At my primary school (ages 5-11) we were given dip-pens; each of our little desks was equipped with an inset, white porcelain inkwell. We also used pencils, but writing with ‘biros’ was strongly discouraged. My earliest memory of writing is of working from a copy-book used to teach cursive script. Here is part of a letter I never posted.
Summer 1958, aged 8; pencil. Click any image to enlarge
The next sample I have is from March 1963, when I started my nature journal. You can see that I have left the textbook cursive far behind and have begun abandoning certain ligatures, such as on terminal e or initial p. The writing also now slopes to the right.
March 1963, fountain pen, probably an Osmiroid 65; Quink Royal Blue washable
That year, it seems, I was experimenting with letter-shapes: notice below the three different es, or the gs in ‘edges’. Some of the abandoned ligatures are creeping back, for the sake of speed.
May 1963, same pen and ink
Four months later my handwriting had become somewhat more regular, though it shows also an increase in speed; we had to write a great deal at school.
September 1963, same pen, Quink Permanent Black
During that autumn term my handwriting became influenced by that of my friend J. G. G. Steedman, particularly with respect to his distinctive es that were, I believe, copied from his elder brother’s hand. These are formed by making a c, then inscribing a loop from its centre to the upper tip and joining this, if necessary, to the next letter. This silly affectation remained with me for quite some time. Notice also that the slope is reducing.
October 1963, ditto
By November, no doubt under Steedman’s influence, the slope had disappeared altogether. However, I was now restoring some cursive ligatures, perhaps to make up for the loss of speed my es were incurring.
November 1963, ditto
The following month my writing even started leaning backwards. The s in ‘also’ is another Steedmanesque touch. However, yet more ligatures are being restored. My early inculcation in cursive writing was probably responsible.
December 1963, ditto
A year later my es owed more to italic script than to Steedman: notice that now the loop proceeds from the top of the c to its middle before being joined to the next letter. But notice also how many more conventional es there are in this sample. The backward slope is still present.
December 1964, unknown fountain pen and ink
The sort of radical change in appearance another pen can make is illustrated in the next sample from only a month later. Yet the writing is essentially the same.
January 1965, Osmiroid 65 with worn nib used upside-down, ? Stephens’s Blue-black
A couple of months later the backward slope had disappeared. Otherwise the handwriting is unchanged.
March 1965, same pen, Quink Royal Blue washable
A hint of a forward slope is detectable by September. By now I was using the deprecated ballpoints; and by now, having opted for sciences rather than the arts, my handwriting was becoming distinctly crabbed and introspective.
September 1965
A year later it had become even more crabbed, and the majority of the gs were formed figure-of-eight style. First, a specimen written with an unknown fountain pen:
And then an extract from a chemistry account book:
August/September 1966
By January 1967 the introspection had grown even worse. Why my masters at school didn’t complain I cannot say. At least the forward slope had become more pronounced.
January 1967
It is more pronounced still, and less crabbed, in this sample from the following March.
March 1967
On my 17th birthday in April I was given a Parker 45 fountain pen with a medium nib. Its fluidity and the need to form larger letters had an immediate effect. The influence of my late birding friend I. G. Johnson, some fifteen or twenty years my senior, is also visible: he had a particularly elegant hand.
April 1967, Parker 45; Quink Royal Blue washable
The academic work involved in science A-levels is pretty gruelling, and involved me in much writing from September 1966 to June 1968; we were issued with filepaper by the ream, and I kept thick lever-arch files crammed with my notes (all lost now). By the end of the first academic year my writing had become more functional than anything else.
July 1967, ditto
An October specimen, written with a Parker Flighter ballpen:
October 1967
Little had changed by April 1968.
April 1968
Three months later the germ of my adult handwriting became visible.
July 1968; Parker 45, home-mixed ink
Annoyingly, I have nothing left from my time at university, September 1968 – June 1971, though by 1973 my handwriting had scarcely changed at all.
September 1973; same pen, Quink Permanent Black
By 1975 it had become more adult and free-flowing.
October 1975; ditto
By 1977, aged 26, it had almost matured.
March 1977; ditto
The following three samples illustrate the way my handwriting has finally shed all trace of anything but my own personality.
February 1982; ditto
January 2000; ditto
November 2011; Parker Jotter, generic ink
This is the way my writing looked until about 2020. Recently however, my handwriting has become less legible: I have acquired the dreaded ‘deathgrip’, in which one inadvertently grips one’s pen or pencil too tightly. I was taught the standard tripod grip (holding the pen with the thumb and first two fingers), and now when I take up a pen I want to exert so much pressure that my forefinger curves inward. Of course this makes writing uncomfortable and quickly causes cramping.
Writing by hand is achieved by a fusion of conscious thought and muscle memory. Conscious thought determines what is to be written and the unconscious informs the muscles how it should be written. Lack of practice in writing by hand – such as is commonplace these days, the use of keyboards being so prevalent – erodes this fusion. The result is that the conscious mind tries to make good the loss of muscle memory by exerting the control that ought to be unconscious.
I find that the only effective cure for this is to retrain oneself with exercises. Making a conscious effort to maintain a relaxed grip, one simply practises making loops, zigzags, or any other pattern; as soon as one feels one’s grip tightening, the thing to do is to relax it. Once a degree of relaxation has been achieved, one can form words, repeating the same phrases over and over again, all the while being aware of the grip.
It helps to use a fountain pen, since almost no pressure is required to make the line: that is why my teachers abominated ballpoints. A wet-running rollerball will do as well. To help in my practice I bought a Lamy Safari fountain pen here, which has a chamfered section (i.e. the part you hold), and after only a week or two I am pleased to say that my writing has already improved.
I rather regret my early adoption of typing; there was an Olivetti portable in the family and by the age of 15 I was using it quite a bit, having been schooled even earlier on a full-sized, long-carriage Imperial. In 1972 I bought an Adler Gabriele and used it until I got my first computer in 1984.
Writing on a computer is very different from writing with a typewriter, which in turn is even more different from writing by hand. When you write by hand you are much more involved and thoughtful, partly because you do not want to make a mistake, but also because there is something intrinsically personal and intimate about the process of making marks on paper. In modern jargon, writing by hand is ‘mindful’.
A typewriter is less intimate, but still there is a reluctance to make an error – especially when nearing the end of a page. Consequently one thinks hard about what is to be typed; I developed a habit, continued to this day, of rehearsing sentences on a scratchpad before committing them to the typed page.
The advantages of word-processing are so manifest that nearly every writer has succumbed to them, but in so doing one loses altogether the intimacy and particularly the care that are part of writing by hand. It is so easy to correct a mistake or transpose text that one becomes almost negligent. This is especially disastrous for writers like me who begin at the beginning and try to get one chapter right before tackling the next.
Whether I shall ever write a book by hand I cannot say, though it is unlikely. But it is something I’d like to try, and I may even dig out that Osmiroid 65 (whose rubber ink-sac is miraculously intact and for which I long ago bought a new nib) and give it a go. But before that I may have to acquire the Palmer Method, which is another skill altogether: though arm-writing explains how Trollope or Proust were able to sit at a desk and write all day.
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