And with smell comes the equally primordial sense of fear, his earliest awareness of the school’s authority and his terror of what lies on the other side of the green baize door. The past is present first as a subtle whiff, and only then is it fleshed out in the more enduring registers of sight and sound. On the one side, silence, authority, the smell of savories on the other noise and freedom.” For Connolly, smell is primary. Cyril Connolly describes his first days at St Cyprian’s prep school in exactly these terms: “I came to know the smell of the classrooms, of slates, chalk and escaping gas, and to fear the green baize doors which separated the headmaster’s part of the house from the boys. Of course, the olfactory is tangled up with the visual, sonic and tactile senses, but smell comes first, transporting the subject back into the deep fabric of the past, the very marrow of memory. Again and again, it is the sense of smell that triggers the deepest, most ineradicable school memories. Linseed oil, varnished wood, unwashed urinals, leaking gas, mutton stew, sizzling sausages, mildewed towels, mown grass, sweaty socks, illicit tobacco: these are just some of the odors that waft their way through memoirs of public school life in the early 20th century.
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