From 1984, a revival in handwriting tuition in schools started to be noticed. Often, a print hand was maintained alongside the old-fashioned cursive deriving from the nineteenth-century handwriting guru, A.N. Palmer.17 (It’s noticeable that many very well-educated Americans of forty and under do habitually write in a firm print hand, with out any cursive joins at all.) Handwriting is still taught in pockets in the United States, despite resistance. ‘We just had this discussion,’ a Chicago teacher says, explaining how he came to teach handwriting again. ‘They have to know this because they’ll still need it. Not everyone has a computer. And for state testing, they have to physically print or do cursive.’18 One perceived problem is that the national unity of style in America seems to be disappearing. This seems to be one area where diversity is perceived by Americans not as exciting, but as confusing and unnecessary. The New York Times observed in the 1990s that ‘ethnic diversity has brought new lettering: Greek E’s, for example, which look like backward 3’s, and European 7’s, which are written with a line across the staff.’19 Is this a bad thing? Perhaps, to generations accustomed to imposing ways of outlining letters on sighing children, the excitement of seeing that you could choose, if you wished, to make your letters in another way seems intimidating.
In third grade in American schools – seven to eightish – now as it has been for decades, a cursive hand is introduced. In 1984, the New York Times reported a recommendation by an emeritus professor of education from Buffalo, New York, that schools should ‘devote about five to ten minutes to teaching handwriting two or three times a week in elementary school.’* They also managed to find that Houston did spend twenty minutes a day in teacher-directed handwriting instruction from first to sixth grade – this was in the early 1980s. In recent years, a programme called Handwriting Without Tears has encouraged teachers to devote ten to fifteen minutes a day on handwriting.20 Other twenty-first-century initiatives included teaching American schoolchildren cursive from the start.21 There seems no doubt that, here and there, there are many individual schoolteachers in America sufficiently convinced of the importance of handwriting lessons in their own education not only to reintroduce such lessons, but actually extend them downwards and upwards.
In England, on the other hand, in 1982, we are told that ‘only 5 per cent of schools taught handwriting. By 1987, this had suddenly increased to about 60 per cent’.22 The National Curriculum now stresses handwriting. ‘The four criteria of the Sats level two handwriting test are legibility, consistent size and spacing of letters, flow and movement, and a confident personal style.’23 But does anyone follow this? From time to time, you hear of an individual school that decides to push it up the agenda – a school called Otford County Primary devised a unique strategy with the support of the great handwriting scholar Rosemary Sassoon (a bit like getting Richard Dawkins to plan your Year-2 Nature Studies, one might think). A primary school called Stonesfield introduced a proper cursive policy.24 Walthamstow School for Girls, spectacularly, insisted that all work had to be done by pupils with fountain pens rather than ballpoints – the rule, of course, had to be imposed on staff, too. Lunchtime handwriting surgeries were introduced.25
This all sounds wonderful. Now for the bad news. After reading about these handwriting strategies in individual schools from fifteen years ago, I wrote to the headteachers of the schools asking what had happened since, and how they had developed these interesting policies. I am sorry to say that, when this book went to print, none of them had responded to me. When I telephoned the PA of one head-teacher to ask if they had any intention of doing so, and if, for instance, they still taught handwriting, since they might be too busy to write a letter to me, she had no idea what I was talking about. Some schools may have handwriting policies, for all I know. They may spend their whole days doing nothing else. On the other hand, if they do maintain any interest in handwriting, they’re in no great hurry to tell anyone about it. I suspect those who were briefly excited a decade or two ago are now about as much interested in handwriting these days as anyone else.
4 ~ A History Of Handwriting, from String Onwards
1. Early Neolithic folk take to tying knots in string to remind them of things. Not really handwriting.
2. 412,000 BC. A community of Homo Erectus living at Bilzingsleben in modern Germany leave notches on bone. Not really handwriting.
