The Tall Girl from Somerset Chapter One 'A fountain pen, a bottle of ink and a computer'
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.
Henry
Chiswick, London.
A fountain pen, a bottle of ink and a computer
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 around you. “All
passion spent” I suppose. Yes, that’s it. “All passion spent”.
Milton, I seem to remember. We did it at school but that was years ago. Little
things still stick though. You always remember the poems you had to memorize at
school. Thomas Hood’s ‘I remember’ was one. It’s been with me all my life. I’ve
always enjoyed reciting it. I hope I haven’t bored too many people!
Here I am in Chiswick
with my life of routines that become quieter as the days go on. 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! There are 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’ve remembered the gist of them.
When you're old, you
still have 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 that one. 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 just happened to be 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! 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 a 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 always used to use
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
down there! Slow down, won’t you!' Then the car
would crash into the barn
door. It crashed into the barn door almost every 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 my friend 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 the 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 always was, Sunday after Sunday.
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