Tools of the Trade

Pencils

My mother always kept a Copperplate pencil on top of the penny-box by the phone in the kitchen. The pencil was perennially, unalterably, essentially, transubstantiatedly blunt. The only paper we had to hand were the rectangular, bent, sweet, waxy, recursively-scented liners from Palmolive  soap. (Those dark brown, oval, translucent bars of glycerine, Pears  soap, didn't have paper liners. The white wrapping was all there was. Pears  was special; Pears was the soap you couldn't get during the War.)

The waxy side of a Palmolive soap liner was impervious to the very blunt pencil; the other side was not. I did preschool doodles. My mother wrote grocery lists.

The first thing I wrote with at school was a stone stick. I wrote on a slate. We wiped the slate clean with a damp rag, waited for the surface to dry, and began again. I don't think I did this very long; my memories of this are soft and fleeting. My next firm memory is of one of the pencils my father brought home from work – another blunt point, but the lead was a kind of redbrown brick. He brought a small pad of oddly-lined paper, too. I took it to school and used the pad and the pencil to learn addition, and also to learn that the page wasn't used up when I'd drawn a very small circle enclosing a cross in the top right-hand corner. I didn't want to go back to those pages, but did; filled them with arithmetic. 2+2=4. 

Blunt. Brick. (Shouldn't be. The lines on the pad too dark, too close together blunt, shouldn't be,  looming tall black shape, looming, smelling of a different kind of breakfast, yelling.)

What did we do yesterday?

That was when I began lodging knowledge in the corners of the classroom where the ceiling met the walls, finding it there the next day in my panic, in the pressure of the questions, using it to ward off the horror that followed failure to answer. What did we do yesterday? – Two and two are four. – What are two and two? – Four!

Great pencil-makers of the 1950s... Australia: Copperplate; Germany: Staedtler; England: Derwent. (Oh those tiered rows – 72 colour-graduated Derwent pencils, how they promised to reproduce reality,  make it something you could take with you in your pocket and have - How I wanted one of those boxes. How vastly it would have been wasted on someone who still can't draw…) My cousin mentioned recently that you couldn't reproduce a South Australian sky with Derwent colours. (Oh... Of course. They match the English landscape.)

Staedtler pencils had a profile of a Spartan soldier in a helmet near the top of the shaft. They seemed very stately. Copperplate pencils were pointed; the pointed end was painted black, separated from the thinner red paint on the shaft by a thin white stripe. The pencils were hexagonal; comforting to run along your lips in moments of happy inattention, chunky and satisfying when chewing your pencil was all the protest you could make.

Pens

We began to use ink in grade 3, and ink meant ink in bottles and pens with separate, curved, replaceable nibs – wooden or plastic nib-holder, steel nib – and you could get them at places like the local greengrocer, along with sheets of glittery pictures to stick into scrapbooks with glue made from flour and water –

Great varieties of nibs, fine, medium, broad – nothing as broad as an broad American calligraphic nib, nothing like; it was the kind of nib a bank-clerk would have used during the Boer War, that kind of pen-holder, also. Dipping the nib, draining it against the side of the bottle, achieving the balance (too much ink vs. having to re-dip too few letters later)…

The pale aqua pen-holder that eventually got chewed so much that its point broke off – oh, how miserable it was, how unlovable, the shaft with the Mt St Helens-sized shear, and the balance fatally affected –

My father's pen, mid-brown wooden with the dark Quink-coloured ink-stain. I think it must have hailed from the early 40s, if not his night-classes in the late 30s –

Mapping-pens from Sands and MacDougall, Stationers, of King William Street, tiny, between a 10^th and a 16^th of an inch across, intimidating because Indian ink is indelible –

And the rest of the stationary store: concentrated cordial-colours of protractors and set-squares looked at edge-on; the slightly repellent light from the cheap and stiff and difficult brass compasses; the oddness of the slightly marbled plastic Australias – sometimes the same colours that laminex came in (one long wandering slit for the Murray-Darling, complete absence of other holes signifying sizeable bodies of water, the borders long, slotted lines); the unstable, toppling plastic Britains with their slotted borders, nearly snapping at Scotland –

Ink

At home we used Skrip – a mid-royal blue; the bottle had a small well built into the side of the neck. You tipped the whole bottle upside down (with the cap on) and the well would fill. You used that for dipping the nib – it kept you from dipping into the bottle itself and getting ink above the metal section that held the nib (and making your pen look horrible). My father was a chartered accountant. His books were perfect: pale, marble-edged folio-sized pages, columns of copperplate words and figures in Skrip mid-blue.

As you opened the bottle the slightly sharp smell, the deep and vivid liquid, the clear glass containments, the sense of great possibility –

The main ink favoured by the girls at school was Quink, a darker, greeney-blue ink make by the Parker company, which also made fountain-pens. Among the girls in grades 6 & 7 the trick was to add water to the ink to make it paler. The palest ink didn't necessarily win – ink could, unbelievably, be too pale.

The worst thing you could do was use the school ink – greeney-black gunk, made at the beginning of the term out behind the tuck shop, older boys using funnels and odd rubber tubing and clear glass demijons, the green component standing thin and separate on the glass above the dark mass of the black and more sedimentary sludge –

At mysteriously-determined moments the designated boys poured it – demijons from the sliding-door cupboards at the back of the room - into the black inkwells built into every desk. The inkwells were plastic, got stuffed with blotting-paper, got filthy. I think cleaning them – at the end of the term – was somebody's punishment.

Ink at highschool became Skrip in the fountain-pen (Platignum, dark goldey-black leopard-coloured stripes), replaced in Leaving by the Bic – Australian for ballpoint – you could write faster with them and you had to write fast in those hot, sweaty, mind-blank exams, 1, 2, or 3 hours, invigilated in a sandstone hall in the city.

Latin in 2^nd Yr, 1963. Hot afternoons, your head nearly level with the desk while you wrote with your fountain-pen, slight smell of wet ink, hot bright green leaves through the window, and the inkstain working its way into the callous on the knuckle near the fingernail on your third finger, the callous that went away only after you stopped writing all day every day. After Uni.