Alphabetical (33 page)

My brother broke through a barrier. He got an Olivetti. It was slim and sleek. It didn't clacketty-clack, it puttered. It was made of a serene dark green metal. The keys were like flat dice: black, square, plastic, with white letters. Everything worked. And when he finished, he could slot it into a case and carry it about with him. It was a ‘portable'. With his Olivetti, my brother threw out the pre-war heaviness of qwerty and brought in something as neat and as hard-edged as Bridget Riley's art and Mary Quant's hairdo. If I typed on it, he would tell me not to type so hard. You don't bang down the keys, like Mum has to, he said.

I spent my twenty-first birthday money on a portable too. I went German. It was an Adler: black and cream. Here the keys were like chunky cream lozenges. It wasn't metal. It was bendy plastic. It didn't putter. It clucked. What was I thinking of? I had foregone style for lightness. This was a writing machine I could take anywhere. It wasn't much thicker than a Dickens novel. I moved up a notch. I was doing two fingers on each hand and two thumbs now. I remember sitting in the dressing room
of the Nuffield Theatre, in Southampton, dressed in my costume of Obadiah for a production of
Tristram Shandy
, with my Adler. I had a deadline for an article to write for the student magazine,
Isis
. If I could bash it out, while waiting to go on stage for the matinée, get it into an envelope and into the post on the way home after the show, it would meet the deadline and get into the magazine. Cluck cluck cluck. I knew then that I was in charge of qwerty. Qwerty did what I told it to do.

Even better, in the student magazine office was a big Olivetti. Like a real professional one. As big as my mother's old Remington but as stylish as my brother's. Over the summer, the news was that the office was closing, and we were moving to a new office that someone had kitted out. There was a rumour that Robert Maxwell was involved. The Olivetti went into the back of a car and found its way home. It sat on the desk I got for my twenty-first birthday, and I sat upstairs in my parents' house in the holidays back from college, typing the poems that would end up in my first book for children,
Mind Your Own Business
. I used triple-carbonated paper, three copies in one go. Even my mother was impressed. She had never liked the mess of the old carbon paper you had to slot in by hand between the sheets.

And wasn't the typeface rather snazzy too? Didn't my mother's seem rather quaint? Even as she was sending off her scripts to BBC Schools Radio, didn't it make her writing seem old too? I was Olivetti qwerty man.

Someone mentioned electric typewriters. What's the point of that? It doesn't make you type any faster. Someone mentioned that you didn't have to go back over a mistake and whack it with an ‘x'. You now pressed a delete button and the letter disappeared. What! You could make a letter disappear? There's a ribbon, and it lifts the letter off the page. The letters aren't ink. They're more like Letraset. They're like . . . stuck on to the
page. So the little ribbon unsticks them. I was up for it. By making qwerty less permanent, it was making qwerty look perfect on the page. Scripts, articles, poems would have no more mistakes. I had to upgrade myself. This four-finger, staring-at-the-keyboard thing had to end. I had to learn how to touch-type.

So I enrolled for a two-week typing course at a typing college in an upstairs room in Camden Town. All day, I sat with young women who had just left school, sixteen-, seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. All day we did the exercises, ‘frf', ‘juj', ‘kik', ‘ded'. Hours and hours forcing my mind, fingers, keys and letters to work along in synch. I loved it. And in the evenings, after school, I came home and forced myself to type what I had to type using what I had learned. Qwerty started to disappear from being something I stared at. Now it was something that my fingers knew. Because I did so much typing in the evening, I found the daytime class easier and easier. I became annoying. At least two people in the class stopped talking to me. I didn't mean to sound like a qwerty show-off though it must have looked that way. I'm sorry.

