Dialogue: Old fashioned joy in stolen elegance

By JOE BENNETT

I stole it, I suppose. Some 20 years ago I found it on a classroom desk in Canada. A child whose name I'll never know had left the thing behind. He never came to claim it. I should have handed it to some authority, but I didn't.

It was a Parker pen, an ink pen fuelled with cartridges and the moment that I tried its nib I knew it was mine.

Ink pens had their schoolboy uses. They could be used to sabotage another's work with blots. If flicked, they cast a spray of dots across the classroom like the blood trail of some murdered aristo.

But as writing instruments the things were fickle. They leaked in pockets, stained your fingers blue. They made left-handed people coil an arm arthritically above the line to keep the ink from smudging.

They snagged on paper, blotted, scratched, ran dry at vital times. Some flowed too freely, some too thin.

They gave us pens at primary school, not cartridge pens or fountain pens but pens with nibs you had to dip in inkwells sited in the corner of the desk beside the groove that held your pencils.

And if I shut my eyes right now, I feel again the cool grey bakelite that formed the handle of the pen. Sweat made it slippery. And I can see the strange device beneath the nib, all fluted like the black gills of a fish.

Such pens were close descendants of the medieval quill, the sort of instrument that monks in cells drew slowly over parchment to make the manuscripts that are as beautiful as anything I know.

I am no monk. I found those pens intractable. But when in later years I got a pen that suited me, the joy was good and durable.

To draw a supple nib along the line was sensuous. The slight resistance could make even handwriting as bulbous and distinction-free as mine look pleasing in the mass.

It satisfied to fill a page with words, words chosen by the mind and sent along the arm to form in shapes that I alone could make, in shapes distinctive as the layout of my face.

It's hard to lie with handwriting. My father's hand looked like the printout from a seismograph, a transverse wavy line whose meaning I could only guess at. It seemed to me the pinnacle of manliness. I've never known a child or woman write like that.

The pen I stole in Canada sat right and snugly in my fingers. It slid across the page with just that necessary hint of friction to slow the writing down to something uniform and legible. It gave a broad but steady flow of ink. It rarely oozed a blot.

It wore a shiny runnel on the inside of my middle finger and kept that runnel stained with ink in perpetuity, stained beyond the powers of even pumice stone. I cherished that pen.

It wrote a thousand school reports. It wrote half a dreadful novel which I've still embarrassingly got. It wrote poetry I fortunately haven't. It wrote letters of affection and apology, devotion and regret. It wrote the words that got the job that brought me to this country.

But then Bill Gates was born and brought the new seductive ease of writing on a screen. The ease of editing. The ease of rearranging. The ease of sending words I wrote to whom they might concern. Like millions around the world I was seduced. Convenience seduced me.

The word-processor earns its ugly name. It's very good for lies. I think of all the CVs I have seen, immaculate in presentation but with all the substance and sincerity of so much cotton wool.

I think of company reports and desktop publishing and job advertisements enmeshed in prose that ought to see the man who wrote them shot.

If documents like these were written by hand, I doubt that they would carry any clout.

My stolen pen has lain in uselessness for maybe 13 years. But then this week, in search of something else, I found it in a drawer and felt it fit as neatly as it ever did into an unchanged hand.

I fed it with a cartridge, squeezed a little for encouragement and instantly the pen performed precisely as it had so many years before.

I bought a pad of better paper and I wrote. What struck me most was silence. Instead of tapping keys and the low insistent hum of the computer's little logic-straitened mind, the only noise I heard was the occasional sweet squeak of nib on paper.

I've used that pen to write these words. And when I've done this sentence and I slip the cap back on, the well-remembered click as it locks into place will be as sweet as yesterday.