For years my blog comments and profile have been decorated by a thumbnail of Blake's water-colour of Nebuchadnezzar. Proclaiming that I'm old and unbecoming, you see. Except the detail was so tiny I doubt anyone would have recognised the connection. Or cared.I chose Old Neb because old age absolved me of any suggestion of boasting - a very English concept, that. Brits do boast but only sneakily: "Ah, you were educated at Harvard! I fear I'm nothing but an auto-didact." One reason why Brits are disliked the world over. Especially by Australians.
Occasionally - very occasionally - I'm visited by moments of clarity. I am old, it's true, but I'm other things too. Surely it was time to retire Old Neb. But God forbid I replace him with some image which suggested I'm handsome, clever, well-regarded, charitable, patient or kind-hearted because that would be un-English. Something neutral then.
The Underwood typewriter symbolically marks the moment when I ceased to be schoolboy (occasionally flogged for bad handwriting) and joined a trade where what I wrote had to be legible. I wish I'd had time to learn touch-typing but speedy writing was another necessity and I simply banged away with a varying number of fingers. Later I was to acquire my own portable (a Remington Rand) which lasted until the invention of the word processor, but I always had a soft-spot for the Underwood, one of several battered machines in the Telegraph & Argus reporters' room.
It had a unique springy action which was gentle on my fingers. Also an upper-frequency chatter, certainly soprano perhaps even treble.
It also whispered to me: "You've grown up."
Graduating from clinkers and Tricounis to Vibram, and then to PAs. That model is, despite its look of antiquity, more modern than Mother's which had I think two keyboards, one for lower and one for upper-case. You may remember more clearly.
ReplyDeleteI don't feel as though I have ever grown up.
Sir Hugh: I wrote my first short-story on Mother's double decker.
ReplyDeleteI can't say I enjoyed childhood or, for that matter, adolescence. I may not have grown up but I feel more in control. I am able to bend the world and its ways to my wishes, rather than being eternally at a disadvantage. I regard events sardonically, detached somewhat, no longer a victim.
The only thing the army taught me was how to touch-type. In later service I was in a large pay office in Canterbury (I was in the Royal Army Pay Corps). I was allocated a large Imperial very similar to the Underwood in your image. As was usual, days passed with very little work. To appear busy I would often completely dismantle and clean each part thoroughly. It was probably the best maintained Imperial in existence. In the garage I still have half the large bottle of typewriter oil I was issued then, some 60 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThat, and my original kit bag are my sole relics of army service
I miss my typewriter. A gift from my grandmother in my final year at secondary school which elevated me immediately to new levels of sophistication. At uni, I wrote my final degree paper in one night and officially past the deadline with the help of coffee, cigarettes and litres of correction fluid, ready to hand it in by 10 am. I call this a major achievement.
ReplyDeleteIt was last used properly by my daughter and friends who happily *wrote* away on important stories on monsoon days under the corrugated tin roof in our home in Africa. The rain was noisier than the kids hitting the keys.
I would have left it behind but by then the country was already inundated by aid-donated computers (at the time, the per capita access and use of computers was highest in African countries). It's upstairs in the attic. Asleep.
To this day I type with three fingers, very fast though.
I love to type, and I loved learning to touch type even more. It was fun. My favorite typewriter was not the manual I first owned, though. It was the IBM Selectric II I used as a young office worker in the late 1970's. I was once a fast typist, but computers made me lazy. Perhaps when it is easy to correct your mistakes, it is hard to stay focused on avoiding them?
ReplyDeleteAvus: There were two Imperials in the reporters' room at the Telegraph & Argus. They were both more solidly made than the rackety Underwood but their "touch" was far harder on my fingers and I could never love them.
ReplyDeleteSabine: I agree it was an achievement (but what was the subject?). Like you I was grateful, over the years, for the typewriter's willing cooperation in writing long, long articles in almost no time at all. Though there was one even faster option: just before I left the North for London, I covered a sordid court case about sex abuse and realised that if I put my skates on it would appear big in the evening paper that day. So I dictated over the phone to a copy typist directly from my shorthand notes and, lo!, I got a front page lead for the first and last time.
When word processors arrived I would have given my Remington Rand portable to any worthy user but none appeared. Instead, at VR's suggestion, it has remained ever since on a side table as guest of honour in our dining room. I should add it was used 58 years ago to write love letters to VR: both of us preferred the exactitude of type over the blurry romanticism of a pen.
Colette: Mistake correction was the main reason why I welcomed the word processor. By that time, working on magazines, I was more concerned with style than speed and had established a rule of thumb: that in a well-tuned world the time spent on revising an article should be the same as that devoted to creating the first draft. I had learned to mistrust my "first fine careless rapture."
When I was in the US I applied for a job on another magazine and was given a practical test: to re-write three press releases. Easy-peasy, of course, except that I had to do this on an electric typewriter, something I'd never used before. I proved a quick learner. The only genuine advantage of electrics over manuals was the button which advanced the carriage return and rotated the roller the correct number of lines.
But I like your confession: "I love to type." Others are good with saws and chisels, on removing the cylinder head from an internal combustion engine, or painting without spotting the carpet. My natural environment is the keyboard from which so much is possible. A friend who encouraged me to write verse was shocked to hear that I wrote Shakespearean-format sonnets on the computer. But why on earth should I revert to any other less comfortable system?
Bravo for retiring old Neb and substituting solid, steady, sensible and sonorous Underwood. More power to it and to you. If there is merit in the self-deprecation that age and Englishness demand, I prefer to reject merit and to wallow sneakily in boasting, pretending I don't mean it.
ReplyDeleteNathalie: Your predecessor re. boasting was surely Richard III. In announcing his scheme to hack and thrust his way to the crown of England he vowed to: "Play the maid's part; still answer nay, and take it." Not quite the same, but you get the idea. Terribly sexist I fear, but WS gives us licence.
ReplyDeleteHa! Not sexist, just cleverly devious. As far as I'm concerned WS has carte blanche to be anything he likes.
ReplyDelete