A Somerset Lad

Ten years ago today, I set off at 8 o’clock on a Sunday morning to drive the three hundred miles from the Mediterranean village of Collioure to the city of Bordeaux.

Two hours or so later, I pulled into a service station on the autoroute. Fans in yellow and blue spotted my Leinster jersey, ‘Ah, Leinster’, they called, and then shouted, louder, ‘ASM, ASM’.

Reaching the outskirts of Bordeaux by one o’clock, I parked the car near a tram stop and bought a ticket. The carriage was well filled – a sea of yellow. I smiled and they began to sing, ‘Ireland’s Call’.

On reaching the city centre, where a change of trams was required, the number of ASM Clermont Auvergne supporters seemed to have multiplied exponentially. I was pulled into a group in order to be photographed with them.

‘Bonne chance’, they said, each of them offering a handshake.

Walking to the pub where Leinster fans had gathered, it was impossible to get near the doorway, let alone get inside, so I walked to a tram stop to go to the Stade Chaban-Delmas, a piece of Art Deco architecture built in 1930 that became the home of Union Bordeaux Bègles rugby club. With a capacity of 34,000, it was much larger than any of the grounds of clubs in Ireland or Britain.

The size of the crowd making its way to the match meant the tram could go no further than two stops, and I got out to walk.

The Leinster supporters had begun a march to the ground, led by a man with a blue flag and I slipped in among them. The streets were lined with yellow and blue attired ASM supporters applauding the arrival of the opposition support – it was a strange experience.

As we approached the stadium, the lines of Jaunard supporters converged and formed a funnel.  Passing through it meant exchanging handshakes with dozens and dozens of people – it was hard to imagine this happening anywhere else.

The noise generated in the stadium was tremendous, chants and tunes and songs and musicians, a constant barrage of sound.

Leinster were left winners of the match when in the 79th minute the Clermont winger Wesley Fofana knocked the ball forward instead of scoring a try, and then the ASM pack conceded a penalty on the Leinster goal line.

There was a feeling that we had robbed them, and even then they still shook hands with us in the stand, and as we left the ground.

It remains the most memorable sporting occasion I have ever attended.

On Good Friday, we visited family graves placing flowers.

Some of the stones and surround were in need of a clean. Dirt and lichens had obscured the names of the departed, so last Tuesday one of my sisters and I returned with soft brushes and Jeyes Fluid diluted in water.

The fluid was efficacious in revealing inscriptions I didn’t even realize were present on the stones. For the first time I saw the name of Stanley John Crossman, a grand uncle who died before I was born.

Jeyes Fluid will always be evocative of High Ham Primary School with its two classrooms divided by a corridor leading to the cloakroom. Infants to the right, juniors to the left: was there knowledge worth learning that was unknown to our teachers?

The school had a set of smells to go with each season: the conkers from horse chestnut trees on the village green; the glue with which we stuck crepe paper to toilet roll tubes to make ‘candles’ at Christmas time; the coke carried in scuttles from the bunker to feed the pot-bellied stoves in the winter; the school milk from third of a pint bottles that had been left to warm; the scents from the school playing field as the county council tractor and mower cut stripes across the football pitch; the chlorine in the water of the swimming pool with blue plastic sides; the perspiration from kids in the area sports, anxious not to let down our little school in competition against places hugely bigger than our own.

But amongst all the smells, none compares with the Jeyes Fluid.

Jeyes Fluid brings memories of cleanliness and memories of discipline.  It went with the toilets and the cloakroom, where you were not to be without permission. It was the smell of the school after everyone had gone home at the end of the day and the cleaning began  It was the scent you caught when arriving for a new day.

If it is possible for smell to have moral value, then Jeyes Fluid was the smell of virtuosity; it was the smell of hard work and strict instructions.

Are associations between smell and memory different for every person, or are there certain links that are unbreakable? Is there a generation for whom Jeyes Fluid will always be the smell of education?

One splash of the liquid and I can step back fifty years to the summer of 1972, my last term in primary school.

We had fish and chips in a Temple Bar restaurant for lunch. They took forty-five minutes to serve them. The portion of fish was more batter than fish, the chips were more like the starch sticks they call ‘fries’ than like proper chips.

Searching for condiments, the vinegar and tomato sauce were in plastic sachets. The ketchup was not Heinz, and even worse for fish and chips, the vinegar was not Sarson’s.

Sarson’s has been a friend for as long as I can remember.

Sarson’s went over soggy chips wrapped in sheets from unsold newspapers.  Like Liam Clancy once said of eating pig trotters wrapped up in copies of last week’s Munster Express, ‘there was eating and there was reading’.  An over generous shake of the bottle and the paper became soggy and left newsprint on your hands.

Sarson’s went over bags of cockles bought from a stall at the harbour in Lyme Regis.  The shellfish already had their own saltiness; a shake of the maroon-labelled bottle gave them a piquant flavour.  If English seaside towns had a taste that captured a sense of the place, it was cockles and vinegar.

In undergraduate days, Sarson’s went over the huge portions of fish and chips my uncle would bring into his  home in Kew in west London at teatime each Friday.  ‘Now, who’s for what?’ he would say, pretending that he had forgotten the order on his way home.

During ordination training in Dublin, Sarson’s went over fish and chips at the Wimpy in Rathmines on the occasional visits there.  College food on Fridays was so bad that the extravagance of going to the Wimpy could be justified.  The fish and chips came with tea served in battered aluminium pots and with slices of white bread thinly spread with butter.  The food left you feeling full for hours afterwards

Sarson’s has always been there. Flick the lid and pour the vinegar over a bag of chips chips, and it is instantly summertime.  There is a memory of sitting in a car with a bag of hot chips perched on a knee. There is the sound of seagulls and the noise diesel engines of boats. There is the laughter of a Friday evening when a whole weekend stretched ahead and Monday was an eternity away.  There is a sense of all being well with the world.

Perhaps that is the real attraction of the Sarson’s: a whiff and, for just one moment, the realities outside fade away