The Sensory Cupboard

In which I reminisce about times, long ago, when we were young and carefree.

The Sensory Cupboard

I don’t need to travel to find you; you travel with me always. Your thoughts are the echoes of my own, and your inspirations are the fuel for my heart. You are my waking breath and the light that spills behind the curtains when the morning finally breaks. With you, it is always morning, and the cockerel’s cry is a promise, never a warning.

As I tread the stepping-stones toward the chicken house, I smell you in the hyacinths, that sharp, heady burst of Springtime. The hens are waiting, an eager, bobbing audience. I let them free to roam the garden, watching them feel the dew between their long, prehistoric toes. They scratch for grubs between the stones, their heads down in the grass, their combs wobbling and glowing a vivid, healthy red.

At the back of the hen-house, I lift the lid of the nest box. There, nestled in a bed of golden straw and wood shavings, are four brown eggs. They lie together, warm and heavy with potential. The scent of the straw is the scent of security. I collect them in my basket and return to the house, noticing the "bloom" on the shells, that dusty, velvet sheen of something perfectly new and fresh.

Inside, I find you in the sensory cupboard. You are sitting on the large green cushion with your eyes closed, anchored by your favourite music. I feel a sudden welling of love, a tide that never quite goes out. Parting the beaded curtains with a soft, rhythmic clatter, I touch your face delicately, a silent anchor to bring you back from your dreams.

"Shall I stroke your head for you?" I whisper.

"Yes, please do," you reply, your voice a soft vibration in the small room.

"Shall I stand behind you?"

"Yes, please do."

I stand behind you in the dim, scented light of the cupboard and begin to stroke your hair back toward me. As you lean against me, the warmth of my body becomes your comfort. Music fills the space, kicking at my senses. It’s strange how a melody can rewire a mind, turning a quiet afternoon into a riot of feeling. The beaded curtain ripples in a stray breeze, and you turn to face me, that familiar longing still bright in your eyes after all these years.

In the evening, we walk in our wood. The snowdrops are bowing out now, tired after flowering bravely through the frost, but the bluebell leaves are already thrusting through the loam. Primroses provide the first flecks of colour. There is so much to harvest here, smells to take home and store for the leaner months. Springtime is a contract of promise; it buries old worries under a carpet of new growth.

We have earned this sensory cupboard. We built it through the decades, travelling from the raw energy of our teens to the quiet fruition of our lives. Now, we can opt to step inside and transport ourselves. With a single scent, we can return to the pathways of our youth.

We swing from a pink moon and re-enter that first apartment, the one with the defiant purple walls and the orange curtains. We are back in the coffee bars, where the air is thick and Jimi Hendrix is "astounding" our ears.

To enter the coffee bar of our youth is to step into a subterranean world of chrome and shadows. You remember the stairs, narrow, wooden, and slightly slick with the damp of a London afternoon, leading down into a basement that felt like the centre of the universe.

The first thing that hits you isn't the music, but the hiss. The great Gaggia espresso machine stands on the counter like a polished silver deity, breathing out plumes of dry, white steam. It is a mechanical monster, clattering and wheezing as it forces dark, bitter life into those clear Pyrex cups. The coffee isn't like the artisanal brews of today; it is frothy, topped with a stiff peak of bubbles that stays on your upper lip like a sugary cloud.

Then, there is the light. It isn't the clear sunlight of the garden, but a fractured, smoky dimness. It’s the orange glow of a heating element behind a grill, the neon flicker of a sign in the window, and the shimmering reflection of the "Harlequin" patterns on the tabletops.

We sit at those plastic tables, our elbows sticking slightly to the Formica. I am a vision of the time, a "ghostly face" created by layers of pale foundation and that defiant white lipstick that made my mouth look like a marble carving. My eyelashes are heavy, "spider-leg" thick with black mascara, framing eyes that are wide with the thrill of being young and "elsewhere."

Your hair is long, flopping into your eyes or curling around those thick, black spectacles that were so fashionable at the time. You have that studious look – white shirt, thin tie, brown tweed jacket and winklepickers! You look so clever and you are, of course.

The air is a physical presence. It’s a tapestry of blue cigarette smoke, weaving around the room in lazy, serpentine trails. It smells of clove, toasted tobacco, and damp wool coats steaming dry near the radiator.

And then, the jukebox hums.

When Purple Haze begins, it doesn't just play; it vibrates through the soles of our boots. The bass is a low thud in the chest, a rhythmic heartbeat that matches our own. Hendrix’s guitar is a jagged, electric streak of purple across the grey landscape of our parents' world. It sounds like the future, distorted, loud, and brilliantly messy.

We talk in hushed, earnest tones over the "clack-clack" of the beaded curtains and the laughter of boys in leather jackets. We are drinking in the "new experience" as quickly as we drink frothy coffee. Everything feels temporary yet eternal, the smoke, the music, the mascara, and the way you look at me across the table, your hair hiding half your face but none of your spirit.

In the sensory cupboard, that basement is never truly closed. I can still feel the heat of the Pyrex against my palms and the electric charge in the air before the "bitter pills" of the future ever existed. We are just two kids swinging from a pink moon, lost in a cloud of purple smoke, waiting for the song to never end.

You close your eyes in the cupboard, remembering the "me" that wore Apple Blossom, if I could afford it or Occur, if I couldn’t!. You, in return, smell of Old Spice and Embassy cigarettes. This was our "uniform." Before we had a mortgage, before we had the "stewardship" of children, we had these scents. They were the markers of our territory in a world that felt vast and unpredictable.

As we travel down the years in the cupboard, these smells become the anchors. When the "stormy winters" of scarlet fever and mumps arrived, and the house smelled of antiseptic and damp laundry, a quick splash of Old Spice or a lingering trace of Apple Blossom was a reminder of the people we were before we were parents.

Even now, as I touch your face delicately to bring you back from your dreams, I can almost find those scents again beneath the surface. They are the "base notes" of our life together. The Apple Blossom has matured into the scent of the hyacinths in our garden, and the Old Spice has mellowed into the "Log Cabin" tobacco of memory, but the essence remains.

In the sensory cupboard, we aren't just remembering a smell; we are re-living the moment the two of us became "us."

We travel back down the years, "putting back" the babies as we regress. We slot them gently back into their watery wombs to await their birth once more, un-living the stormy winters of measles, mumps, and chickenpox.

My mother floats into view, smelling of the antiseptic and starch of the hospital where she worked. And there is my dad, his presence announced by the sparkling, cherry-wood scent of Log Cabin tobacco burning in his pipe. He only smoked a cigar at Christmas.

Whose idea was it to build this place? Was it yours or mine? I truly can’t remember. One morning I simply woke up, and there it was, manifesting in the spare room where the children used to play. Now, the sun dazzles through the window, creating a kaleidoscope of colour through the tinted beads, rainbows fractured against the walls.

You deny building it, yet there it remains. Some days it smells of heavy incense; other days, it carries the scent of long-forgotten rain. When I sit there, I can taste the past, the present, and the future all at once.

The present tastes of the mundane and the modern: pizza, Cappucino, and the salty hit of a burger in a bun; but the future... the future tastes like a bitter pill, and it is hard to swallow. Tomorrow, perhaps, the sensory cupboard will be gone, vanished back into the architecture of the house: but for today, we shall inhabit it in all its magical, shimmering glory.
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