A whiff of the past

I was on the bus yesterday evening; an elderly lady sat down in front of me. As she did so, the faintest whiff of mothball wafted past my nose. Her winter coat was evidently on its first outing of the year on this cool autumnal evening.

It was immediately familiar; I didn't have to puzzle out where and when this particular odour put me in mind of. For a moment I was totally there - transported in spirit by the smell to another time and another place. Not a shred of doubt. Those molecules entering my nostrils must have ideally matched those which I'd last sniffed 45 years earlier.

It was Polish cub scout holidays in Northwick Park, the former army camp between Chipping Campden and Blockley in rural Gloucestershire, in the mid-1960s. [You will find it on Google Earth using these coordinates 52° 1'45.24"N, 1°45'14.01"W.]

These barracks had been used since the end of the war to house Polish refugees; many carried on living there. The older residents would shuffle about, often wearing dressing gowns and bedroom slippers as they made their way from their quarters to the communal refectory, shop, chapel or clinic. Many of them were born in the 19th Century, when Poland was not on any map of Europe.

Each summer in the mid-'60s, hundreds (literally!) of us children aged six to 11 would suddenly turn up from London, running, shouting, roller-skating along the walkways linking the camp's various barracks. As I re-read this passage, I can smell the tuck-shop, selling Twizzlers sherbert sweets...

I will no doubt blog these kolonie zuchowe in more detail on my Grey Jumper'd Childhood blog; my point today being to register the precision of memory and how powerful smell is in triggering intensely powerful recollections of spirit of time and place [not incidents, though].

From the point of view of human biology, this is quite something. I must have spent no more than six weeks of my life here four and half decades ago, yet the feeling of 100% match with that briefly picked up by my olfactory organs on that bus; no doubt, no ambiguity. Mothballs were common around the wardrobes of many of my parents' friends, yet this particular brand or compound was clearly the same at that around the musty barracks of Northwick Park.

The Polish refugee experience at Northwick Park (which closed as a resettlement camp in 1968; the following year the scout cubs had their camp in Northern France) is beautifully described with many nostaligic photos here, by a former resident, Zosia Biegus Hartman. The pics on this wonderful site had the same effect as that smell of mothball yesterday!