SOUNDS & SMELLS & MEMORIES

With Chess playing on the CD, I am suddenly transported half a world and a decade away to the Lowveldt of Zimbabwe. I played the tape non-stop as I drove Rab's Mini non-stop from Pretoria to Harare - a trip of about 1100 kilometres in eleven and a half hours damaging my coccyx permanently in the process. Six foot three of corpulence does that in a Mini. I could still find the spot  today - the bump which did the damage as I hit it at about 120 kph - about top speed for the Mini - with the love duet playing on the tape.

Funny how sounds and smells do that. Conjure up such crystal clear memories. I often wonder about Matt's sense of smell. I remember telling him, before he and Rab went to Germany where I was to meet up with them for the first leg of our first overseas trip that he should try and remember the smells as well as the sights - to use as many of his senses as he could. I do not have a great nose, but there are many odours which are evocative for me - the rain on the dust of the Zimbabwe high plateau: the scent of coffee brewing takes me immediately to the cold morning air in a Zurich square having just come off an overnight flight from Africa: the unmistakable esurience of lamb chops being grilled on an open fire - but these are pretty gross aromas compared to the fine distinctions which he can make. He can recognise dozens of perfumes and aftershaves hours later. Did he always have this ability which I unconsciously recognised when passing on my advice? Or did he start concentrating on smell as a concept as a result of the trip.

I guess it was a latent faculty because his ear is also so much keener than mine and he probably has more memories stored by sound and smell than I. Yet we still remember differing things, even when we shared experiences.

For me, the main source of sound memories is in songs. I can never hear "We'll Gather Lilacs" without thinking of Dad, and the two of us walking down the leafy path to the beach at Nahoon - why? I must have been very young - maybe that was just after he got back from the war and I was still coming to grips with no longer being the centre of attraction, yet it is a happy memory unlike the doleful "Four Legged Friend" which he whistled sadly after a blue with Mom. We used to mock him in later life whenever he started this one, offering him a horse hair shirt to go with the mood.

Funny that there are no tunes I associate with Mom except "Buy My Flowers". I can remember the last time she sang that, in our house in Fish Hoek. The sadness of the tune and in her voice reduced me to tears and before we knew it Steve and Ang, my brother and sister were also bawling their eyes out, rather like the time many years later when a suitcase fell on Mom's head on the train outside Bulawayo and knocked her out. She laughed when retelling the story because the first thing she saw on regaining her senses was four open mouths bellowing fit to bust.

And of course there is only one song that all our friends remember my darling old Anthea by - "The Way We Were" and the way she would belt it out late at night especially when we were all young and full of good red Cape wine. We had a tape with seven different versions and she would play that right through if you would let her, like the evening I sat next to the turntable and, according to the neighbours who were the only sober people within earshot, played "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" fourteen times in succession. I still like that tune.