Roots

The town where I lived up until the age of 16 had a combination of very distinctive smells.

If you disregarded the stagnant odour from the two weed clogged rivers that ran through it, the sickly pungent odour that came from the muck spreading on the fields that surrounded it and downwind of the sewage works that served it, it was not that unpleasant.

In the middle of the town was the marmalade factory.

I always wondered why it had ended up as a major employer given that the production line threw out copious amounts of orange marmalade, both smooth and with peel bits and yet in our part of North East Lincolnshire I was not aware of any groves of the citrus fruit that went into it. The second main line was in lemon curd, again dependant on imports but I never saw any evidence of regular deliveries of either oranges or lemons at any time, and believe me I was always out and about and would have noticed such a thing.

It remained a mystery and may never be fully explained given that the business folded some time in the 1980's.

The other and perhaps more persistent smell was that given off by the sugar beet factory on the western edge of the town and therefore, according to my Geography Teacher of the time, more likely to dissipate its odour with the prevailing winds.

The factory dominated the skyline with its two large smoke belching chimneys, hoppers and steel clad buildings and for many years, from the 1920's ,it was a source of income for a good proportion of the working population.

We had, as a family, recently moved from another sugar beet town some distance away which was, to my teenage mind nothing less than a bit of a conspiracy.

It was easy to be confused in the early weeks of living in a new town because of the similarity of the attack on the senses visually and through the nose by the surroundings.

Father was a Bank Manager and not some secret troubleshooter for the British Sugar Corporation, as far as I was aware.Our relocation was therefore purely coincidental or so the story was.

Both towns had been selected as sugar manufacturing centres because of their central locations with regard to large and productive agricultural land where the root crop was grown which yielded the sucrose which was so highly prized. The rising price of traditional sugar cane and the uncertainty of supply in times of war had prompted the British Government to develop a home grown industry.

The actual merits of the beet root had been known since the 16th century. Boiling up the vegetable, possibly out of curiosity had produced a sweet syrup and in the following centuries a thriving commercial market was established in France with the support of Napoleon Bonaparte and through other central and eastern european countries.

The elongated densely fleshy plant has a composition of 75% water, 5% pulp and 20% of sugar.

I can verify this in that I used to eat it raw if out trespassing in a farmers crop. After an initial gagging action at the thought of munching through a dirty, mud caked plant which had been exposed to who knows what in the natural world there was much to be said for the kick of sweet sugar, a strange satisfying of any thirst, something to chew for a few minutes and then a sense of heightened energy.

The downside was usually a very sore throat but I attributed that to the chemical sprays to keep down aphids and other parasites.

The distinctive outline in the sky of the factory has long since gone and upon a brief revisiting of the places of my youth I was more aware of the other general smells of a small town such as carbon monoxide, the takeaways and of course that troublesome sewage works.

The Uk has slipped in the world rankings for beet sugar since the halcyon days up to the 1980's to 11th in 2011 and a long way in actual tonnage from the top spots.

It is sad to see the demise of yet another industrial process in this country and the loss of the pride of a workforce, the impact on families and the shrinking of the money flow through local businesses and the community.

Still, it may be for the best as sugar has been demonised by those dictating our health and lifestyles and those huge lorries, laden with the raw product did tend to kill a few of the townsfolk every so often as they bludgeoned their way down the High Street taking cyclists, pedestrians and motorists by surprise and to a shocking conclusion.