3. 8000 BC. The Azilian culture in southern France take to painting squiggles, stripes and spots on pebbles. Nobody knows what they meant, if anything, if not a slightly tragic wish by a prehistoric Terence Conran to brighten up the cave. Not really handwriting.
4. 5300 BC. The Vinca culture in the Balkans incise symbols on clay. Two hundred and ten symbols are recorded. They appear to be related to the possession of objects. Not really handwriting.
5. Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.
6. The accountants invent writing systems in Yangshao in China around 4000 BC, and various middle Eastern sites between 8000 and 1500 BC.
7. Sumerians around 3700 BC start to stick one-syllable symbols together to form words, first by joining pictorial symbols together so that ‘eye plus water meant weeping.’1 Still not handwriting.
8. Egyptians invent hieroglyphs. System now includes 26 one-consonant signs. The principle of the consonant alphabet widely accepted by 2000 BC. Not much like handwriting.
9. Over the next 4,000 years, Egyptians develop four scripts: hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic and Coptic. Hieratic is developed by accountants, written on papyrus and other surfaces, taking on links between letters and other simplifications. Suddenly, it looks a lot like handwriting. All of a sudden, people start writing proper literature in it. Response of accountants to this not recorded. Possibly start going round handing round clay-tablet business cards to newly affluent poets.
10. In Mesopotamia, wedge-shaped tools applied to clay produce a form of writing called cuneiform. Scribes are trained at special schools, performing exercises in writing over and over. Very much like handwriting lessons.
11. The development of alphabets results in a Phoenician alphabet with twenty-two consonants around 1000 BC. Other writing systems quickly follow, including Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and others which have not survived. All of these demonstrate the personal ability to write letters, as well as incised or engraved forms. From this point on, it’s all handwriting.
5 ~ What’s my Handwriting Like?
Many previous books about handwriting have been written by people with beautiful handwriting, to which the readers might want to aspire. This is not one of those books. What people usually say about my handwriting is that it looks ‘incisive’, ‘quite grown-up’ and, most often, ‘What’s that word there?’ It looks like this:
It came about in the following way.
1. Taught a print hand at Malden Manor Infant School, 1969. Upright letters, not joined-up. Good for stories about spaceships and ones about magical princesses, sometimes at the same time.
2. Longed to start on joined-up handwriting. Invented own script, bearing no relation to letters or words. Developed inexplicable urge to write under the pseudonym of Edwin Harrington, possibly connected to the first ambition.
3. Observed difference between Mummy’s handwriting, nice, cosy and round, though as she admits, utterly unable to spell the word ‘carrot’,* and Daddy’s, elaborate, graceful, reaching upwards boldly and with a signature like a knife into a wound, not much like his name at all. Insight grasped: people don’t write all the same, and the way they write is a little bit like them.
4. Was taught joined-up writing at Malden Manor Junior School, 1971. Slowly mastered the rounded letterforms recommended by Marion Richardson in the 1930s. Took particular pleasure in her z’s, like this – – and struggled with her r’s, with the hook and hammock. Foun
d faint disappointment in the no-nonsense f’s, and felt there must be more to life than that. First signs of rebelliousness: replaced the back-to-back brackets of the Richardson x with two crossing diagonal lines. Felt much better about not being allowed to write in a forward-sloping hand.
5. Glimpsed the signature of Elizabeth I. Love at first sight. For some time wrote title pages of unwritten novels by Edwin Harrington, my chosen pen-name, with absurd arabesques under the signature. Now eight years old. The novels of Edwin Harrington went unwritten.†
Elizabeth I’s signature.
