Inky Fingers

Preparing to decorate the bedroom, I clear a clutter of miscellaneous ornamental flotsam and jetsam from the wide window ledge.  In my hand I find a little cube, about two inches high, with a hole in the uneven top.  A swirl of blue and purple through the wobbly clarity of rough glass.  I have another one, somewhere else.  Shaped like a little cup, the top dips into it in a short tube, like a glass lobster pot on end.  Its glass is rough and full of bubbles.  Functional objects, appearance an after thought.  Inkwells.  No-one uses inkwells now.  My fingers skim across these computer keys, but I remember other ways of conveying the written word. 

I can see again the scratched wooden desk I sat at.   Its top slopes like a shallow easel, hinged to form a lid which, when opened, reveals my crumpled blue jotters, my name scrawled haltingly across the front.  These jotters, as I recall, have lists of Imperial measurements printed on the back – mysterious things such as furlong, chain, link, rod, pole, perch - which we are supposed to learn off and recite without any real understanding of why.  

There’s a shallow groove running between the black hinges, and along this I lay my pencils, end to end.  They are constantly escaping and rolling off.  As they bounce across the wooden boards of the uncovered floor, I know that yet again I’ll be forced to raise a nervous little hand, and, when permitted, make my way across to the teacher’s desk.  This involves crossing the open floor exposed to the forty pairs of my classmates' eyes - brown tunics, cream blouses, each fastened into their wooden desks, neat rows, five across, eight deep.  At last I attain the teacher’s huge wooden desk, on the corner of which is my objective – a large box-type pencil sharpener.  It rattles and wobbles as she turns the stiff handle.  I watch the wood curling off and falling into its tidy plastic box.

Pencil tip viciously sharp, I slip back onto safety of my desk’s wooden bench seat, shiny from the restless wriggling of so many brown tunic-clad little bottoms.  At the rightmost end of the pencil groove, there is a round hole, and sitting in this is a little white ceramic inkwell.  Oh, and here’s the Janitor, navy blue serge uniform and official peaked cap.  He’s carrying a jug in which he has mixed up some kind of powder to create the ink we are to use - a thin, gritty, greyish green liquid.  He pours some into each little hole atop the wells.  

I observe my pen with dislike.  It has a wooden handle, a bit like the paintbrush I use in art classes.  At the end is the nib, a metal teardrop shape, split at the point, curved to hold the precious drop of ink and ready to dispense it at exactly the right speed as the pen floats elegantly across the white expanse of the page.  Or at least that is the ideal.  My trembling little seven-year-old hands pick it up and dip it tentatively into the inkwell.  The page seems large, blue lines marching across it with military straightness.  The ink drop obstinately refuses to tuck itself neatly into the back of the nib.  My first insult to the page is only a faint scratch.  I try again.  This time, the ink comes precariously with me, wobbing ominously.  I place the nib on the paper and begin to shape uneven letters approximately along the line.  Hope rises as the ink flows evenly, but a little thin.  I press the pen down harder.  The forked tongue of the nib opens with a protesting squeak, the ink departs and to my horror swells into a dark, forbidding blot.  I raise the trembling fingers again, and attract attention from behind the vast wooden desk.  Blotting paper, white and soft, is presented.  Too anxious, I quickly squash it down and the blot spreads, wide and jagged.  In future years I’ll recognise the result as one of Rorscharch’s Ink Blots, but now I see only as a mammoth catastrophe.  I start again, heart beating, mouth dry, to replenish the ink in the nib.  But it won’t fill, despite increasingly frenzied dipping so that the nib bangs its metal point hard onto the bottom of the little well.  I withdraw it and inspect it.  The forked point is twisted, its two tips intertwined like crossed legs.  I try to straighten it, and my fingers tips become stained greenish grey.  I can hear the other forty pens scratching and squeaking their way across their straight blue lines.  There is no despair like a child fearing peer ridicule and adult critique.

Somehow, I learned to write with a dip pen.  Then came the revolution.  We were permitted to bring fountain pens to school.  I loved my tortoiseshell pen, and the bright blue ‘Quink’ which came in little fat glass bottles.  Carefully inserting the pen’s golden nib into the dark viscous surface, you manipulated a little golden lever on the side.  This compressed a small rubber tube within, and so sucked up the ink.  If you reversed the process, you could form a froth of bubbles in the bottle.  

And then came the Biro, plastic and multi-coloured; the typewriter, its keys set in a small amphitheatre, beating a rat-a-tat-tat as they sprung up in meticulous, choreographed order; the carbon paper which blacked fingers and clothes; the Banda copier, whose purple print would have intoxicated you in a haze of methylated spirits; the dot matrix printer that so impressed us all; the vast photocopiers you had to queue to use.  And now we take it all for granted.  Where’s the cartridge; I’ll print out twenty copies; the spell checker caused that stupid error, not me.

And a whole host of skills fade into history.  But the forked tongues of those sharp nibs have scratched their spidery words indelibly upon the lined pages of my childhood memory.