I remember the first time I remembered a smell. This was remembering to the extent that it stopped me in my tracks, taking me back to a specific moment, a specific place and a specific feeling. The smell was that of a bike shop. Mainly rubber, with notes of oil and plastic and a strong hint of sheer excitement. In that instant I was about 10 years old, in Bache Brothers Cycles at Lye Cross, near Stourbridge, in the West Midlands. My grandad was next to me, with the shop man. I was getting a bike for my birthday.
When I was talking about the power of smell on the radio, Speth, a Welsh speaker from Manchester, got in touch to say that in Welsh you can hear a smell as well as smell it. At first this sounded charming, if far-fetched. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. While I can’t – in English, anyway – exactly hear the smell of that Black Country bike shop in 1977, I can smell, hear and see it very clearly. I can feel it too. I can feel the shop man’s grip as he lifts me into the saddle. And I can hear him saying to my grandad: “Blimey, he’s a lump, isn’t he?” Ever sensitive about my weight, that was a sour note. But I’ll let it pass, because all I can feel, then and now, is the general joy.
As my wisest Welsh friends have explained it to me, the verb in question, clywed, means to feel or to sense, as in sensing/feeling the smell or the sound of something. And also occasionally its touch or taste. So, every sense but sight. If sight was included, it would work perfectly for me in that bike shop, because I can see it all in HD.
I wonder if our language might be a bit short in the smell department. We lack a verb to express smelling something nice. We have plenty to suggest the opposite – it stinks, it pongs, it reeks etc – but nothing to imply that the smell is nice. For me, the verb to smell feels at best neutral but erring towards the stinkier side of life.
Smelling is believing … Photograph: Posed by model; Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
Having Croatian heritage, I am proud to say that we have the verb mirišiti that you’d only use in the context of a pleasant smell. Its opposing partner is smrditi, which you can’t even say out loud without wrinkling your nose. These two verbs allow for one of my favourite expressions in Croatian which, frustratingly, doesn’t really work in English. If – a mite unkindly – you’re describing a person as OK, not good or bad, neither one thing nor another, a bit vanilla, you’d say ni miriši ni smrdi. This translates into English no better than: “It neither smells nor stinks.” Doesn’t work. Our smell lets us down, so to speak.
A listener who had lost their sense of smell 30 years ago was quite sure they could still smell cut grass, melting butter, and bacon cooking
Vanilla, by the way, like lavender, is a scent that reliably elicits strong emotional responses from prisoners. I learned this from Michael O’Shaugnessy, a senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, who has run workshops in prisons using scent to engage learners with the aim of nurturing creative skills. Vanilla and lavender work well because they are, or were, found in soaps and perfumes evoking powerful memories of grandmothers’ bathrooms.
On that radio show, I asked whether you can smell a smell without physically smelling it. A listener who had lost their sense of smell 30 years ago was quite sure that they could still smell cut grass, melting butter, and bacon cooking. Other listeners’ texts streamed in: privet blossom for ever evoking a holiday a lifetime ago in Weymouth when Sue was five, playing on a putting green surrounded by hedges; for June, it was the smell of the canal in West Bromwich on a hot summer’s day; with wonderful specificity, Chaz can summon the smell of an 80s snooker hall – featuring stale smoke, cheap cleaning fluids, freshly ironed baize.
I love all this. Bache Brothers Cycles, to my delight, is still there. I’m going to pop in this weekend for the first time since 1977 to check whether it smells as I remember it.
Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
