Memory is a strange thing, isn't it? There you are, happily going about your business, when suddenly some small thing can trigger a memory about something from many years ago, easing it from the deep recesses of your mind and hauling it out into the light of day once more. Smells do this in particular, I find. I don't even have to actually smell something, for often simply recalling the smell is more than sufficient to trigger a memory.
For example, yesterday I was driving in the afternoon towards Llandudno in North Wales, to attend a meeting, and the sun was flickering through the trees to my left as I drove, reminding me of autumn days long ago when I was a child, unwell and in bed in the nursery at my home. I could look across and out of the window, beyond the little paddock that lay parallel to our rear garden, and towards the woods that stretched from Lacock Road to the parking spaces in front of St Bartholomew's church and Corsham Court entrance. As the sun began to set so there would be a range of golds, reds and yellows that seemed to filter through the trees, casting a kaleidoscope of patterns across the window and into my room. I can still hear, in my mind, the sounds of people in my father's shop downstairs, a medley of the voices of shop staff and customers. I would often try to figure out whose voice belonged to whom, attempting to identify anyone whom I might know. But the thing that I remember especially is the smell of it all. Warm, smells of wine, of wet floors, and of the shop itself; and when I remember them the memory brings with a comfortable feeling of security and family.
Musing on the subject I remember other shops in Corsham at the time, recalling the distinctive odours that identify them now so readily in my mind, and with the memory comes a recall of the individuals, most now long since passed away probably. The fragrance of cigar smoke reminds me of MacMillan's, the ladies' and men's outfitters diagonally across from the Methuen Arms Hotel at the top end of the High Street. Even now I can transport myself to the shop, standing on the linoleum floor with its strip of olive green carpet stretched in front of the counters, and look upwards to the stacks of hat boxes which contained a variety of men's hats. As you entered the shop, the men's side was to the left, the women's to the right. I don't ever recall going into the latter, although maybe my mother might have taken me in once or twice. No, it's the men's side that I recall; the cloying smell of stale cigar smoke seeming to cling on to everything in the shop, as much a part of the shop itself as the fixtures and fittings were.
Just a couple of doors up was James' Hardware, and I remember the bare wooden floors, aged with the dirt of thousands of feet over the years, as Corsham folk shopped for a bottle of paraffin, a few nails or screws, or something for the home. I remember Joe James with his dark moustache and friendly manner. Joe was a leading light in the local amateur dramatic company, and interested in everything about Corsham in general. It was a shop where the customer was king, and where Joe, and I believe his father before him, ensured that they supplied every need. A shop where, should you so require, you could buy just one 6" nail, or just the right quantity of screws for a particular job. Certainly, in those days, quantities were not arrived at by accountants in the way that they seem to be today. The shop smelled of a mixture of metal, polish, paraffin, dust and old buildings.
Halfway down Station Road, next door to the chapel, was a convenience store, and it was there that I would go to buy broken biscuits by the half-pound. The biscuits were kept in square tins to the left as you entered the shop, glass lids on the tins lifting to get at the biscuits. The floor was given a fresh dusting of sawdust each day. I remember bacon being cut on the slicer, cheese being measured by eye, cut with a cheese-wire, and weighing virtually the exact amount requested when it was popped on to the scales. The shop smelled of a mixture of sawdust and assorted foods, and was always a pleasant place to visit.
One of the places that I never found so pleasant was the Dry Cleaners, of which there were two, Bollom's and Johnson's. I hated the smell of the cleaning fluids which always gave me a problem with my breathing, and so I always tried to avoid going to drop off or collect things for dry cleaning. Similarly, although I never had to go inside the shop, I remember the chemical smell that was emitted from the ladies hair salon next to the SWEB Showroom in the High Street. It must have been from the concoctions used for perms, and to this day I find that ladies hairdressing salons, especially the older-fashioned ones, are best avoided!
Some things good, some things not so good, yet all of them a pot-pourri of sights, sounds and smells that make up so many yesterdays, and each remembered for differing reasons and with different degrees of pleasure or distaste, primarily the former rather than the latter. there are many more of course, far more than I have either room or time for today, and even if I did, sometimes I think that it's better to eke our memories out a little sparingly and enjoy them even more.
I wonder what you remember in this vein, dear reader. Why not leave a comment and share it with me and with my other readers.
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