The Chemical Store
Acidic tin. Pungent, forceful and acrid, like wiping sour limes across a salty tongue. The smell would shove itself up my nose and down the back of my throat. It would creep into my mouth, make my cheeks suck inwards and put my teeth on edge. And it would stay there. It didn't matter how much fresh air I gulped in afterwards. It would linger in the passages at the back of my nose to flavour my sandwiches. I can picture the chemical store at the rear of the potting shed with clarity the moment I catch the smell of weedkiller or insecticide.
At the back of the shed was a door, it never shut properly as the hinges hadn't seen an oil can for many years. Its green paint had blistered and flaked, leaving patches of grey wood. The smell didn't drift out into the main shed but hung around the doorway like an unwelcome salesman. This was the chemical store. I hated going in there. There was a bench running along the back wall illuminated by a small, square window high up on the right hand side. The dust and cobwebs were thick in here. The least disturbance caused large amounts of dust to rise into the air where it swirled briefly in the meagre light before settling on a different surface. The 'push things to the corners' mentality had been at work in here. The newer chemicals were on the front edge of the bench with names like Benlate and Turbair, the older stuff that was no longer used was pushed to the back, it was never thrown out.
The smell originated from these remnants. There was a white painted gallon can, its surface pock-marked with rust. The label it once had was reduced to a small curl of paper still clinging to the side. Some of the rust marks had viscous dribbles of a thick yellow syrup trickling from them, which set at about an inch long. One dribble contained a fly set in its poisonous amber. Dark brown glass bottles sat in the corners, bits of liquid left in each. The dust stuck more thickly where the chemicals had run down the sides. There were brown paper bags, rolled over at the top, the words 'Flowers of Sulphur' written in pencil on the side. A cardboard box was balanced on three of the bottles. Its top was open and it contained brown paper pyramids with a little fuse in the apex, these were Nicotine Smokes. Using these was an awful job. We would stuff newspaper in all the gaps we could find in the old wooden glasshouses and place the smokes at intervals down the central path. Then it was the job of one of the men, thankfully, to light them. He would have to run down the path lighting as he went, praying he wouldn't get a troublesome one, dash out the end door and slam it shut before he took a breath. I can still picture a glasshouse gently curling the noxious smoke into a windless blue sky.
The floor was a litter too. Old plastic bags of fertilizer, Urea and Sulphate of Ammonia, were pushed to one side, their contents set hard from absorbing moisture. A pile of mouldy hessian sacks had been kicked further and further under the bench until they resembled a compost heap against the back wall. More grey blankets sat in a heap, gradually decaying, not eaten by mice. They didn't come in here. But the strangest thing in the store was a photograph. It was a large, sepia tinted monochrome of a young man in army uniform. It was in a plain wooden frame and the tape that held it in place at the back had come adrift so that the photo was at an angle to its mount. There he sat, at a rakish angle, boss of all he surveyed. This store had once been where he had slept.
By 'Er Outdoors.
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