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 copperplate, 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 pens 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 pen 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 signature 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.’

A.J.H., novelist, 57