From nearby I’d hear Bert exclaim, ‘Steady on. Watch the garden’, and I’d have to remind him to not talk because I was trying to be deaf as well as blind. He would grumble quietly for a bit but then my stumbling around would get the better of him.

‘Careful now, don’t go putting your great big foot on the “Slater’s Crimson China”.’

‘Shush. I need quiet. I can’t smell my way around if you keep talking. I have to concentrate.’

‘That’s a special rose,’ he’d say. ‘Probably the first to reach New Zealand.’

‘With the Chinese?’

‘No, with the missionaries.’

As I became more familiar with the paths and better at peeking through almost-closed lids without being detected by my eagle-eyed granddad, I would call out scents. ‘This one smells like jam. This one is sweet. And this one is …’

‘Just right,’ joked Bert, who never took my experiments as seriously as I did.

At Christmas one year, Bert passed me a lumpy parcel wrapped in newspaper and when I opened it I discovered, to my delight, that it contained an old World War Two gas mask. ‘There you are, kid,’ he said. ‘You can wear it when you help me with the blood and bone.’ While I stood by in my gas mask, Bert made fertiliser, mixing potash with dried blood, iron sulphate and sulphate of ammonia. His ‘secret ingredient’ was Epsom salts, taken from the bathroom cabinet, but I was always far more interested in the large sack of dried blood kept inside the door to his garage. He liked to tease me that he had brought it out from Manchester with him and that it contained the blood and bones of an Englishman. I believed he would bring dried blood all the way from England, via Panama, but I doubted the blood itself was from an Englishman. From my limited knowledge of world history and events I assumed it had to be from a foreigner.

I never got the opportunity to get to the bottom of the blood and bone story because one day, when I called in on the way home from a friend’s, I discovered Bert dead, lying on the floor by the oven. A knife covered in porridge was next to him, and a frying pan of porridge still on the hob. He’d been electrocuted.

Notes from my grandparents: gas, eucalyptus, soap, oats, rose and blood. It’s a start, I suppose, though not the notes I would normally consider for a perfume base. They lack the weight and depth I desire for my foundation. But, I won’t dismiss them out of hand.

My mother, Nita, had energy and vision and my father, Pete, had a sense of humour. Nita encouraged my father, who was a doctor, to carry out major renovations on our bathroom and Pete, who played along with all my mother’s suggestions, went to work, roping me in as his assistant. The revamp coincided with the period in the seventies when the carpets throughout my childhood home were orange or brown shag pile, and the curtains and chairs were either purple or acid-yellow upholstery velvet.