6. In the handwriting hour, Mrs Clark instructs us to copy out a poem from the anthology and decorate it. There will be a prize. I copy out a poem about ducks and attempt to draw some portraits of ducks among the reeds. Find I am unable to draw a duck. Moreover, Mrs Clark, deep in her Welsh soul, with her passionate devotion to Marion Richardson’s letterforms, disapproves of the adaptation of the f and the t in my handwriting. The t should join from the bottom, she says, not from the crossbar. She calls out one name after another as winner of the class competition, as I hover over her desk. All the names she calls have buggered off to torture a frog in the school pond, or something. Finally, after having gone through fourteen names, she has no alternative left. I am declared the handwriting champion of 2Cl. There is no prize but Mrs Clark’s unwillingly bestowed acclamation. Am overjoyed.
7. Teenage dissatisfaction with own handwriting, but not so much as with the horror of teenage girls’ near circular hand with a heart over the i. Buy a first fountain pen. Mr Buckley of English remarks that I press so hard on the paper when I write that he could read it on the other side with his fingertips, like Braille. It’s true that the nibs of the fountain pens have a tendency to bend upwards like Arabian Nights’ slippers and to divide in two under the pressure. Mortified, for a time I try to pass my pen over the paper with a featherlike touch. All too much. Handwriting becomes entirely illegible for a time.
8. At university, become entranced with the stabbing stunted verticals of my tutor E.G.W. Mackenzie’s hand-writing. Meet a boy from a very posh school with a strange posh name who is forever leaving distinguished-looking notes on my door. He explains to me about italic handwriting, which was apparently taught at his Catholic boarding school. Combination of the influence of Miss Mackenzie’s violent verticals and Paul im Thurn’s public-school italics produce a handwriting entirely consisting of violent downward verticals, enlivened with the occasional equilateral triangle. Fortunately modify this in time for finals, which I manage to pass.
9. Beginning PhD thesis, hand in first chapter written in ink on paper. As I was saying earlier, my supervisor, Norman Bryson, tells me to write everything on a computer in future because my first chapter makes his eyes hurt and it’s not fair. The beginning of the end of handwriting.
10. 2008. A creative-writing student tells me that she is unable to carry a notebook around with her to make notes in with a pen (for overheard dialogue on buses, characteristic small pieces of behaviour among strangers) because she can’t write with a pen on paper. Can’t? ‘It really hurts.’ And, by the way, the student finds my handwriting really difficult to read, so could I give all feedback in typing? Including marginal comments? Yes, that too.
6 ~ Witness
‘The thing about handwriting at prep school – there were really two main currents, both of them emulating one of the masters. There was the headmaster, who was a dapper, sarcastic, chain-smoking, favouritizing sort. He had extremely neat print-like writing, in which all personality seemed to be suppressed. A lot of us were rather frightened of the headmaster, and we felt this must be a good way to write, utterly neat and legible – neatness was something of a fetish. But then we had another master – F. X. Sempill – who had very beautiful . . . I suppose it was essentially italic writing, but his capitals had marvellous rococo flourishes and tails. He was a mysterious though clearly rather repressed character, and perhaps in his case the repressions were released into these curlicues. I was rather more drawn to him. You asked about the Greek E, because I wrote about it in a novel, in a passage very much based on my own prep-school experience. It’s never come naturally to me, because it’s difficult to incorporate into anything at all cursive, isn’t it?
‘There was a sense of liberation in getting away from mimicking the headmaster’s boring hand. I can remember spending a lot of time writing, almost like self-imposed “lines” – just writing things out, trying out different letters. There were other boys who were into doing that as well. We got quite self-conscious about handwriting. I think we had formal handwriting lessons when we first arrived at the school. I was reading very fluently at that age – I was seven and a half – though I remember there were one or two boys who could barely read. We used Marion Richardson’s copybooks, which was a sort of copper plate, wasn’t it? No, it wasn’t. I remember there were Marion Richardson books around which we were encouraged to use. I don’t think I used them myself. I said copperplate, but as you see I can’t actually remember.
