SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 162

Report by Richard Usborne

Describe evocatively four of the following smells: one of the main tents at the Chelsea Flower Show on the third day during a thunder- storni; 42 cricket pavilion that has just been opened again .after the winter; a basket full of puppies in clean straw; a French café at 10 a.m.; a London fog; a pomegranate; a country house (at which you are a guest) dining-room into which you come for breakfast on Sunday in February; a farrier's shop. Limit 200 words.

I believe that the senses of smell and taste have their terminals boxed in the brain alongside the box of memory terminals, and short circuits are frequent. (Journal of Neurology, please copy.) You can describe a compound smell by analysing its parts. Or you can evoke by scene, giving the reader a scent so well that it brings the smell back to him. "Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Green- wich pensioners, wheezing by the fireside of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin." (C. Dickens. Bleak House.), Memory via smell, or smell via memory. Or you can do it by imagery.

Items, with subjects listed in order of their popularity:— Cricket Pavilion just, opened after the Winter: As if a large colony of mice had overturned a bottle of beer, and, after revelling, had anointed their fur with bat-oil and gone to sleep in the stuffing of all last season's pads.—(R. KENNARD DAvis.)

Country. House Sunday Breakfast in February:

-Smoked haddock is here, and last night's cigar smoke, and the

smoke of this morning's reluctant fire. The wind is always in the wrong direction, and the melancholy refuse-heaps in the wet garden creep unpleasantly through the noble, ill-fitting windows. There is a background of stewed tea and drowned coffee.

—(GRANVILLE GARLEY.)- A French Cafe at 10 a.m.: . . . and she drank black coffee with croissants and at the bar a man was drinking wine I suppose. And you know how it is a fresh morning in Paris and in the air are bells and the church of Madeleine and its flower market are in a dew and you smoke the first cigarette and you feel comfortable in your hairy tweed and your girl smells with Chanel.—(Mac. DOURY, la HEMINGWAY.) A Basket of Puppies:

The warmth of animals that comes from skin and hair; A smell of stables faintly on the air.

Damp muzzle, too, and eager friendly tongue, And the clean breath of something very young.

—(W. BERNARD WAKE.) Main Tent, Chelsea Flower Show, Third Day in Thunderstorm:

. . . the flowers beginning to putrefy and the stale flower-water, and with another thunder clash I am transported to a corner of a Genoa cemetery on a hot June day, idly watching a gardener pile dead wreaths on the rubbish heap. The name of the smell is not anticipation but decomposition.—(MRS. HACKER.)

A Pomegranate :

I cut a pomegranate in half. Behold, a mosaic of light cells, blood-tinctured, a miniature window for a Cairo mosque. I sniff faint fumes as of dye-stuff, astringent, cold. And, from the golden- brown rind, a tannin smell bringing memories of morocco leather, sun-warmed saddles, a camel corps.—(M. E. MILLEN.)

A Farrier's Shop :

Ghostly horses snort as red-hot, wrought-nail-rod shoes drop sizzling into water-tubs: acrid-smelling coke fumes, sweat, scorched hoof and leather-apron, the ammoniated reek of manure: and, in the easy shadow, men sit smoking plug tobacco, the breath of their gossip powerful.—(M. E. MILLEN.)

The ladies win all the prizes. First (£3) to "Sawdust Asgold"; £1 each to P. M. and Nancy Gunter (though she has gone away from the dining-room in her country house).

PRIZES (SAWDUST ASGOLD) Thunderstorm at Chelsea Flower Show:

Trampled grass recalls fermenting hay. Flower-stands give freshness of sawn wood ,and damp moss to sickliness of expiring magnolias. Next health-breathing genista and ribes. Humanity exudes mixed grill: rain-soaked cloth, dripping felt, wet rubber, scent and cigarettes. Gardener's new mackintosh dominates even hyacinth and narcissus.

A Cafe on the Breton Coast, 10 a.m. : Through doorway suggestions of seaweed, tar, fish-heads, ozone, drains. From kitchen, whiffs of frying fish outwaft the garlic and

A London Fog:

The conflict in London between sea-port and industry, salt water and fresh, beer and railway smoke, finds release and resolution in the city's fog—a river miasma mingling with soot and chemicals to torment the unselective nose. It is Oxford overlaid by Birmingham.

—(C. P. DRIVER.) • stale twist of supper. Seamen drinking morning boc have oily jersey, sodden boots. At last! My own fragrant café-au-lait with golden-brown smell of hot bread!

A Farrier's Shop: Oh, exhilarating atmosphere of warm horse! Even blacksmith's sweaty shirt smells clean. There's good earthiness breathing from potato-heap in corner, and from fresh dung swiftly removed. Sulphurous gusts drive from the fire; over all is the penetrating pungency of singed hoof.

Sunday Breakfast at a Country House in February: Glorious Sunday blend! Aroma of coffee, toast, porridge and sausage. Burning logs and sun-warmed hyacinths suggest incense. Enter hostess: Scent or soap? Neither. It's sprig of daphne in her coat. Enter host, all peaty tweed, pipe and Colgate. . . . But feugh! Remove that Cairn! Sorry! It's stuff vet gave for eczema. Open the window, Charles. I do. Fragrance of morning hits like cold hard blade.

(P. M.)

Cricket Pavilion (Girls' School):

First, the chalk-and-varnish smell of sun-baked lockers; then, catching in the throat with the old excitement, the remembered smell of all sports days, gym displays and house matches—a blend of damp serge, tennis-shoes, the oily-thonginess of bat and lax-stick and- surely?—the fruity emanation from perspiring heads! Yes, that ribbon by the basin, where the plug-hole gives an occasional hiccup of carbolic and verdigris.

Puppies in Straw:

All young things have a downy sweetness—a kind of fragrant bloom. I always think my puppies smell faintly of chocolate Easter-eggs in shavings—there is even the hint of a cardboard container—which is the hen-smell even the cleanest straw has.

Pomegranates

The pomegranates in our South African garden had a tooled leather smell, as of cricket balls kept in a cedar-wood drawer. But when you broke them open (oh, never cut a pomegranate) their scent was fresh rather than sweet, like very early morning, or spring water welling through wild violets.

Breakfast in Strathcarron:

. the toasted oatmeal smell of frying trout, a whiff of turnip off the butter, the sharp aromatic kiss of rasp. jelly on yesterday's bap, incense of peat on the hearth—and that lovely permeating country smell which is frosted kale, harness and distant midden!

(MRS. N. GUNTER)

Chelsea Flower Show Smell:

Like mowing and sprinkling the lawn, watering the geranium-tubs and airing blankets at the same time.

Basket of Puppies Smell: Like eating hot bread and milk in a hayloft on a warm summer evening at sunset.

Country House Smell: My favourite country house smells of very old ghosts making mince-pies.

Farrier's Shop Smell:

This is evocative of Guy Fawkes night, plus roast chestnuts, and of ironing with a too-hot iron.