin is bitter; strawberry flavouring is sweet with a sickly edge; fresh paint is bitter-sweet. Some smells are fresh; some are old. Newly sanded wood is fresh; a baulk of wood that is supporting the keel of a boat in a boatyard, and has probably supported the keels of many generations of boat, smells old. We can also distinguish a few aggressive smells that get up our noses – piquant smells like vinegar, like epoxy resin, like the higher fractions of petroleum. The common feature of piquant smells like these is that they excite the specific nerve in the face – the trigeminal nerve – that also responds to pain and cold as well as piquancy, and that makes our eyes water or our noses sneeze. These distinctions offer the foundations of a way of describing smells, a vocabulary of odour that I am sure can be developed to describe the full range of smells.
On the return journey in the ferry across the harbour to Portsmouth, I can revisit the sensations of the ferryboat. Once again I stand on the little deck taking pleasure in the marine engine scents and the sights and sounds of a busy harbour. It seems to me that there is a special bonus that comes from concentrating on the hidden sense of smell. The bonus is that the more insistent senses of sight and sound continue to make themselves heard as before, but they are enriched. Being attentive to smells makes me more attentive to all my senses, and able to savour the whole experience of a boat journey in all its dimensions. The senses amplify each other, and bringing the sense of smell into play amplifies the other senses.
There is another bonus. On my return to Portsmouth, I wander into the Royal Navy dockyard, now a heritage site. Here at last I find the smell that I came for. In an old lofty workshop there is a repair yard for old wooden boats. One step inside and the air is full of the fragrances I want. It is a rich cake of smells: smokey tar, fermented meat, sticky varnish, dried fruit, paint, hemp – all blended from the wood and rope and half-used tins of stickiness that lie around. The Vikings would have felt at home.
This has been a short reconnaissance into the sense of smell, a first trial exploration. What have I learnt? First I have found some important truths about the mechanics of smelling in the real world, where sensations come at us fast and fleetingly, and where all our senses are competing for attention. It is difficult to grasp a smell. It comes and goes too rapidly for analysis. It hovers on the edge of recognition and then takes flight. It comes out of thin air and goes into thin air. Wind blows it away. Cold freezes it.
