A shorter history of linoleum.

Some philosopher, or it might have been a scientist or a chef, said that the sense of smell elicits the strongest memories. You can't hear, taste, see, or touch it; so it must be true. The others are only recognition; each smell must be a sensation in the brain that is implanted the first time and simply gets poked, like a cow prod. Don’t ask me.

The smell, which was a blend of new hessian, 1950s chemical plant, glue factory and artist's studio, was a brand new roll of linoleum that was being installed in the kitchen of the house in which I lived. I was close to the source of the aroma because I had not yet reached the mirror-like leading edge strip of 18/80 stainless steel that edged the kitchen sink and side drainers. I had to pull myself up to look into it and see two green eyes.

The lino, once the installers had gone off in their Maples truck, looked to me like tracks. It was a linear geometric design; grey strips alternating with thinner black strips with alternate red and yellow stripes crossing the grey strips in evenly spaced intervals, like sleepers. It was as attractive in a 1950s retro sense as any lino design I'd ever seen; thin cubist rectangles of red and yellow debating wider black and grey eternities. My mother certainly valued the pattern, or maybe just the floor itself, which was polished furiously three times a week by a three-brush Electrolux, grey with dark red fittings, using Wundawax polish. 

It appeared to be a ritual. She polished the joys and the disappointments and the spillages and the tears and the songs and the laughter and, later, the tragedies well into the floor, in a kind of semi-religious cleansing ceremony, which I observed and noted. I took occasional turns at the task, not as a chore but because I enjoyed the torque steer of the Electrolux machine as its engine shrilly drove the essentially unbalanced three-brush mechanism wildly around the floor. If you held the T-bar handle loosely, the machine would swinge rhythmically, swivelling across the kitchen and bouncing its thick rubber all-round bumper off chairs and cabinet doors, a virtual dodgem car with a Daihatsu Charade 3-cylinder engine.

The linoleum painting, as it surely was, outlived music genres, which is close as I can come to analysing decades, laying mute, a theatrical stage mat, as Harry Nilsson released in the early stages of 1972 ‘Without You’; and I listened one sun-drenched May morning to the impossibility of the song’s lyrics, little knowing that the impossible was not only possible but was heading my way, while idly polishing the red and yellow optimistic stripes with the Daihatsu polisher.

The linoleum swallowed life, sucking it up like the boards at a theatre; platforming a thousand dramas, none the same; actors passing like ducks in a shooting gallery, some of them to go around and around again and again as decades passed; others putting in merely a single performance. The house in which I grew up was a passing parade; my mother brought home waifs and strays - human ones (we had our cats and budgerigars) so that we the denizens - us, me, my siblings -  rolled our eyes at the sheer folly of the program - one small house - when pitched against the might of someone who could actually do something; the UN for example. I didn’t want to play Kurt Waldheim’s son. 

The linoleum lay silent, its stretched colour palette defiantly, valiantly 1950s through eras of kitsch, and dimming with the years but never disappearing. It is still there. She doesn’t polish it anymore. I wipe it weekly with the sponge; but the indentations from five decades of chairs, having been scraped in and out from the table - again indicating a million human interactions with or without tears - hold their stories too close to read.