If I was to breathe in the sweet perfume of a biscuit barrel filled with custard creams or the congealed stench of those third of a pint bottles of full-fat milk, I would instantly be transported back to break time circa 1982.
I was a tomboy of about 11 and had just moved from a comprehensive junior school in the Midlands into a world where I shared a “common room” with fellow girl pupils, all dressed in brown - though there was nothing common about anyone else there, as far as I could tell.
I was at a boarding school with parents living overseas, three sisters at other institutions and other family and friends a seemingly endless train journey away, so writing and receiving letters became my full-time hobby.
The joyous mid-morning ritual of the post arriving was something we all looked forward to. We would gather round a green, felt board criss-crossed with black elastic and marked out with the letters of the alphabet. Craning my neck, I’d try to see from the back of the queue whether anything had been wedged into the section to which my surname belonged.
On the occasion when I spotted my mother’s neatly hand-scripted style on airmail paper, I was overjoyed. Her words were tightly packed together and often ran down the side of the page, as if she was trying to cram in as much news as possible. Often, there was a squiggled note from Dad at the bottom and I learnt early on how to avoid tearing open those airmail folds too harshly for fear of ripping off the crucial sentence end!
Later, the letters became typed or tapped out on our new Amstrad computer -a huge, revered cream object for which my mum sewed special green dust covers.
Time pressures later meant that there was one carbon-copied letter for all four sisters. The lucky one got the original and the unluckiest got the barley-legible whispers of the smudged bottom copy. But they were always careful to make sure we took it in turns and there was usual a tailor-made biroed message to each of us individually.
The written word became so valuable that I still can’t bear to part with any of the crumpled, folded, scribbled-on and elastic-banded letters I received at that time.
Those words of encouragement drove me on and I’d write reams back. It’s cringe-making to read some of the teenage rubbish I used to tell them; some of the concerns that I was so pre-occupied with at the time that really weren’t important.
I expect I told them I was envious of a girl called Helen who often had weekly parcels of fruit cake and ‘tuck.’ No way would my family spend money on things like that for me - the school was feeding me wasn’t it?
We had special wooden lockers where we kept our stash and one of the first things we were obliged to purchase was a padlock for our private locker.
Some girls gathered beside theirs in the evenings to nibble on their favourite snacks before bed or stash away their secret something or others.
The dictionary describes nostalgia as “a yearning of some period of the past or wistful memories of it.” And while I don’t want to back to the past, there are some days when a certain smell or song or a certain feeling makes me wallow in nostlagia and switching off from the present moment, feels just right.
Although I sometimes denounce writing as a lonely, passive occupation, it is a doing thing. Words can fill an empty moment and the right words, thoughtfully put together, can inspire, make sense of the senseless and give us cheer or purpose. So I won’t be throwing out any of those old dog-eared letters just yet.
What takes your mind back to a bygone time – pleasant or otherwise?
