The corridors are so brown, like the engraving on the fine mahogany finish can be seen as both brown and white but not purple. If you peel back underneath will you discover a bone marrow, seething with the history of the place? Inside the structure, the building itself like a living breathing organism that pulsates and writhes with the history of accepted fact, the knowledge as a den of understanding. A crèche for those inducted into the ways of natural thought. Acceptable behaviour and recognized approaches. How could I come to find myself here? We can wind back and go through a genealogical maze of class and social factors that led me up to this point. My father; a military historian, perhaps after his career, maybe during, a man who pottered in his study or a serious academic? He moulded the gears of history? Stood at the table with the men of science and policy. I was surrounded by the trappings of his obsession, mahogany, mahogany, mahogany but bookcases towering around me in my childhood, impenetrable walls of spines intertwined I would sit (imagining) in my nappy. Upwards towering, soaring waves of words, numbers, graphs, charts intermingling to create the tableaux of my formative years. Then Torrance like he would drag me away but never snapping. Just a baby/toddler/child. Later I would learn stealth and secrecy and the torch would be my companion in that Library of his. I remember discovering Hitler on his desk, books sprawled open amongst maps like parchments. His idiom of a face metallurgical on the yellowing paper, a hard dash across the spot below his nose. History.
Later maths but first language, learning the patterns of speech, vowel sounds tumbling to a halt at glottal stops and simplistic furrowing of the lips with umms and ahhhs. First mother, always mother first but later him. That library intertwined round my family like a membrane between which we drifted in and out. Trigonometric shapes drifting off the pages, cosine and sine and inefficient efficiencies that haunt me to this day. Interpreting and sifting, changing and moulding. Such an impressionable vessel and yet quickly becoming hard as steel.
I remember that I was happy there.
But the mahogany of these walls as I push my wheeled case full of books that I won’t need along this corridor. Forward, wheels perfectly in synch, no annoying straggler. Wiggling imperceptibly denying me the course to my room, to enlightenment, true knowledge and acceptance. This is why I am here, through boarding school and beyond. Write what you know, but I know nothing. Not at this stage, I am adrift. I dream of Paris of Hong Kong, I am just turned eighteen and boarding school is behind me but I can’t think about that place now. Not as I enter the mahogany hallways of this place.
“The walls look like mahogany.”
“The walls aren’t made of mahogany a*****e, keep moving.” A voice from behind perhaps my fathers. Perhaps another students, I was too enraptured by the beauty of the place to absorb the barb.
