My Animal Life(14)

The assembled school was instructed by Mr Norris to write the story of a day in the life of a tea-picker, for possible ‘national prizes’. Alight with the happiness of ignorant invention, I wrote a five-page, semi-illegible saga of the life of a woman to whom I gave the well-known Indian name of Iris. Mr Norris saw past the ink-storm and was delighted; he read out my essay to the whole school, all twenty or so of us, that is, including the ‘top class’, a row by the window of six giant boys with big legs in short trousers who looked at me sourly. Three stories were submitted for the overall Typhoo prize, including mine, which I hoped was the best. All three stories came back unplaced in the overall competition, but with consolation ‘school’ prizes; big-legged Roy from the ‘top class’ was, I think, first, Margaret Gee third. Typhoo clearly took the handwriting aspect of the competition more seriously than Mr Norris; they must have been puzzled by my submission with its shambling, no-longer-tutored, ink-spurting loops.

At my next berth, Billingshurst County Primary, which also taught italic, I hung on grimly to my loops, swearing that this was what Watersfield had taught me; and at Horsham High School I was one of the only loop-writers in my year. But then around fifteen, when all pressure was past, I decided, like every adolescent, to design my own signature, and at the same time to revamp my handwriting. Italics were suddenly the only stylish choice; loops now seemed slow and fusty. I have been an italic writer ever since, and, too late for the Typhoo Tea prize, am legible and neat.

But quite early into this story of manual strain and difficulty, print erupted, objective, grownup, an amazement.

Machines in the 1950s tended to be clunky and cabinet-sized, of public interest. They arrived in town centres or on railway stations, to be admired and inspected. Our most regular journeys as a family were back from Bromsgrove, or later Billingshurst, to Wolverton, and on one such journey, changing as we did in London but also from time to time at stations like Crewe, all four of us were impressed by a giant crimson machine on the station platform. What it ejected (primed with money and the right manipulations of a heavy-duty handle on the right, a thing like the massive hand of a clock which could be pointed, creaking, to various letters) was slim strips of soft metal, like gardeners’ plant labels, aluminium or more likely lead, I think now, on which anything you chose could be printed in relief, standing up in glorious regularity, part of the public world, indubitable, beyond the reach of carping by teachers, safe from my own desperate efforts with erasers, definitely true: MARGARET GEE.

It was, like the advent of the typewriter early in the twentieth century and the computer and printer of the last two decades, part of the second phase of the Gutenberg revolution, in which print became commonplace, democratic. In the first, fifteenth-century, phase, the invention of print took writing and reading beyond the constraints of the careful caste of monks who copied books by hand. But printing was still laborious, controlled by the small number of printing-presses and the beliefs and tastes of those who owned them. Books remained relatively few, expensive and respected. Now in the twenty-first century the meaning of print has changed: it has lost perhaps half its authority for that half of the world who have it at their fingertips. Few people with a printer in their bedroom and advertising copy spewing through their letter-boxes will believe something just because it is printed.

In 1955 things were different. Books were still valued partly because of the war, ended only a decade ago, when paper was rare and publishers put, apologetically, ‘war economy standard’ in the front of their books, to show that production was under constraint. Typewriters were massive iron things, black-painted upright sisters of sewing-machines, more for offices than private houses. The success of italic writing depended partly on its clarity and its resemblance to type, the way it brought individual writing closer to the public sphere, moving in the opposite direction to the extravagant loops and coils of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copperplate which had tilted it towards luxury, privacy, eccentricity.

There was a brief phase, during which I myself grew up, when ordinary names like mine could gain awesome stature and authority by being printed, thanks to machines like my railside crimson mammoth and all the other different kinds of personalised printing that followed — black plastic strips with white raised letters, transparent sheets of fragile ‘Letraset’ transfer letters, machine-embroidered cloth name-tapes, ordered through the post, that magically produced multiple perfect ‘Margaret Gees’.

With my new metal printed strips from the station, I was almost famous. I was real. I had somehow joined the world of books, or had proved I could join, one day, the world of books. I think the day when I came home with my laboriously stamped-out name on grey metal clutched in the pocket of my duffel-coat, and found, almost unbelieving, that it was still there next day and was not a dream, was even more exciting than the day two or three years later when Mickey Mouse comic’s ‘News’ page carried a medium-sized headline half-way down, ranged left: ‘BUDDING AUTHORESS OF BILLINGSHURST, AGED 10.’