I'm up to the armpits in old-school fragrances

My nostrils twitched, just as did those of Mole in The Wind in the Willows on sensing the nearness of his old home in the winter darkness, and then came the rush of memories, not of goose in the oven or pudding on the hob, not of chestnuts roasting and crumpets toasting at an open fire, not the fumes of sherry, claret and Madeira - for none of those was to be sniffed by any London child in the austere and deprived years of the earlier 1940s - but of armpits.

For most of those years my nose was well below the height of the adult armpit - the bus conductor reaching for my penny fare, the schoolmaster leaning over my desk to grimace at the hash I made of mathematics, the too-indulgent grocer stretching over his counter with the small bag of broken biscuits that he sometimes held back for the benefit of boys.

We did not bathe much in those days - irregularly and perhaps once a week with luck and when the water was hot, for the gas was often at too low a pressure even to boil a kettle. My stepfather taught me the desert-army tricks of bathing in a mug of water and I cannot recall his smelling of anything other than Navy Cut tobacco, or my mother faintly of perfumes carefully rationed to the merest dab, but most other adults smelled of armpit.

The Government was aware of our unwashed condition and campaigned against BO with posters and jingles, but not with much effect. I do not recall finding it offensive; indeed, on those winter evenings when I had been detained at school for extra maths, or as not infrequent punishment for insolence, the smell of adults on the journey home could be intoxicating. To climb the stairs of a bus in the homegoing rush hour was to experience Nirvana - all the windows tight shut and obscured by condensation, everyone puffing away at every conceivable brand of tobacco from mild Woodbine to exotic Balkan Sobranie, every wet rubberised cotton mackintosh contributing the odour of a garage workshop, the crude perfume of cheap cosmetics on every woman's face heightened by the damp. Add to all these the ubiquitous odour of armpit, and you have the full flavour of the heady mixture that we breathed.

Only real Harris tweed broke the spell, for it was not the sweet smell of heather, pine trees and rare whisky, but the stinks of sheep's lanolin and dog's urine combined.

These foolish things are not quite as romantic as the lipstick's traces and romantic places of the song, but there they were, vividly remembered among the paper hats and raucous tipsiness of office parties in a restaurant not nearly as good as it once was, a truly Proustian experience triggered by a waiter's armpit.