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The last seems such a cliché of boarding school life – surely the tearful mummy pleading with the bullies is in Tom Brown's School Days? Or a Michael Palin sketch? – I wonder if I've made it up.
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Photograph: Robert Perry for the Observer Writer Alex Renton with his dog Ziggy on Calton Hill, Edinburgh. That was their prerogative, they told us on the first night, a few hours after our mothers had extracted promises from them to look after their little ones. If you wept out loud, the 10-year-old dormitory captain and his deputy threatened to whip you with a belt. I and the other eight-year-olds would turn our faces into our mattresses, pull pillows over our heads. Just down the corridor, two worn wooden steps led to the tiny dormitory where I slept in my first term at the school. Waiting for his flap-jowled face to stop shouting and get to business: detail the punishment or the beating.
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I'd scrutinised those bricks, the way they sat upon each other, many times over those five years. This used to be headmaster "Billy" Williamson's study. We enter a cosy girls' dormitory where the low black beams were, suddenly, shockingly familiar. The give of a floorboard in a corridor, the sunlight through a window, the shape of a wooden refectory bench, an echo of children's voices. It is the details from other senses that clamour. I could summon the brew: disinfectant, boy sweat, meat stew, chalk dust. I have not been looking forward to the smell. There were no ghosts, no shocks as we toured the corridors and classrooms.