The Smell of Fresh Rain

The Unexpected Pleasures of our Most Elusive Sense

Barney Shaw

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785781148
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

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 ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• CHAPTER 1: The Smell of Fresh Rain
• CHAPTER 2: The Salty Tang of a Sea Breeze
• CHAPTER 3: Metals and a Cup of Coffee
• CHAPTER 4: Charcoal Burners
• CHAPTER 5: The Meanings of Smell
• CHAPTER 6: The Sense of the Familiar
• CHAPTER 7: Madeleines
• CHAPTER 8: A False Scent
• CHAPTER 9: Two Halves of Bitter and Four Packets of Crisps
• CHAPTER 10: The Great Stink
• CHAPTER 11: Brave New World
• CHAPTER 12: Noses, Numbers and Wheels
• CHAPTER 13: On the Tip of My Nose
• CHAPTER 14: The Most Expensive Perfume in the World
• CHAPTER 15: Holy Smells, Pious Smells
• CHAPTER 16: The Smell of Three O’Clock in the Morning
• CHAPTER 17: Afterword
• An A–Z of Smells
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Copyright