The Right Machine

Author's Note. This story is fictional, though it contains autobiographical elements. But the two typewriters most definitely existed!



It’s my Mum I have to thank. And most of the time I don’t mean the word “thank” ironically. It’s one of those things that prompts you to say “it’s a long story”, except it isn’t, not really. She’s the kind of person who doesn’t get irritated easily, but has things that really irritate her. I suspect I take after her in that respect.

Anyway, when she was a young woman – and I mean really young, only a couple of years after leaving school, she was a secretary. And that’s a word she’s never been ashamed of nor has any intention of being. “If folk nowadays, women AND men of course, want to call themselves PA’s then that’s fine by me. But I was a secretary, and a good one, and proud of it.” As that proves, there was no false modesty about it. She clearly distinguished herself even though “some of them were her best friends” from those who were merely typists, even though she was a better typist than any of them.

This is how it went. She defied, and disappointed her parents by saying that though she was the first generation of their family to have the chance, she wasn’t going to stay on at school after 16. They had wanted her to do her A-levels, go to university, and probably train as a teacher. But she was having none of it. She has admitted herself that she doesn’t know what she would have done if there hadn’t been the chance to do that course leading successful applicants to full time employment at a local major manufacturing firm. But I can certainly see why she was tempted and I daresay I would have been too. It’s the kind of thing they don’t offer any more, or only at posh colleges that charge the earth. The recruits (who had to go through a pretty strict selection process) were hand-picked and not only was their tuition free, but they also got, amazing to us nowadays, half pay while they qualified. And they didn’t just learn to type. They learnt shorthand and book-keeping up to trial balance (to this day I’m not quite sure what that is), commercial history, commercial geography, and commercial French, and even had lessons in art appreciation and architecture and the like.

Though there was never any dramatic breech from her parents, things were frosty for a while, and though they would never have dreamed of disowning her or anything like that, they let her know that she had made her decision, and now she was a woman, and responsible for her own actions. But they weren’t really the kind of people to bear grudges, and especially when they realised just how good the course was, and the chance was, even though they never entirely stopped wishing she’d change her mind and be a teacher, they had the honesty and decency to say that it hadn’t been such a bad idea after all, and warmth was resumed.

She didn’t let them or herself down, and was in the top ten of the intake that meant she went straight to the “administrative suite”. She was also remarkably lucky in her boss. He was, as she always said, a lovely man. He was called Mr Wilson, and looked like a little bouncy ball. He had a heart of gold, and when her father, my Grandpa, was ailing later on that year, he gave her days off willingly and generously saying, “You do a grand job, Marie, and we can work things out.” But there was just one little thing about the lovely little golden-hearted bouncy ball of a man. Even when he wasn’t covering for Mum, he was not averse to doing some of his own typing. And for Mum it was positively excruciating watching him. She had been trained to touch-type, and they’d even had apron like covers over their typewriters to make sure they couldn’t cheat. Their instructor also told them that even in those days of manual typewriters (though by this stage they were beginning to adopt electronic ones) there was no need to treat the keyboard like a punchball. To watch Mum typing was poetry in motion. Of course, I never saw Mr Wilson himself typing, but she had a good turn of phrase and a repertoire of gestures that would have put Marcel Marceau to shame. Generally the most tolerant of people, she winced even long decades later. She had an aversion to what she termed “tippy-tappy-typing” (I swear she used that term long before soccer commentators did) but that was something she smiled on benignly in comparison to jabbing. Mr Wilson, she said, as she gesticulated, had all his own fingers and thumbs and they were all perfectly flexible, but when he was typing it was as if each hand transformed into something that was at the same time a giant single claw and a soccer ball being manouvered in a manner that was most definitely not tippy-tappy. He intermittently crouched low over the key board and flung himself back in the chair as he took random jabs, or so it seemed. It was then that she made the vow that though it was probably too late and not her place to work on Mr Wilson’s typing style or lack thereof, whenever she was in a position to protect a typewriter from being treated in such a cavalier manner, she would take that chance. The one thing that baffled her was that he was actually fairly quick and moderately accurate. “But that doesn’t make it right” she said firmly.

And I was her first real chance to put her plan into action big time. Oh, she had no intentions of repeating her parents’ mistakes (though as I’ve said, they’d long since made up) and trying to make me follow, or even dream as a child, of a career that didn’t interest me. It never entered her head to force feed me book-keeping, and I found her old shorthand books interesting in a strange kind of fashion anyway, though I suspected I would never get far past the chay, jay, kay, gay stage. But I was going to learn to type properly whether I wanted to or not! I never did have one of those children’s typewriters, and though of course I threw the statutory wobbler for any child deprived of a present they hanker for, it wasn’t long before a friend let me have a go on hers, and it was a horrible, clanky plastic monstrosity that I was rather relieved I didn’t own. I was set to learning on one of Mum’s old machines. She still had an old Imperial she had bought when she left the firm, and was still workable, but rarely used, but I was allowed to use her little portable Olivetti. It was an elegant machine, reassuringly metallic and pleasingly – well, Italian! I’m going to date myself now, I fear, but by this time, though it would be some while before even tower computers became the norm in regular homes, word processors were becoming more and more the norm, and I knew that when I entered the 2^nd year of high school I would learn how to use one. And word processors were wonderful. There was no need for touch typing and no need for those little bottles of strange smelling correction fluid (not that I can ever remember Mum needing to use one). I even heard our school secretary, whose typing style would probably have passed the Mum test, saying that they were a positive godsend. And the thing was, Mum didn’t disagree. “I’m not against progress and making life easier for yourself,” she said. “And I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’s sorry to be spared having to use carbon paper. But you’re still going to learn to type properly using all your fingers and without needing to constantly look at the keyboard. And you’ll thank me for it.”

