Creosote afternoons…

So, whilst I’m on the subject I might as well continue.

Freshly mown grass, sterilised milk straight from the larder, the oily smell of rain when it fell on parched summer pavements, the cloying fragrance of trimmed privet bunched upon the pavement, melting tarmac.

Are you coming with me? Is it a sunny summer afternoon for you? Do have your plastic sandals on? Maybe the paddling pool is out, the smell of warm soft inflated plastic and slightly cloudy fluoride tainted tap water flashing in the sunshine. There’ll be a sickly yellow ring on the grass for weeks after your dad eventually gets around to letting it down. You might hear a push mower in the distance, a flymo buzzing, the snip-snip-snip of hand-held hedge clippers - a whistle with another thirty feet to go. Can you feel the warmth of the heated pavement slabs upon your bare feet? Look, even the old spat-out chewing gum stuck to the road has gone to a sticky goo - don’t step in it whatever you do.

“Put your shoes back on, you’ll step in glass and cut your feet to ribbons.”

A fire siren, must be a fire. Don’t worry this isn’t the war.

And the tarmac on the road outside your garden gate; has it melted in the heat, a shimmering floating ghost hazily drifting above it? And will it never rain, the wet heating the pavement until it steams that smell of heat and petrol? And can you hear the clink of teacups, your Nan indoors in the cool and sipping lukewarm tea topped up with milk from the thin bottle of sterilised milk that forever sits upon the kitchen table?

And lolly sticks from cider ice lolls dropped on the hot pavement, collected and made into whizzers, fingers gently criss-crossing five to make them firm, then flinging them through the air to smash to smithereens as they hit the ground.

 

Are you there? Are you still with me? Can you smell the candyfloss of a summer fete?

Breathe deeply, and somewhere you will smell the creosote as men and boys, stripped to the waist and holding dripping brushes paint sheds and fences trying to avoid the burning splashes. Is it your dad, your uncle, brother, mate holding that brush and humming? Doesn’t it stink? Doesn’t it smell great, that rich, heady aroma of coal and tar and gas towers and summer’s afternoons. I still have his creosote. It still smells the same.

“Careful Frank, you’re splashing it everywhere. If it gets on the flowers they’ll die.”

Of course they banned it in 2003, Health and Safety, illegal both to buy or use. Didn’t stop Frank though; he had enough put by for a few years shed and fence painting. Not that he ever got to use most of it. They said it might give you cancer – like sulphided wine, and radiated eggs, and rare red meat – but only from ‘a lifetime's daily skin contact with creosote’, so not like cigarettes and in the end it wasn’t the creosote or the cigarettes at all. Just bad luck, he hadn’t smoked in thirty years..

Frank in his vest painting the shed, a beer by his feet.

That’s where I am on this sunny summer’s afternoon; where are you now?