Wordsworth
celebrated his Inward eye; my inward eye very
often takes me back to School as it was from 1933
to 1940. Truly, my heart with pleasure fills (as
GP prefers it not to dance) - and with gratitude.
Enough of inward eyes: we all have inward noses,
much neglected I fear. My inward nose takes me
back to the thirties. 1 invite you to
'........Come. smell with me.' First, the
unforgettable, unforgotten building smell -
apologies to RB, That virile smell of the
preservative soaked dark brown timbers, bleached
bare and there by summer suns, still resinous in
places and - regrettably so 'flammable. The new
gloss paint, the new matt paint smells left by
the decorators in the form room - particularly
when the heat was turned on again.
Come down
the steps to the boiler-room, to Mr Beesley's
pride and joy. Smell again the fuelly smell of
the works that kept us warm. No continental
malodours from the toilet block as we pass; just
Jeyes Fluid and chlorine whenever we went to
drown the bee. (That's rhyming slang - not
Cockney but Lancastrian.) This is the
groundsman's shed where Bob Ariss presides; sniff
the oil, the petrol and the mower itself still
warm and grassy following Bob's ministrations to
his sacred square.
Up the
front steps and we find the staff-room door open.
Whiff..- but don't inhale the noxious miasma
billowing from the sanctum. Just put it down to
Herb's pipe, to Eddie's pipe and to the
cigarettes of Drugs et al. I still treasure the
warm welcome which I received in that room when I
had just disembarked from a troopship back from
North Africa
Nearby,
past the corridor pictures of Captain Oates and
Lawrence of Arabia, we come to the tiny P.T.
cupboard. We have the keys and unlock the door:
we smell again the linseed oil-soaked cricket
bats, the leather case-balls and the
talcum-dusted rubber bladders with their
confounded bits that would never tuck in
easily..... and the lacer, blast it, that would
so easily pierce the bladder.....a push too far
and once more to the puncture outfit with its
rubber solution, rubber patches and - more talcum
powder.
In the Hall
there's always the smell of the gym apparatus,
the hide of buck, box and horse: fibre mats and
occasionally the unconvincing pungency of Sloan's
linament as a malingerer pleads. 'I can't do gym
today. Sir. I've got bad knee,'
'Tell me another.......get changed!'
Now, near the stage where the newly-painted flats
and backdrops have their distinctive smells
(remember Walpamur?) as do the library and the
changing room where grease-paint and spirit gum
tell of their current use as green-rooms for the
Dramatic Society.
The Art
room. Listen to Nanny Huckle explaining the use
of the colours in our newly opened boxes of
Reeve's water colours. What a lovely tinny,
bland, pigmenty smell. 'After yellow ochre you
have gamboge tint. Use it weakly to paint the
outlines of your pictures and you can then work
it into your final composition.' No harsh HB
pencil drawings and colouring-in for her.
Turn right;
smell the sulphur? It becomes worse as we enter
the Chemmy lab and Drugs allows us to open the
stinks cupboard. Ugh! Hydrogen sulphide,
sulphuretted hydrogen, bad eggs - same thing; -
H2S or something! A bunsen burner is a bunsen
burner is a bunsen burner in that it will still
give off a foul stench if the gas and air
supplies are accidentally maladjusted or
deliberately maladjusted by the maladjusted.
Somehow, heat. light and sound, and mag, and
elec. are not particularly odiferous. but here in
Juddy's half of the laboratory condominium, the
candles still smoke waxily as their images
flicker, lens -re versed. Blobs of paraffin wax
drip from heat-expanded metal rods - something to
do with conduction and coefficients of linear
expansion - and ebonite rods, well rubbed on
blazer sleeves, become slightly niffy and
attractive to innocent bits of confetti. Juddy
calls this Electrostatics.
That's the
bugger. Sorry. Mr Brigg,. the buzzer. Time for
lunch. Out we to up more steps. Don't turn left
to Charlie Fennl and the sweet smell of fresh
timber, sawdust and of the oily rags used for
cleaning woodwork tools. No - turn right, hand in
your dinner ticket. (4p per day) see the white
table-cloths, be a Bisto Kid and savour the
five-star cuisine of Mrs Shawcross, the roasts
and the veg., drool over her baked jam rolls and
custard - particularly the gable ends - as Jack
Smith did. Sight, smell and taste in perfect
unison.
Back into
the main building, to the cloakrooms with their
solid cast numbered pegs which in summer carry
little other than our dusty blue and black
quartered caps which in the winter, so
rain-doused, that they look completely black
together with our sodden macs smelling steamy
till home time.
This is the
stationery store. At the end of the day, Fab or
Scotty or some other master will open up and
release that unfailing smell of new exercise
books, new graph and writing paper, boxes of
chalk, pristine blackboard dusters unused in any
way. Ouch! (Joe Egg did me once for using an
apostrophe S in my French homework.) Requests
made known, used books are exchanged tor new,
'May I have a new C.W.B. (Class Work Book)
please, sir ? C.W.B - that reminds me. Can you
hear the clatter of boots as Richie approaches to
deputise for an absent colleague, subject and
level immaterial, shouting as he passes. 'Form
IVa ! Take out CWBs and pens.'
Richie,
that great eccentric. Pate, spectacles, collar,
pockets, boots and a flower in his buttonhole
whenever possible, and often a rose.
What
prompted his choice; form, colour, scent, before
he strode across the field to begin yet another
day?
Geoffrey
Dixon once said that teaching under C.W.H.R. was
an experience he would not have missed for
worlds. Today, men who were boys at PGS when I
was a boy at PCS will say that learning under him
and his colleagues was equally an experience not
to have missed. Indulging all our inward senses
proves this.
Carpe diem.
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