The Tall Girl from Somerset. Chapter 1
The Tall Girl from
Somerset
This is the story of Anne, and from now on, all being well, it
will be posted here once more, a chapter each week, on Fridays.
1. HENRY
Chiswick, London.
A
fountain pen, a computer and a car.
It’s high time I put it
all down on paper. I’m not getting any younger after
all. None of us are. But at least with age you can see
things in perspective, and you also have a calmer view of
everything. “All passion spent” I suppose. Yes, that’s
it. “All passion spent”.
There’s nothing really
to struggle for anymore, although I do give myself little goals. I
have no great ambitions to achieve now, no promotion at work to aim for, no
more cvs to send in. That’s one good thing about getting
old! No more cvs to send in! Thank goodness for
that! How long I used to spend on them! Then I would walk
down to the pillar box and post them. And then I waited. And
I waited. And usually there was no reply at all. None.
What does it take to just send a standard letter? 'We thank you for your
application but regret to have to inform you that...' That is better than
nothing. Anything is better than
nothing. "No man likes to have his best ignored, be it ever so
little!" Who said that? Was it Johnson? It may have
been. Everything worth saying has been said by Johnson. Or Shaw or Wilde. I may not have Johnson’s
words quite right, but I think I got the gist of them.
When you're old, you’ve
still got to work towards something. You’ve got to have aims, however small
they are. Just getting up and getting dressed is objective number one, and that
seems to take long enough. In fact, I need a coffee and a rest when
I’ve made myself ready for the day ahead. And I used to be up and
off to work in 20 minutes! 15 minutes sometimes! But, anyway.
When I say I must put it
down on paper, I really mean that. I still use paper. And I still have my
old fountain pen. I was thirteen when I bought it, and the man in
the shop said it would last a lifetime, and so it has. I have had
several nibs since then, of course. A couple of nibs ago I changed
to ballpoints, but then I changed back again. There is nothing like
ink. Did you know that Victor Hugo used exactly one bottle of ink to
write ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’? He opened the bottle when he
started the novel, and that bottle lasted him to the final
sentence. Think of all the other bottles of ink in the shop where he
bought it. What happened to them, I
wonder? I suppose that some were used
for a few schoolboy exercises, some were half used and then thrown away, some
were left on the shelf and simply dried up, and some were tipped over and spilt
on the floor. But that one bottle was bought by Victor Hugo and
taken home and put on the desk, and look what it produced! In fact, he thought
of calling the novel ‘What there is in a bottle of ink’, but then he had second
thoughts. Thank goodness.
Well, my pen has lasted
me almost a lifetime anyway, we’ll see how things go! I prefer pen
and paper. What I want to talk about is too close to me for using a
computer. When you’ve got words on paper, you know where you are,
don’t you! You’ve got control. But with a computer I
always have the feeling that the words will fly off somewhere and then I never
know if I can get them back. It’s like a racing
pigeon. Off it goes into the deep blue yonder, and you’re never
absolutely sure if you’ll ever see it again. And pigeons have a far
better homing instinct than computer text! I have never lost
any pigeons but I’ve lost plenty of words, I can tell you.
I am always told that I bang the keys on a
computer. Well, I was brought
up with a typewriter, and that is what we had to do in those
days. We gave the
keys a good bang! It is hard to change, and we carry
our habits through to the
next invention. My grandfather had been brought up with
horses. Horses
pulled the plough and they pulled the hay wagon and they pulled
the trap to
church on Sundays. Nothing on the land was faster than
the horse. The horse
was king. And then one day my grandfather bought his
first car. I remember
seeing him turn from the road into our yard at a tremendous speed
, violently
pulling the steering wheel towards his chest shouting ‘Slow
you brute! Slow up
there! Slow down, won’t you!' Then the car would
crash into the barn door. It
crashed into the barn door each day, I remember.
As regards Anne, I can only talk about what I saw and what I
heard, of
course. It’s not the whole picture, you can be sure of
that. Of course, it never is
the whole picture, but it’s something. ‘Algo es algo’
as Carmen would say. I’m
taking you back now,back to Somerset in the early
60s. The swinging 60s! But
Somerset, at least as far as I can remember, and my memory does
play me up a
bit nowadays, Somerset did not swing much in the
60s. That was all in London,
I suppose. Life in the village and in the gardens of
the village and in the fields
round about the village went on much the same as it had done in
the 50s and as
it had done in the years
well before the 50s as long as you take out the
war. The runner beans came up just the same, and so did
the potatoes. The
sweet peas bloomed and were cut for vases in the dining room. The Bramley
trees blossomed and gave apples just the same. The same as they do
now really,
if you go back to see. The church tower is still
there just as it was
always there, Sunday after Sunday.
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