The electric typewriter was supposed to be portable. Like a suitcase is portable. And, like a fat black plastic suitcase, it stayed put. The letters it made were strangely thin and weaselly. People said I had to get a golf-ball. Everyone was talking about golf-balls. I was going to get a golf-ball, when someone else said that it was going to be computers. What you're going to be able to do now, they said, is type something and store it in the machine. Then you can call it up again, change it as many times as you like and only when you're happy with it do you have to print it. You get this printer where you put in these sheets that are all joined up, press a button and it prints it all out in a great long sheet, which you tear into pages.

No thanks, I said, I'll stick with the electric. I'm loving erasing
my misdemeanours with the delete button. I can even put up with thin, weaselly qwerty. My fingers know everything now. I rule qwerty like the King of Ruritania rules the peasants. Every letter does just as I tell it to. Well, mostly. ‘Z' and ‘X' give me bother. That quick change from the little finger to the third finger of the left hand. Don't ask me to do it quickly. And another thing, I didn't do a third week, when I would have learned how to touch-type the numbers. I have to look. But apart from all that, I'm Mr Qwick Qwerty Guy now. My electric typewriter sounded like jazz: te tutter, ta ta ta tutter, tutter te ta ta ta. The bebop of qwertyuiop.

I bought an Amstrad. Why were the letters green? Not when they were printed. On the screen. The screen was green, the letters were green. And with whopping great big serifs. No one does serifs like that any more. But now, I had joined the era of letters on a screen. The page was starting to lose its dominance. Where once writing had been that permanent thing I did with something that made marks, now the mark was temporary. Everything was postponable. OK, if there was a deadline, something had to be fixed. Everything else could be changed. And I loved it that you could leave something for a year and then decide to change it. The imperfect screen page had only ever been seen by me. So where qwerty had once been permanent, as with my mother's typewriting, and where it had been semipermanent, with pages of writing with the electric typewriter, it was now, potentially, forever provisional.

I was loyal to Amstrad. I stayed with it long after people were writing documents and playing that weird-coloured ping-pong game on the Apple, and after PCs came in and you could store thousands of documents and obliterate the universe or battle to the death in Japanese. I got an Apple. It was called a ‘duo-dock'. You had a laptop which you docked into a loading
bay which turned it into a desktop. Qwerty was now portable and office in one. One moment, I could type small on a tiny laptop keyboard and the next I could be big and old-style on the PC-like keyboard. It was like slipping from recorder to saxophone. The fingers just knew what to do.

And that's how it is for me now, promiscuously moving from laptops to PCs, taking my portable qwerty skill with me. Typing with my eyes shut works as a party trick for five-year-olds. Talking about one thing while typing something else is one of the most annoying things you can do with your friends and loved ones. It still seems incredible that my mind and fingers can own a knowledge which enables me to produce pages of perfect script.

There is a drawback. Of course there is. There is always a drawback. If I write on to paper, the scribblings-out stay there. Bad for looking good. Good for staying in sight just in case I want to use something that I didn't want before. Corrections on the screen disappear. The delete button was invented by employers who wanted their secretaries to produce perfect documents. If these machines had been invented by writers, there would have been a ‘correct' button which would turn the word red and bung it in the margin. Yes, I know there's an application like that that's been invented, but I want a key. I want ‘correct' to be of the same status as qwertyuiop. Just something that my right-hand little finger could learn. Bebop and dop on, Correct!

Today, there are millions of keyboards and printers in homes, schools and libraries. ‘Qwerty' still reigns in the office but it has escaped. Many more people than there were in my mother's time have the means of producing documents and writing of all kinds in a form that looks and feels professional.

I am curious about one thing, though. There is still enormous emphasis placed by governments and education departments on
the presentation of correct writing. Schools spend millions of hours teaching children handwriting, spelling, punctuation and general orthographic neatness – with a pencil or pen. Quite a bit of time is spent doing ‘IT', none of which involves learning ‘qwerty'. If ‘qwerty' was on the curriculum, millions of children would be able to write nearly as fast as they think, and go back and edit pages of their writing so that they could present them immaculately. Instead of learning spelling and grammar as something that exists only in textbooks, they could learn how to use the spell- and grammar checks. They're not failsafe but they are a modern data-bank on which we can base our work. It's only a modern way of using a reference book. I have a feeling that in fifty years' time, people will look back with bemusement at this era in which electronic ‘qwerty' was so dominant, while schools still spent so much time on pen and paper.

