In the midst of all this, a 91-year-old friend, Una, sent Rog home with a handful of violets from her garden. They fitted perfectly into a charming, lopsided vase my sister Al made yonks ago – I had always searched for the right flowers for it.
The scent of the violets conveyed me to a time when I stirred my washing as it heated in a copper. The perfume took me to mossy, damp, woody places with shady secrets, where I rode my motorcycle wildly past trees dripping fragrant moisture. I twisted the machine along on the winding road in an effortless rhythm as I fled the calamities of urban youth.
It took me further back, to my grandmother’s side as her knobbly fingers transformed my ungainly efforts into embroidery, and my young eyes enabled me to thread the needles from the wooden reels of Coat’s cotton. Her dressing table held a silver hair-grooming set, mysterious silver-topped jars and the powder she patted on her limp, finely crazed skin. Her crystal perfume atomiser was connected to a pink-silk-crochet-covered balloon that I loved to squeeze, releasing a magical scent that made me forget the dry, dusty heat outside.
Violet is a tricky fragrance to capture in a long-lasting scent – apparently it supplies good middle notes but falls down somewhat on the base, fading in a couple of hours. But something’s in the air – violets are throwing off their musty reputation with companies such as Donna Karan parading a square-cut bottle of divinely purple-hued iris with violets, and a rebranded Yardley London rereleasing its 1913 April Violets.
And then there’s the most famous of them all, Violetta di Parma by Borsari. Originally Lodovico di Borsari managed to acquire its secret way back in 1870 from the monks who had distilled the essence of the flower for Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife, Marie Louise. Word is she was as shy as the flowers she loved so much.
