(Published in THE MONTHLY, September, 2025)

On an Autumn day in Melbourne not so long ago, while travelling home on the train, I was caught by a scent. It wafted over from a woman seated across the aisle. Her hair was short and blow-waved neat, her coat was buttoned, her handbag was upright against her hip; she was a woman in her middle years, occupied with her phone. I willed her not to disembark until I had found the memory of the smell. It was teasingly familiar, yet I knew it lodged in the distant past. I inhaled more deeply and felt a flush of happiness. A moment later, the happiness was swamped by a wave of anxiety and longing.

What was that smell? I rummaged through memory, but despite the powerful feelings it engendered, the original source remained out of reach. 

The woman slipped her phone into her bag, stood up and moved to the door; soon she would be gone. I wanted to grab her, hold her back till the scent revealed itself. The train slowed, the platform of the station appeared, then, just before the doors opened, it came to me: it was hairspray, the Elnett hairspray my mother used to helmet her hair back in the 1960s. (I would normally avoid turning a noun into a verb, but the hairspray did, in fact, make of her hair a helmet, and it did so actively enough to warrant a verb.)

I had solved the mystery of the smell, but I was curious about its emotional baggage.  

My mother died in 2012. Twenty years earlier, while in her mid-sixties, her cognitive skills began to dwindle. In the last eight years of her life, she recognised none of her family; in the last three years of her life, she could neither walk nor talk. Before the dementia, and probably because I was more like her than were my sister and brother, my relationship with my mother was not easy. I spent my childhood trying to win her approval, or perhaps, more simply, her attention. I would stand beside her as she sat at her dressing table, one of those old-fashioned ones with a central mirror and two side wing mirrors – three versions of my mother as she teased her thin hair and stiffened it with Elnett hairspray. The last element of her beauty regime was to apply perfume to her neck and behind her ears – it was Je Reviens by Worth in a small round blue bottle – then she would turn to me, silent and desperately hopeful, and dab some of the perfume behind my ears. The anxiety and longing disappeared in a moment of pure happiness.

Smells and memory, such a powerful, yet mysterious coupling. I can bring to mind something visual, I can imagine a voice or a piece of music from the past, but I cannot imagine a smell – nor, with a nod to Proust, taste. But perhaps such considerations are moot, given the capriciousness and capaciousness and plain bloody-mindedness of memory. After all, each time memory summons up a particular past it produces a different version. The life since the event changes the perspective on the past event, as do the reasons for wanting to recall it. Memory is always in service, first and foremost, to the present and not the event it seeks to restore. I may not be able to recall a smell or taste in the way I can a picture, a face or a piece of music, but the fact is, no memory is faithful to the past.

And yet, there was that raw longing, that look-at-me ache, conjoined with the Elnett hairspray. It was primitive, juvenile, it served no purpose, so I wanted to believe, to the adult I have become. It was of then, and it trespassed into my now.

I was nineteen or twenty when I first came across Sartre’s 1964 memoir of his childhood, Words  (Les Paroles). I was immediately drawn to it because of the cover of my Penguin edition. Instead of the usual image, the cover carries a quote from the book in a huge font: ‘I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it…’ 

I shared this sentiment – I still do, although with a little less vehemence than Sartre. But what most appealed was that a very famous person dared contradict the assumed innocence and care-free quality that defined childhood.

I wanted to pack childhood away as soon as it was finished, but childhood will not go so quietly; indeed, I’ve come to believe that childhood claims the better part of memory for itself. Miserable or happy, privileged or deprived, pivotal aspects of childhood are tenaciously entrenched. Yet, as my experience with the Elnett hairspray demonstrates, these memories can hibernate beyond conscious reach for years, even decades, only to bombard as you make your way through maturity.

There’s nothing new about this: a century ago, Freud revealed that the ignored past, the forgotten past, the past of which you are unconscious, can nonetheless exert a powerful effect on who you are and how you behave. And yet we live, most of the time, as if unaware of being tethered to the past, and when old events gate-crash the present they result in surprise and shock, they can readily throw you off balance. 

These thoughts led me back to Walter Benjamin’s essay on Proust. Benjamin writes of ‘purposive remembering’ with its strenuous efforts to recollect and, in the case of A la recherche du temps perdu, to imaginatively restore the past. ‘Purposive remembering’ suggests that a reconstruction of the past is possible. But it’s not, and why imagination is essential to memory – not simply to fill in the gaps, but also to provide the multi-dimensions of lived experience: the facts, the movements, the emotions, the smells and tastes

In the days following the Elnett hairspray event, I mulled over the liquid connections between imagination and memory. Joyce wrote that ‘Imagination is memory’; I would propose the reverse: that memory is imagination – not the entire infinite stretch of the imagination but rather memory is a process of the imagination.^[1] The idea that memory is fused with the imagination, that all memories are distilled in the imagination, provides for the malleability of memory. The fact is that when I focus my mind on the child standing at her mother’s dressing table now, I understand the situation slightly differently than I did just a few weeks ago, feel it differently, and know it differently, too.

There was a postscript to the Elnett hairspray incident. Driven by nostalgia (definitely not curiosity) I went on-line and discovered that the perfume my mother used, Worth’s Je Reviens, was still being produced and was available from a shop in the Melbourne CBD. (As to why the perfume and not the hairspray: I use perfume every day, but have no need for hairspray). I caught the train to the city, I went to the shop. The perfume came in two sizes, each sealed in the familiar blue box. I bought the large bottle – far better value, according to the woman in the perfume shop, but that was not what convinced me: I assumed my mother, who used the perfume every day, would have used the large version (even though in my memory the round blue bottle was quite small). But I was wrong. When I removed the perfume from the box the bottle was the right shape and the familiar rich blue colour, but it was far too big. My mother used the small size – which, I expect, was the only size available back in those long-ago days. I was so disappointed, I was wanting exactly the same, I was wanting to revisit exactly that old scene. To experience it again. Fortunately, the scent had not changed. I put some on my wrists, I wanted to keep smelling it, smelling the better part of a difficult childhood. 

The headache began almost immediately, first the shadow that presages the pain, then the pain itself which, in most instances will morph into migraine. There are many perfumes that do this to me, but surely not Je Reviens. 

I persisted – I so wanted to wear this perfume – but so did the migraine. I gave the bottle to my sister. And the memory? It has changed again.

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^[1] in 2007, a team led by Demis Hassabis published a paper in which memory and the imagination were linked. They showed that similar brain activity occurred during tasks employing memory of the past and tasks requiring an imagining of the future, both being grounded in the hippocampus. Since then, much further work has been done on the neurological connections of memory and the imagination.