“That’s the kind of thing mothers always say,” I muttered, intending to be heard, and she made a point of not hearing. I suppose it was an unfair accusation, as it wasn’t the kind of thing she was prone to saying.

Now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to turn into one of those misery memoirs where I was tied to a typewriter and fed on water and gruel until I mastered the art. Mum didn’t even rig up some improvised apron to put over the keyboard, though the possibility that she might was always there. She sometimes left me to my own devices (and was quite happy for me to use her precious little Olivetti to try out my fledgling writing skills) but she also took her duties as my “Learning How to Type Properly” teacher seriously, and though she wasn’t the kind of teacher who hovered, she also had an uncanny instinct, and when she appeared to be lost in her book or whatever as I did the exercises in the Touch Typing for Beginners manual, I was periodically brought up short by a good-natured but firm and not to be ignored call of, “Eyes front, Grace, eyes front!”

Well, of course I indulged in my small acts of rebellion. But I realised more and more that I was indulging in that somewhat unpleasantly worded phenomenon of cutting of my nose to spite my face. I was secretly quite proud of my increasing skills at the keyboard, and even, as an experiment, improvised my own “apron” out of an old cardigan and felt a decided warm glow when I realised I had produced a flawless piece of typing (fair enough, I picked my own text and avoided too many numerals and punctuation marks!) completely “blind”. I told Mum about that years later and she smiled and I realised that she probably knew all about it.

Of course there’s more to word processing than just typing, but it most certainly helped, and our teacher was hugely impressed. I think that was probably the first time I DID thank Mum, even if not in her hearing and said, “Mum was a secretary, and she taught me.”

“She did a good job,” Miss Dawson said. I liked Miss Dawson. She was never one of those teachers who thought pupils who were ahead of the rest of the class for whatever reason were nuisances and “notice boxes”.

I didn’t quite inherit Mum’s involuntarily wincing at keyboards being ill-treated (though don’t get me started on people who turn up in sun dresses in December and say the heating should be on higher!) but apart from anything else, word processor keyboards were far quieter anyway, though we did have a communal printer that was monstrously noisy, even with two layers of polystyrene and a folded bath towel underneath it.

A couple of years later, Mum bought me my first word processor for my birthday, and had no hang-ups about asking me to teach her how to use it, though she always respected it as mine, and I think underneath she always preferred her little Olivetti.

I’m back here again after a few weeks without much writing. They have been a sad few weeks, too. It was not entirely unexpected. Mum’s health had been going downhill for a while, and I saw the expressions on the faces of people who hadn’t seen her for months, then looked back at her own, and saw what they saw. She quietly told me that though she hated to leave me and her dear friends (Dad died when I was only ten) she had probably known it was coming even before the doctor did, and added, “My memory is starting to fail a bit, too. And we both know what that means, and I thank God I’ll be spared it. I won’t say don’t grieve, Gracie. It’s unfair to ask that of anyone. But remember that I couldn’t love you more or be more proud of you and I want you to have the happiest life you possibly can.”

I never did become a secretary, nor even skip a generation and become a teacher, though I’ve done some private tutoring. In fact I’ve been a bit of a job hopper, but in almost all of them I’ve needed to use a keyboard – certainly in my present one, probably the one I’ve been at longest, in the local History Museum, where I’ve always been happy and they couldn’t have been kinder over my recent loss.

Of course the word processor was replaced by a succession of PCs, though I’ve never been the kind who needs to replace them as soon as the new model comes out.

But here’s the thing. Mum had one of those “simple send offs” she’d seen advertised on the TV, and whole-heartedly approved of but now I’m planning a celebration of her life – I think I’ll be ready to face it before too long. I was determined to write a piece about her – I don’t like the word eulogy that was warm, brought her back to life, was honest, vivid, not just a collection of trite truisms. But I couldn’t seem to get it right, not on my laptop, not in an old-fashioned notebook.

I WONDER, I thought. And yes, there in the attic at my old childhood home, but still looking well cared for and not remotely rusted, was a little portable typewriter. I lifted it down carefully, my eyes welling up with tears as I did, and carried it down to the lounge. Don’t build your hopes up, I told myself. It would almost certainly not have a functional ribbon in it.

But it did. And I am using it now, with my eyes front, and somehow all of the right words are flowing. And it’s Mum I have to thank. For everything!