THE STORY OF

•
AN EARLY FORM
of ‘R' appears in ancient Semitic inscriptions as a probable ‘resh' meaning ‘head' with ‘r' being the sound it signified. At this stage it looked like a simplified profile or outline of a whole human head. This shape (but not the word or sound) was a possible copy from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph. Around 1000
BCE
the Phoenicians turned it into a backwards or reverse ‘P' shape. This is the early form of the Greek ‘rho' letter appearing around 725
BCE
. This passed to the Etruscans, who handed it on to the Romans, who reversed it and added the beginnings of R's tail, probably to distinguish it from ‘P'. Classical Romans from Imperial Rome produced the letter as we know it today.

r

This appears first in Latin manuscripts from around
AD
500 and was adopted first by Charlemagne's scribes with their ‘Carolingian minuscule' lettering and then by Italian printers in the 1500s as our lower case.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

This is one of the vowel-consonant names like ‘eff', ‘ell', ‘em', ‘en', ‘ess' and ‘ex'. The theory again is that this was once ‘erray' and contracted initially to the first syllable of that word. From there it could have evolved into any of the vowel-plus-‘r' combinations so quite why it ended up sounding the same as we pronounce the word ‘are' is not quite clear. Modern French – which is sometimes a guide to how the Norman French may have spoken – pronounce it in more or less the same way as we do: ‘air'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

Speakers of English have many ways of pronouncing or not pronouncing this letter. As a native of southern Britain, I'm one of the frightful gang who don't voice it at all in words like ‘card', ‘mother', ‘fire' and ‘fur'. When a vowel is the next sound to follow it, though, I do sometimes make a non-growly sound by rolling my tongue up on to the roof of my mouth as in ‘for a laugh', ‘foreign' and ‘fire on deck'. I even commit the heinous crime of inserting a non-existent ‘r' sound when I say ‘draw-r-a picture', ‘saw-r-a man'. Some who have grown up selecting which Rs to pronounce and which not also pronounce their Rs as a ‘rw' or a ‘w'.

Those who always voice the ‘r' in ‘card', ‘mother', ‘fire' and ‘fur' vary in several different ways, rolling their tongue so that it vibrates against the roof of their mouth, growling at the back of the throat, or making quite a marked ‘r' as in the stereotypic pirate-voice saying ‘arrrr'.

As an initial letter in words, ‘r' appears with an ‘h' in ‘rhino' and ‘rhythm' or with a consonant or consonants preceding it as with ‘tram', ‘pram', ‘dram', ‘gram', ‘cram', ‘brim', ‘thrill', ‘stream', ‘krill' and Anna Karenina's lover ‘Vronsky'. I know someone with the surname ‘Nri' and people of my age have learned how to say ‘Sri Lanka'. It combines with vowels to make (in my pronunciation) a vowel sound as in ‘card', ‘herd', ‘third', ‘lord', ‘curd', ‘board', ‘peered', ‘feared', ‘tired', ‘bored', ‘fared', ‘stair', ‘stare', ‘mere', ‘pier', ‘pour', ‘our', ‘lure', ‘poor', ‘dinosaur', ‘are', ‘coir', ‘fleur de lys' and ‘heart' . . . For all pronouncers of ‘r' these are vowel-plus-consonant sounds. Following the ‘r', we use consonants to make words like ‘hurt', ‘carp', ‘curse', ‘lord', ‘barf', ‘large', ‘ark', ‘snarl',
‘furze', ‘arc', ‘curve', ‘curb', ‘turn' and ‘harm'.