Cut grass in high summer. Your mother’s scent as she kisses you goodnight. Proust’s aunt’s madeleine dipped in hot tea.

This is what our childhood is concocted of. The sense that tugs most agonisingly at our memories. Or so we are told.

Perhaps because, when we first catch the smell of something, we can’t always remember what the specific something is. Sometimes it is only the general era it brings back, and our happiness when we smelt whatever it was then which we can’t quite put a finger on.

Perhaps that is why we consider smell the most visceral, most nostalgic of memories. 

Because we’ve all had the sensation of recognising a smell, or even a taste, and knowing there is something distinct and familiar, say in a complex dish, without being able to pin down what it is. The annoyance when the person who cooked it says, “Coriander, of course,” which you knew that you knew all along.

True, we can do this with music, too. You know it’s a favourite of yours… but is it The Trout or The Archduke: two sides of the same record you were given for your fifteenth birthday? Or is it, in fact, neither but something by Mozart or even Rossini…

By and large though – music aside – sounds are more recognisable. And so more consciously remembered.

My mother lay on my bed next to me. Only one bird was up, and singing solo into the darkling dawn. Just one bird. Had it woken too soon, when none of the others thought it a time to sing? Would it soon realise its mistake and pipe down again?

Wait, my mother said. Wait, and listen.

It seemed agonisingly long… but she was right. A second voice eventually joined in. Two birds in the lightening very early day. Quarrelling, arguing back and forth, tree to tree, in song. Presumably vying with each other, though I doubt I knew this then, for dominance or territory or a mate. Or just who could sing the louder.

How many minutes was it before the sky flamed alive with sound? Vibrant, throbbing and thrilling, song upon song, cascading through the trees into our garden and the open window of my bedroom. The welkin ringing with it, at full throttle long before breakfast, to last all day and into the sloping light of the afternoon as my mother carried a tea-tray onto the last and diminishing patch of sunlit lawn, before supper and sleep for the birds and me both, long before my father had finished work and my parents had sat down to eat their own.

The Dawn Chorus, my mother said.

Is it my imagination? Or has the world truly burst into long-forgotten song since lockdown?

More, far more birdsong outside my window in the mornings, waking me now, when it’s barely light, before four o’clock. A robin cocking its head and commenting on our mid-morning coffee. A wren chuckling from the branches overhead at teatime.

And blackbirds darting low over the lawn as the sky recedes, and singing long into the late evening. 

They mean far more than madeleines to me, these sweet songs from my childhood.