The first typewriter that was ever officially “mine” was a rather beautifully designed and styled one, a genuine “thing of beauty” which used
to belong to a friend of my father, an elderly blind lady called Miss Frieda (or
possibly Freda) LePlait (or
possibly Le Plat) who used to run “The
Kindness Club”. This was a club for children who liked animals and from which
we used to get regular newsletters when I was very young, although the club
itself was probably so small and obscure that it now seems to have been erased from history.
I presume that at some point she got herself a new
typewriter and was throwing this old Remington away, but, for whatever reason,
at about the age of eight I acquired a second hand typewriter to type my bits
and pieces on, and, maybe, surreptitiously be taught to write and learn to
spell rather better at the same time, although judging by Word’s insistence on putting red
zig-zags under my words, perhaps that didn’t work out too well after all.
I’ve always liked typewriters and still have a fondness
for their old-fashioned lo-tech (and battery-free) mechanical action even in this modern age, even
though it’s probably years since I actually sat down and used one. I think that
there’s something rather comforting about that systematic “clack-clacking” as
the keys hit the paper. Perhaps it’s because it takes me back to hearing my
father writing his sermons when I was very young, or maybe it’s because I
really am some kind of retrograde when it comes to embracing new technology,
but, whatever it is, they remain rather fascinating machines to me.
I still have three of them. Miss LePlait’s Remington, my father’s
last Silver-Reed, and another which predates them both and belonged to my
grandfather but which I was unable to extricate from the loft recently as it
had got itself seemingly inextricably lodged behind something, but this one has always
remained a favourite, even though I seem to have “vandalised” it by etching my
name onto it at some point.
That’ll have been my dad, again, letting me loose with one
of those pens with a metal nib that would let you mark things by scratching
into the surface in one of those strange theories of theft prevention that we
all sometimes go through.
If you look at the picture carefully, you’ll notice
something “odd” about the keyboard because it’s not a standard QWERTY but some
other, more arbitrary layout. I was once told that this was because it was
meant for use by blind people and so all of the more “useful” keys (in the
best Holmesian “Adventure of the Dancing Men” tradition) were put on the bottom row for easier access. I don’t
know whether that’s true or not, but it might explain why I got it rather than
the office typing pool, as it might have been pretty much useless to anyone who
was a trained touch typist.
It’s interesting to me that, despite having used a QWERTY
keyboard pretty much every day for over two decades I still struggle to think
where each key is. I mean, obviously I know where they are, otherwise these
pieces would be a heck of a lot shorter, but, if I have to think about it,
well, I can obviously give you QWERTY and I’m pretty sure I could point out the
OPASNM, but the rest just remain a little vague, even though I don’t have to
think about it all that much when I’m rattling out these single-digit
monstrosities for you to read.
Still, it’s interesting how QWERTY has become the
“standard” international keyboard layout of choice (well, for English and
most of the European languages anyway…)
when there were so many others about. Apparently we have to thank Christopher
Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the QWERTY layout which was designed,
despite myths to the contrary, to speed up typing by preventing jams as the
letter bars of the early typewriters used to get tangled up with each other.
There are others, of course; the Dvorak, the Colemak and
the Neo to name but three, but it is the QWERTY that seems most likely to
prevail and, as for Miss LePlait’s much loved keyboard, well it still seems to
be rather unique and might be part of the reason that I never learned to type
properly…
