Pick up your Pens . . .

I don’t spend a lot of time examining my fingers, but the other day during a bout of idly contemplating my digits, I realized that the bump has finally disappeared. It was a callus and it was formed on the middle finger of my left hand (I am left handed) shortly after I learned to write. It was usually indelibly stained with ink.

Just about everything I write these days is on a computer, because when I write by hand unintended words and letters tend to appear on the page. My handwriting, of which I was once so proud, is slovenly and erratic. At the age of eleven, I passed the 11+ and went to the “grammar school.” One of the things that set us apart, besides the ugly gymslips, the blazers and the school berets (all in a rather grim shade of bottle green) was “school writing.” We were told that a great deal of our life would be taken up writing essays and that in order to write quickly, legibly and efficiently we had to undo everything we had learned about writing. No more loops and flourishes. Our writing henceforth was to be streamlined, with no fancy bits to slow us down. It was assumed the ideas would flow: our handwriting had to follow suit.

And write we did. I was in my early twenties the first time I saw a multiple-choice exam. Unfortunately, it was the GRE and I wasted precious time trying to figure out what to do. Until then our homework and our exams had consisted of essays. There was quite a ritual. We were given “rough note books” where we sketched out our ideas and sentences, always in pencil. The paper was so cheap it wouldn’t even hold ink and in those days of post-war austerity, we had to fill our rough notes books completely before being allowed a replacement. Then we moved on to our exercise books, where the essays were fleshed out in their full glory. They had to be written with a fountain pen. No biros allowed. And none of those sissy cartridges either. We had bottles of ink (Waterman’s) and we dipped the nibs in the bottle, applied pressure to the plunger and sucked in the ink. I don’t remember being told to use blue-black ink, but I know I did. Blue was rather flighty and black better left to elder statesmen.

I kept those exercise books for years. I was comforted to see how much I had once known about Metternich and the imagery of Alfred de Musset. I still have nightmares about taking exams and memories of walking into a room and taking my place under the steely-eyed gaze of the invigilator. The words, conjuring up some academic Indianapolis 500, were always the same: “Pick up your pens and start writing.”