Feb 29, 2000
Primary education up till the 1960’s was largely concerned with mastery of the pen and ink, and we made some monumental messes. When I first went to school in 1934 (delayed by a year because Coates’ government was trimming government spending), we still used slates when we weren’t writing on blackboards. The slate was a thin flat slab of smooth black rock with parallel lines scored on it. You wrote on it with a thin stick of some softer kind of rock, called a slate pencil, and you could rub it out with a damp cloth and reuse it any number of times. By the time I was in standard I however we had embarked upon the throw away society, and used lead pencils and paper. We were the first of what Vance Packard called the “waste makers”. In standard we were allowed to use pen and ink on special occasions, but we got to use it full time in standard 3. By then I would be about eight.
We wrote with a steel nib dipped in navy blue ink. We were somewhat in advance of Captain Hobson who had to write with the sharpened and split shaft of a goose’s wing feather. (Hence the French word “plume” for a pen). He would have sliced it on an angle with a “penknife”, and split it, and dipped it in black ink probably made from a suspension of soot. Adults in my day still called a pocket knife a penknife. I’ve tried making a pen like that out of a chook’s wing feather, but it is difficult to prevent it making blobs of ink on the page, and although the downstrokes can usually be made to look presentable, the nib often digs into the paper on the upstroke and fires a scatter of ink across the page. When you read Captain Hobson’s diary at the Waitangi Treaty House, be forgiving of the blobs and blots, and give him credit for getting it as neat as he did. It can’t have been easy.
Of course people who wrote regularly like Hobson, learned to avoid most of the pitfalls of their equipment, but for others who wrote little and rarely the result could easily be a page of blots and smudges that were scarcely readable. Like the shearer in Banjo Patterson’s poem, “The answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
And it seems the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar.”
Our pens consisted of a spring steel nib inserted into a little steel socket attached to a wooden handle not unlike a pencil. The ink at school was usually a mixture of dyes made up by “Stephens”, and supplied in a tall square bottle with a little lip on the rim so you could often pour it into the inkwell on your desk without spilling it all over the desk-top.
Sometimes the School Committee would save money by buying powdered ink that could be mixed up with water, but it produced an inferior product with a strange reddish sheen on the surface, and it rusted your nibs. Ink drying on the nib it gradually built up a thick coating that made your writing thicker and blots more frequent, so it was something of an occasion when you got issued with a new nib.
The inkwell was a little porcelain tub that was let into a hole in the top right hand corner of your desk so it couldn’t normally fall over and spill ink everywhere. As an added precaution, and I suppose to discourage the ink from evaporating, the top of the tub was almost enclosed by a dished flange with just a pen-sized hole in the middle of it to admit the nib. Consequently any flies that sought refuge in the inkwell, or got put in there, would have had to walk upside down to escape, which with inky feet they were unable to do. They could of course be impaled on a nib, and rescued that way, and if still alive, could sometimes be induced, while life persisted, to walk over the page of someone else’s
book, leaving an inky trace, which with any luck would bring down the teacher’s wrath on the owner of the book. Learning to keep ink under control must have been a major part of the skills training we got in those times. I wonder how they manage to occupy the equivalent amount of time today.
Ink was so important that in some schools only the right hand could be used for writing in ink. This caused psychological problems in several generations of left-handed kids, but there was a certain amount of justification for it. Writing in ink with the left hand meant your hand smudged the wet ink of each word as you wrote the next one, unless you dried each word with blotting paper as you went along, or wrote from above the line, as many left-handed kids taught themselves to do when the rule was relaxed. One left-handed lady I knew, still in her adult life wrote with her right hand when using ink, and with her left when using a pencil. Left-handedness was permissible at her school only for informal work. Her handwriting in ink was so bad that she wrote all her letters and such in print script, using her left hand. Print had also been regarded as informal.
So because of the difficulty of handling ink, we avoided it for the first two or three years at school. That way we not only avoided a lot of mess, but could also rub out errors. Ink was not only messy. It was also permanent. However, in the real world, for which we were being prepared, all serious things, letters, cheques, accounts had to be written in ink, so at whatever cost, we had to learn to master it. Some never did. Inky Payne, for example seemed to have a natural affinity for ink, such that he always had it on his hands and face, and even on his legs. His books were decorated on every page with inky fingerprints among the smudges and blots. When we went to High School we were allowed to use red ink as well as blue, for underlining and such, and Inky then appeared in two colours like some bizarre attempt at battle fatigues.
Ink could be used for purposes other than writing. Flies or bits of paper dipped in ink and impaled on a nib could be used as a missile, by flicking the pen somewhat after the manner of a Roman catapult. A direct hit on person or property had the advantage of leaving indelible evidence of success. Of course retribution was swift and severe if you were caught. Ink was for serious!
Likewise if you removed the inkwell from its hole and inverted it smartly on the top of someone’s desk, it usually made a sufficiently neat seal so that the ink would not run out until the unfortunate owner of the desk tried to lift it to put it back. At that point the ink would run everywhere, but by then you were well away.
At secondary school we were generally expected to have graduated to a fountain pen, but the ones we could afford were unreliable affairs, and would sometimes discharge their contents on a whim, leaving an unsightly blot on your page, or an indelible stain on the pocket of your jacket.
Strangely enough, ball point pens, when they finally arrived, were not welcomed as one might expect. This was partly that the early ones were also rather leaky, and left little globs of ink at intervals along the line of travel. Furthermore they used thick oily ink, so that you could transfer an impression of it to another page by pressing your hand on a freshly written word or signature. So for a year or two the banks tried to refuse cheques that were written in ball point. Vain hope! And of course they leaked in your pocket on hot days or at high altitudes, every bit as well as the fountain pens.
And yet I often sigh for the good old days.