‘The pens were quite a thing. We all had fountain pens, always cartridge pens, and the cartridges were put to all sorts of uses afterwards. One played with them, turned them into missiles of different kinds. I had a Parker at that time; some other boys had Osmiroids. We had crazes for different-coloured inks; and those biros with four different coloured inks that you could select – I gave one of those to my favourite master. He shared my birthday, so he would give me a bit of illicit tuck, and I gave him a four-colour biro to do his marking with. Mr Sempill kept different-coloured pencils behind his breast-pocket handkerchief – all very sharp, green, red and blue, to do his curlicues with.
‘How did I write essays and things? I can’t quite remember. It was one’s own signature, of course, that one spent quite a lot of time on, and wrote on everything one owned that didn’t already have a name tag on it. I loved the Elizabethan signature; I remember spending hours doing Elizabeth I, with those scrolling lines underneath. And I carried on, trying out new styles, new letters, all through big school and Oxford. I sometimes come across an old Bodleian yellow slip in a book, you know, and I’d laboriously been writing the title of a book over and over on it, trying out different styles. By then I had friends with very cultivated, usually italic hands, so handwriting was still part of the atmosphere. And as an English graduate, of course, you had to study historic handwriting, though I don’t think that affected my own.
‘Some boys at school wrote revoltingly badly. I can see I was rather pleased with my own handwriting. It seemed beautiful to me, though of course when I come across it now it looks gauche and pretentious. It has simplified over the years. It’s got faster. The truth is that I write by hand less and less. I always wrote all my books fully in longhand up until the last one. I wrote the first three with the same silver Sheaffer, a beautiful pen, though now all the silver’s been rubbed off the barrel of it by my thumb. For the last two books I used a very good Parker I won in a Listener crossword competition. In fact with the latest I found myself beginning a chapter in longhand, then moving quite quickly on to the computer – something I never thought I would do. I had to send a handwritten letter to someone yesterday, and I started off quite elegantly, but after a few lines it was getting awkward and odd. I was missing out letters. Perhaps we’re losing the art of writing by hand.
‘I suspect I do still sometimes come to conclusions about people on the basis of their handwriting. At prep school someone had a book on, what’s it called? Graphology – we came to damning conclusions about those boys who had, say, very backward-leaning handwriting. It was supposed to show they were emotionally stunted – or something – and I retain a trace of that still. There are certainly things I’m snobbish about, like circles for dots over i’s, an abomination.
‘The thing that I’ve written more than anything this year is my own name. I’ve signed something like four thousand copies of my new book, and during those marathon sessions one just watches one’s signatu
re disintegrate in front of one’s eyes, missing out more and more letters. If I feel I’ve really short-changed them on the letters, I try to make up for it on the underlining.’
[Collapse of interviewer and subject].
‘From my teens I’ve always underlined my signature – perhaps it’s a tiny vestige of Elizabeth I. A graphologist would probably have an explanation for it too.
‘You can know someone for years these days, and have no idea what their handwriting is like. None at all. An American boyfriend of mine sent me some photographs after I’d known him for about a year, and he added a note saying ‘It struck me that you’d never seen my writing’. It was quite true, I hadn’t. It must be different nowadays even in a newspaper office, I think. I was very aware of people’s handwriting when I joined the TLS, because we were all subbing things on the page, with varying degrees of legibility. One colleague always used a very soft and usually very blunt pencil. Another had absolutely minute and obsessively neat handwriting – which took me back to childhood too, seeing how much you could get on to a piece of paper. Our sense of each other’s personality in the office probably was bound up with our sense of each other’s handwriting.’
Interviewer: ‘What’s the letter that gives you most pleasure to write?’
‘Over the years, I’ve taken a lot of pleasure in a capital B where the top stroke sweeps back, through the ascender, and curls down behind and even under the letter. On the other hand, I’m a bit embarrassed about lower-case y’s, especially at the end of the word. I never used to put a loop in the descender. But then I started doing it. I don’t know why. It didn’t seem really to fit in with the rest of my writing. I suppose your writing does keep evolving, and after a while degenerating, in little ways. And now I want to talk to you about secretary hand.’
The Missing Ink Page 3