What does autumn smell like?

Smell is surely the most evocative of our senses. Every now and then I catch the very minutest “glimpse” of a smell (can one catch a “glimpse” of what cannot be seen?) that instantly takes me back to my childhood. Often the memory is fugitive and inconclusive, a fragment briefly seen and as quickly lost.

I can tell you that a warm autumn day in Harmergreen Woods smells of old summer houses. In particular of the summer house at West Close, the long low bungalow on the edge of Exmoor where I lived from the age of minus one until my father passed away and my mother married a man 20 years her senior who lived up on the moor itself.

To enter the summer house at West Close - out of the back door of the house, across the tarmac yard, over the lawn and past the beds of lupins around the leaky concrete pool my father made - was to enter a warm, close, place, a repository of discarded objects, a treasury of smells. On summer days my mother would open the double doors at the front of the summer house so that my father, who was frequently - and, as it turned out, fatally - ill could sit and soak up the sun. Our piano was there, on the right, just inside the doors, and chairs, deck chairs, travel rugs and - in the deep, dark back half of the summer house - old beds and blankets, books, dead leaves, spiders, cobwebs, woodlice.

My friends and I would play in the summer house - “mothers and fathers” and unspeakable medical dramas with the Attwater girls; Davy Crockett with David Hosegood or Sue Kingdon - and I was put to lie out in the sun outside the summer house with my Dinky toys as I recuperated from pneumonia or scarlet fever.

The timber and asbestos walls of the summer house - this was in the early 1950s, long before they discovered how dangerous asbestos was - absorbed the sun’s heat and warmed the musty things inside until they gave off that compound of decay and wool and canvas and upholstery and last year’s leaves that I smelled in Harmergreen Woods last Thursday.

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