WE ALL remember how the smell of madelines brought memories of childhood flooding back to Proust. Setting in motion a train of consciousness that manifested itself in the volumes of, “A la recherche du temps perdu”.
And so it was as I walked past a Cypriot family last week. They were gathered in the sun sitting under a solitary old olive tree. Blue sacks lay beneath its branches, a rickety ladder leant against its rough trunk. Granny was squatting on a stool carefully selecting the best of the bunch for her own bucket; her son was foresting the highest branches and Granddad directed operations whilst lighting another cigarette. Two noisy grandchildren were given the task of taking the leaves off the olives as they were shaken from the tree and putting them into big white mesh sacks. There was laughter and shouting and it was a scene, which I am sure, had not changed for generations.
It instantly took me back to my own childhood days, blackberrying. When picnics and picking and playing were synonymous. When all four generations of the family would head for the hedgerows and the day was spent hunting the fattest and juiciest specimens. When we would competitively see who could fill their Tupperware container first and our mouths, fingers and clothes would eventually be stained with the bright purple juice.
There is something deeply satisfying and comforting about these rituals of family life and country living. In the fast paced, car-dominated, individualistic world of 2005 it pleased me to see this snapshot, by a roadside, of family life. Two generations now of my family are gone, to be replaced by the young, but still we go blackberrying and it struck me that the remembrance of people past is much more real to me in the smell of a Bramley apple and blackberry crumble from the fruits of our days’ labour than in the coldness of the cemetery.
I’d like to think if I return, many years from now, to that dusty road on the outskirts of Nicosia, under a timeless olive a family will still be there: changed but unchanged. The roles moved on of course, but the tableau and the day preserved. So that one could almost faintly see Granny still in black on her stool, meting out her wise counsel to her grandchildren, and Granddad holding his fag backwards between his fingers in the way of the soldier.
The legacy of Proust, who died eighty three years ago this week, is to remind us that memory is sensual, triggered by smell and taste and sounds. That sometimes it is those ordinary days that we take for granted: the ones where we watched our grandmother crack an olive with a flat stone or boil the sugar and ruby rich fruit for jam that mean the most. That later in life the smell of blackberries bubbling on the stove or the sharp taste of olives steeped in lemons and garlic and coriander will indeed be a reminder of lost times.
