My nose and other trivia

The captain who could not smell and I are having an aperitif before lunch. Palembang, Indonesia. MV Landak, 1955.

A friend of mine has told me that my nose is not one of my assets but more like a liability. It is a handicap, he said.
The good man doesn’t mean that it is misshapen or even offensive to look at. No, albeit slightly off-centre and battered by years of hay fever and persistent colds during its formative years, it is still a respectable nose for a north-western European of Dutch-Frisian-Germanic descent. What he points out is that it is far too sensitive to do me any good. This might be true, as I am invariably bothered by strong offensive odours which may run from the scent of somebody with too much pomade at my dinner table to the finer points of the Isarn cookery my esteemed “Mae Bahn” performs “al fresco” under my bedroom balcony. On the other hand I will be the first to know that the house is on fire.
Smell, as the experts will tell you, is actually what makes you enjoy your dinner. It gives tone to the basic flavours like bitter, salt, sour and sweet. These are registered by the taste buds in ones mouth. I once sailed with a captain on a tiny coaster in Indonesian waters who bragged about the fact that his olfactory faculties had long ceased to function.
The chief engineer was too lazy to get out of his overalls and leave his bottle of Dutch “Jenever” to join us for lunch and dinner and consequently my only daily dining companion was the “old man”. Our Chinese cook was never praised nor scolded and with no appreciation nor critic at all, he really did not care what kind of swill he prepared for the western barbarians. Whenever I objected to these culinary catastrophes, the captain just shrugged his shoulders and said that as far as he was concerned the food was edible. Fortunately my portly Singaporean Chinese cabin attendant, Ah Yoo, saved me form starvation by feeding me special dishes from the crew’s own Hokkien style galley in between the official meals with the big brass.
Smell is one of the most powerful triggers to bring back memories of places or situations in the past. My partiality for the scent of Indonesian “Batik” (the smell of the wax used in the process), gives me a feeling of security and warmth.
It probably goes back to the distant past when I clung to the sarong of our “Kokki” (cook) or “Babu” (maid). The Javanese number one, the “Djongos”, in his impeccable starched white uniform, invariably smelled of “Roko Kretek”, the clove scented cigarettes the Indonesians are addicted to and which, in a fit of nostalgia while on a visit to Bali, made me start smoking again for some years during the early seventies.
When I was five, my father was due for overseas European leave and we left for Holland on one of those magnificent ocean liners of the era. It was called the SS Indrapura, after a volcano in North Sumatra, and I recall the voyage whenever I smell oranges. I never before had a real orange until the day we embarked and its fragrance became for me an association with those pre-war voyages. I will also never forget the smell of tar and the odours of cooking from the galleys in the alleyways. The salty taste of the railing whenever I stuck my head between the bars to see what was going on in the sea below is another vivid memory as was the taste of the sea water from one of the taps in the bath tub. A special kind of soap was supplied to be used for this kind of water.
From our stay in Holland from 1934 to 1935 I recall the fumes of burning coal in the winter and the wonderful fragrance of pine and heather in the countryside in the summer. Once I came home to find my maternal German grandmother clad in a black dress with black stockings, frying sprat in our kitchen which spread a most delicious aroma all through the house, never equalled again by my efforts to produce the same with our local tropical fish. The sweet woman died some year later when we had returned to the Indies, shortly after the German forces invaded the Netherlands in May 1940.
The scent of gunny bags and sawdust remind me of the dark days of the Second World War when I was forcibly employed as a labourer supplying the Japanese military and our own camp kitchen with rice, maize and other foodstuffs, as well as sawdust for the ovens to burn. Later, when I was twenty or twenty one, I joined a ship of the Holland America line as an apprentice mate and my main responsibility was to polish all the brass on the bridge, every day, except Sundays, seasick or not. Consequently, the smell of the polishing agent - I won’t tell you the name because it was Brasso - still nauseates me in association with those awful and miserable days on the cold and stormy North Atlantic when I was unsuccessfully trying to get my sea legs.
The smell of popcorn I associate with American cities and the garishly lit cinemas with alternating rows of coloured flashing lights over the entrance. I had an unforgettable time when I was able to get away from the ship for a few hours, to explore the American scene and visit newly made friends who were in our eyes, children of the war, incredibly rich and generous.
Amazingly enough, it is the scent of Chinese dried herbs which dominate my memories of the first time I arrived in the land of the Siamese in 1952. I assume this was because we passed the Chinese herbal druggists on our way along New Road when we went ashore in Bangkok’s China town. Another olfactory memory I have from my early years in Thailand in the early sixties is the invigorating scent of Thai incense and consequently that of the temples. Most disagreeable I have always found the odour of “Plah Rah” (rice fermented fresh water fish). It still reminds me of the rotting rice in the bilge of the ship after discharging a cargo of the staple and another unpleasant Thai nasal experience for me has always been the odour of a fermented bamboo shoot curry which is, I must hasten to say, a great favourite of my most favourite people, the people of Isarn or the Northeast.