The Scent and Taste of Memory
By Richard Walker
I was recently on a visit to Paris with my friend K to see the fantastical David Hockney retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation. I hadn’t been to Paris for five years. As we walked down into the metro a memory exploded of when my family was on its first leave from the ‘White Man’s Grave’ in Ghana, the country which, in its way, bookends my memoir, Highlife & my other lives.
At the request of the UK government, my Dad had flown out to Ghana ahead of the family to work with Kwame Nkrumah’s post-independence Ghanaian generals. My Mum, sister and I, still young children, followed a few months later by boat from Liverpool. We journey through the Bay of Biscay, the adults drinking ‘beef tea’ on deck with rugs over their knees. I ask Mum if I can have a sip and I like its savoury, nutty flavour. It feels like it’s doing me good. I’m allowed to sit in a deckchair and have my own but I’m not old enough to be given a rug.
As we round the north-west shoulder of Africa and step ashore at Las Palmas, I see donkeys with panniers loaded with green bananas. I’d always thought they were yellow. I’m told they’re not yet ripe and we have to wait to eat them. In Bathurst, Gambia and Freetown, Sierra Leone canoes paddle out to the SS Apapa. Fresh pineapples and mangoes are hauled on board. I’d only ever seen tinned pineapple and never come across a mango. Over the following days the savour and aromas of both fruits explode in our mouths. So this is it, this is Africa! Marvellous, strange fruits tingling our tongues and exciting our taste buds. Whenever I stroll past the Asian food shops near my house in East Oxford, I’m standing on deck watching the pineapples and mangoes stacking up: provisions for our breakfasts in the following days.
On board as the sun sets, we have our English high tea which is not nearly as exciting: fish paste sandwiches, strawberry flavour jelly, sponge cake. I ask if we can have pineapple or mangos. I’ve fallen in love, bewitched by these delicious fruits. I’m told they are only for breakfast. Then we go to our cabins where Mum starts getting ready to go up to dinner with the adults. Towards the end of her preparations we’re swamped by a heady fountain of pungent perfume.
I have a bottle right here in my study. I take it down from the shelf in its turquoise and cream box with its horse logo and pull out the gently curving bottle about the length of Mum’s hand. I remove the cap and vaporise eau de parfum on to my wrist. I inhale the slightly metallic brass of its aroma and there I am with my sister Jane in the bunk below, my mother turning off the lights except for a small one casting a soft yellow pool by her bed under the porthole. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she says, ‘Maybe a midnight feast,’ her dress swishing out against the heavy door, the notes of her perfume tinkling down the corridor as she makes her way to the Captain’s table. My sister Jane and I are left alone in our bunks. I can see different shades of dark through the porthole as we plough south through the Atlantic the invisible West African cost on our port side. How Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass can take you on a trip to a distant time (1960) and place, the smell of memory, of someone who lives in my and my sister’s consciousness, until she and I lose our memories.
The memory that recently invaded me in the Paris metro with K is: squashed with a crowd of adults in the metro I was crushed in the carriage with my parents and sister and my face was part smothered in a male overcoat. Pouring down that rough wool from a bearded cave was an invisible torrent of pungent, piquant and prickling breath which my father later told me was garlic. My first ‘madeleine memory’ not as exquisite as Proust but robust, distinctive and unforgettable. It was a Proustian moment but in reverse. Entering that metro with K brought back the memory of the garlic fog I’d experienced as a nine year old.
It was the location which conjured the memory of the garlic fog not the garlic fog which conjured another memory. For someone like me who’s lived and worked in every continent and though born in England spent more of his life outside his birth country than in it, it is place which pulls at my heart and sparks memory bringing a past scene into the moment. I was enveloped by waves of garlic as we walked down into the metro but K was oblivious to its presence. She had no history with garlic there.
Highlife, & my other lives explores how our memories are constantly created and recreated wrapped inside one another, interacting with all our senses but here through taste and smell. They are Russian dolls but ones that interact across time and space, a living tapestry embroidering our lives in three dimensions which we walk – well, some of us do – around with, hearing and seeing stories in our heads.
Our last full day in Paris was K’s birthday. After we returned from a free cruise on the River Seine past the restored Notre Dame, free if you present your passport with your birth date, we meandered back to our apartment. And there we consumed two small birthday tarts, after K had blown out the candles, half each.
Raspberry and lemon tartlets. As I bit into my portion of the lemon tartlet and the zing of the toasted lemon meringue exploded in my mouth, my taste buds recalled my Mum’s full size lemon meringue pie. I watched as she bent down in front of the oven and with her glove pulled out the peaks of perfectly toasted meringue, anticipating the zest of the lemon underneath the snow which would make my cheeks shiver.
And then I came back to the lovely apartment in the 11th arrondissement of Paris celebrating K’s birthday.
Richard Walker’s Highlife, & my other lives is published by Amaurea Press. Amaurea will be publishing a new edition of Richard’s first novel, A Curious Child, in November 2025.