My earliest memories are of scent. The scent of my grandparents’ corner shop in Barnsley where I was born; the dusty smell of the coal cellar, of the bundles of morning newspapers, delivered fresh from the printer’s in a warm blast of ink and newsprint; the smoke of the coal fire; the sunshine scent of the glass jars of sweets; the earthy, eager scent of my grandfather’s allotment, with its fruits and flowers and herbs; the scent of my grandmother’s talcum powder, which was called Moonflower, and was only used on special occasions. Then there was the apron my mother wore in the kitchen – bright red, with black embroidery. I called it the Chocolate Apron, because that’s what it smelt of to me: it was only much later that I realized that, to most people, red doesn’t smell of chocolate.

Synaesthesia is a phenomenon, whereby one sensory experience – for instance, sight – inadvertently triggers another – in my case, scent. Put simply, I smell colours. Red smells of chocolate; purple of smoke; some shades of blue, of petrol or gas. Bright light accentuates the phenomenon; dark glasses damps it down. Perhaps this explains my early fascination with all kinds of scent; that and the fact that for me the sense of smell is so closely linked with memory. In either case, from childhood, I experienced the world largely through colours and scents, and later, when I discovered the existence of bottled scents, my imagination was immediately fired by the possibilities. My parents’ modest income meant we spent very little on luxuries, but my great-aunt Marie (whose ex-husband managed the Folies-Bergère) always wore Chanel no. 5, which remains associated in my mind with her style of Parisian elegance, and I spent unsuccessful hours trying to recreate the magic from jam-jars filled with petals from my grandfather’s garden.

By the time I reached adolescence, I found myself becoming increasingly aware of TV commercials for scents. Scent seemed to be as much about building identity as it was about smelling good. I wanted to be the Havoc girl, the It girl, the Charlie girl.  I would spend hours at the perfume counter in Boots, trying every scent I could, and in the doctor’s waiting-room, I always went through magazines looking for unused scent samples. My mother had an account with Yves Rocher, and sometimes bought scent for my birthday: I loved Chèvrefeuille, their fresh, green, honeysuckle scent, and I still sometimes mourn the disappearance of their gorgeous chypre, Ispahan. The Guerlain perfumes I secretly craved – Chamade, Mitsouko, Vol de Nuit – were well out of my price range, but I sometimes bought the tiny bottles of bath oil, and used them as a substitute for the expensive Eau de Parfum. Otherwise, I made do with Spiritual Sky’s tiny square bottles of scented oils – amber, patchouli, frankincense, coconut, vanilla, cut grass – on sale for £1 apiece at the local hippie shop. At university, I kept my little collection in a shoebox under my bed along with my (forbidden) incense sticks; the cleaner always commented on how lovely my room smelt.

Over the years I developed my early perfume addiction to include a larger number of scents – in fact, more scents than outfits. I’ve never been especially interested in fashions, but scent never fails to draw me in. I choose my scents daily to suit my mood – I could never have just a signature scent – and my tastes change with the seasons. In winter, I go for warmer scents like Chanel’s creamy sandalwood Bois des Iles and Dior’s Patchouli Impérial. In summer, I go for lighter scents, like Ô de Lancôme or Eau de Guerlain or Jo Malone’s Lime Basil. Here are my favourite memories: my only child’s wedding was Francis Kurkdjian’s À la Rose: my own, in 1989, was Chamade (a wedding present to myself that cost more than my £20 dress). And every book I’ve written has a different scent attached. It’s a method I first read about in Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares to help actors get into character: but it works just as well for a writer exploring a new identity. I used l’Artisan Parfumeur’s Dzing! for A Narrow Door; Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue for Blueeyedboy; Kurkdjian’s Lumière Noire for Broken Light, and my new book Vianne was written, like its predecessors in the series, on a wave of Chanel’s Coromandel. Scent is a gateway, not just to creation, but also to the past; to the heart; and most recently, in my experience, to a new community.

That’s because for the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to participate in judging the Fragrance Foundation’s Jasmine Awards. I only became aware of the awards in 2017, when, to my surprise, I won a Jasmine award for a piece published in Good Housekeeping. The following year I was invited to help judge the literary category, and since then I have been introduced to a whole new world (to me at least) of scent, scent bloggers, creators and journalists. At first it was slightly daunting – I’d always known I loved scent, but until then I’d been woefully ignorant. But through the Fragrance Foundation I found such a welcoming, warm and friendly community that it was hard to stay daunted for very long. And since I began my involvement, I have learnt so much more than I imagined I ever would about the history of scent, its ingredients, its psychology, its fashions; its personalities, its heroes. I have been to workshops, perfume launches. I have tried many, many new fragrances. I have read many hundreds of articles; listened to countless podcasts and followed a wide variety of Tiktoks and Instagram threads. Five years ago my husband bought me an antique cabinet in which to keep my steadily growing collection – a far cry from that shoebox under my bed in Cambridge.

This year I chaired the Jasmine awards. For eight weeks between December and February, my house was filled with adverts for scent, short and long pieces of perfume journalism; score sheets; bottles and blotters and sprays. Every room in the house was filled with a different fragrance; every piece of furniture seemed to be covered with samples. Twice I travelled to London to sit around a long table laden with bottles of perfume, to talk about all aspects of scent with a dozen fellow-travellers.

It was bliss.

And of course, the more I learn, the more I find ways to incorporate scent into my process. Twice I have been involved in helping to create scent illustrations for my books: when The Strawberry Thief came out, CPL Aromas made Xocolatl, based on a descriptive passage from the novel, and this year, Sarah McCartney of 4160 Tuesdays has created Vianne’s Confession, a lovely, bitter-chocolate church-incense confection, to illustrate my story. Scent, too, has its narrative; each one has a tale to tell. And scent has been so much a part of my own story that it seems strangely appropriate now that I should have joined the narrative.

I sometimes find it hard to believe how lucky I’ve been in finding all this; and I wonder what my nineteen-year-old self would have made of it all, with her little collection of Spiritual Sky, and her secret craving for Guerlain. I think she’d find it hard to believe – and yet, it feels like a natural beat in an ongoing story. I’ve just finished the first draft of my latest novel – an odd little folk-horror story written to 4160 Tuesday’s The Lion Cupboard, which smells to me like the memory of a haunted Victorian wardrobe. And while other authors celebrate finishing a novel with holidays, jewellery or champagne, all I really want to do is choose the scent that will lead to my next project: because, in scent, as in story, nothing ever really ends. It just links onto something else; another chapter; another phase. I don’t have a title for my next book. I barely have an idea of the plot. But I do have a scent, and a colour, from which everything else in the novel will grow.

I don’t know if it will be an easy or a difficult book to write. I don’t know if it will be a success. But I do know this: whatever it is, however long it takes me to write, it’s going to smell amazing.