SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SMELLS

I grew up on a small pig farm in what was then a Berkshire village by the River Thames. Not surprisingly, many of the scents and sounds I hear and smell today remind me of that glorious time when the world, and I, was new and each season almost appeared differently to my maturing eyes. I loved everything in that great physicality around me - sights, sounds, smells……

I even fell in love with the pigs, quaint and vaguely disgusting as that may seem. I adored the squeal of the piglets and the way they wriggled, and their grimy milky smell. I loved the way the eyes of the older ones lit up when the pails clanked and I loved the sound of their contented grunts as they played the clean straw.

These sounds and smells, the dull clunk of the snapping of a bale wire, the mustiness of the straw inside, mingled with the raw energy and pungency of the animals themselves. Even today whenever I catch a whiff of pig dung on the breeze, or hear a grunt and snuffle, I am instantly transported back to those times.

At the age of eight one of my holiday tasks on the farm was to stoke the large boiler with orange wood. It stood vertically on spindly legs, like a moon lander, with a firebox underneath. We used this for boiling swill, collected daily from the restaurants of Oxford.

The swill had to be boiled for an imprisoning length of time. But when you are tired and hungry, with an autumn frost settling in the black darkness of the surrounding countryside, I can assure you that there is no more appealing smell in the world than that of swill boiling away like some great Irish stew.

And when that eclectic mix of potatoes, cabbage, meat, fruit and custard had cooled and been mixed with barley meal and poured into their troughs, you could tell from the happy faces and delighted squeals, just how much the pigs enjoyed it too. Many's the time I would have gladly exchanged my own supper for theirs and for their uninhibited company.

The farm was littered with evocative scents, too numerous to recall. The tractor, with its oily exhaust, for instance - never, for some reason, the same smell as any other diesel engine. The rich smell of ripening apples in the apple store and of apple wood burning in the hearth (peat and especially peat smoke has a similar evocative effect), was another. And burning generally - bonfires in the autumn - the rich snap, crackle and pop as the fingers of flame take hold, the blast of heat, the blue, clinging smoke, always in your lungs or in your eyes; that, too, is an evocative smell.

In summer there was the sweet cut of lawn or field grass and the lazy drone of the mower in the distance. And by the summer river, another thousand scents: from the stagnant bottom mud to the rich blossoming fragrances of the river plants, to the unique, mild and biological aroma of fresh river fish and the creaking antique odour of the wooden boats.

I used to travel to school each day by a train drawn by a steam locomotive. I don't believe anyone can remain untouched by the heavy whoosh and clank of a steam engine or by its glorious miasma - a combination of sulphur and hot oil.

A living metal dragon belching fire and pulling a rake of carriages, all brass knobs, leather straps and horsehair benches with, on the walls, exotic images of far flung destinations like Torquay, Hereford or Penzance. The carriages, too, had their own distinctive odour, metal polish from the daily cleaning, dust from the horsehair, steam that oozed from under the seats on a frozen winter morning.

Many places provided such complex scents. Theatres, for instance, have their own special thespian smell, especially backstage - a witches' brew of sawdust, damp, clothes moths, paint, make-up and mice, all roasted by 1000 watt bulbs and all rolled together in one evocative fantasy of make-believe.

Aeroplanes also have a collective smell - have you noticed? From the smallest piston-engined crop-sprayer to a jumbo, straining its 400 tonne bulk down a mile or more or runway - all have an similar - and to my mind not particularly pleasant - aerial smell.

But the sound of engines spooling up at the end of the runway, the rising note as the throttles are banged home, the lurch forward as the brakes come off, is like a first kiss, - a tingle factor - and always a leap into the unknown. Those sounds, those smells stand you on the edge of a void.

In fact, I suppose, complex smells abound wherever there are people - a London pub, for instance, happy and bright despite the stale smell of sweat, beer and tobacco. Or a café, somewhere on the Mediterranean, where the elegant aroma is of fresh coffee admixed with the faint, but not always unpleasant atmospheric scent of drains and garlic.

You sit in the sunshine, now breathing in that coffee, or anticipating the biting touch of that first mouthful of ice-cold beer. Or you may be broaching the crackling crust of a baguette with a gleaming water-sparkled pat of butter and fresh golden apricot jam, out of which the scent of that delicate fruit leaps to kiss you on both cheeks like a long lost friend.

Later in the market you may move among the vegetables, again assaulted by the odour of freshness. You will pick up a tomato, picked that morning and filled with energetic goodness and a flavour that rubs off in your hands. It cries out to you for a slice of sweet buffalo mozzarella, a tranch of salami, a few Greek olives and the whole to be softly dribbled over with luscious walnut oil.

I smell these walnuts and I am back again on the farm, for we had walnut trees, even if the fruit, thanks to the Berkshire climate, ripened only rarely. I am wandering again around the long empty pig sties. A door left unlatched, swings mournfully and bangs in the breeze. The rich smell of dung has faded to a tame compost. I have aged. Like an ancient cartridge case picked up in the woods, that exciting fresh reek of cordite has disappeared, into the air like the shot it once held. Only scent-filled memories remain.