Month: July 2019

Last week I put my writing on the back burner and met a couple of friends for lunch.  I don’t usually do this – it felt a bit like bunking off school – but it was the only dates they could do.  And sometimes it’s good to break from routine.

One of my meets was with an old work friend. We met in Bradford on Avon for a light lunch at the double award winning Bridge Tea Rooms near the town bridge. The building dates back to 1502, which means small doorways, low ceilings and beams – not forgetting a couple of well worn steps you need to negotiate as you enter the building.
The tea room has a Victorian theme with waitresses dressed in black with white aprons and caps. The food is excellent with a wide range of options from breakfast through to lunch and afternoon tea.

I have a great fondness for Bradford on Avon with its Saxon church, Tithe Barn and lock up on the town bridge (pictured below) where it was reputed John Bunyan spent a night. It was where I spent my senior school years after moving to West Wiltshire. Fitzmaurice Grammar School was a smaller school than Marlborough, where I spent my first year. It was also lot closer to home – two bus rides each way as opposed to a daily 30 mile round trip by train. During my first year at Bradford on Avon our form room was at the rear of the school in a long wooden building known as The Gallipoli hut (shown behind the main building in the picture below), which had been erected in 1920. It housed both second years (year 8 in modern speak), the 5th form cloakroom and the male staff room. These huts were like freezers in the winter and saunas in the summer.  Thankfully, by the time we reached the third year (Year 9) we had moved up to classrooms in the newly-built Physics and Chemistry block.  It was in there that the whole class of 3A fell foul of an American exchange teacher. I think the move from  a US high school in Philadelphia to a small provincial grammar school was a bit of a culture shock for him.  I’m sure this was the reason he appeared to have very little humour and even less patience.  On this particular occasion while we were waiting for him to arrive from the main school building a large black Labrador wandered in.  As two of the class tried unsuccessfully to catch it and put it out, he arrived.  Not at all amused, he wanted to know who had brought the dog into the classroom. When told it had come in by itself he refused to believe us.  He gave ‘the culprit’ the chance to own up and when unsurprisingly no one did the whole class was given detention.

In those days school rules were strict. Any pupil discovered beyond the school gates without their hats or caps were automatically given detention. Eating in the street was another misdemeanour which attracted the dreaded ‘D’. Once a month the headmistress would keep all the female pupils back after assembly. On those occasions we usually had a lecture about short skirts, nail varnish and wearing hair loose below collar length (neither of the last two was allowed). When I see schools turn out today it makes me wonder if she was still around what she would make of 21st century uniform and rules.

Someone else who had her own set of rules was our games mistress.  During winter months the afternoon games period would find her choosing pupils for netball and hockey teams and those left over were sent out with the boys on a cross country run.  No gloves, no scarves but at least we got to keep our jumpers on!  The run was all along the canal to the hamlet of Avoncliffe (picture  right) a couple of miles out of town then back along the road and into school. Remembering occasions when the fog came down really thickly I sometimes look back and wonder whether it ever crossed her mind about the danger of sending young girls out in twos and threes along deserted tow paths (in those days the local canal was full of duck week and fallen trees). On really cold days we got into the habit of setting off only to spend our time in Tithe Barn (left) where there was a certain degree of protection from the elements. We had the whole thing down to a fine art; staying there for the right amount of time and then sneaking across the railway line and back into town,looking suitably breathless as we struggled back to the changing room!

On rainy days our PE lesson was spent learning ballroom dancing. Sometimes the boys were ‘persuaded’ to join us and of course they hated it! It did, however, give us a grounding in the tango, the waltz, the cha-cha and an introduction to Scottish dancing by way of the Gay Gordons and the Dashing White Sergeant.

When I finished my four years at Bradford on Avon I was looking forward to college, a business diploma and the intricacies of the typewriter keyboard. College meant no uniform, a more relaxed regime and being treated like an adult. It was the final step towards the working world. But even now, wandering around the town soaking up the memories and seeing the changes which have taken place, in some ways I really miss those school days. Most of the teachers are, of course, long gone. The school closed in 1980 and transferred to Christchurch Secondary School at the top of the town (a larger  more modern campus with the potential to extend) to become St Lawrence Comprehensive. For several years after the school stood empty and neglected – a sad end for this lovely building.  Nine years after closure it was eventually rescued. The main school was converted into accommodation and several new builds added in the grounds to provide 42 upmarket retirement flats with a new name – Fitzmaurice Place.  A happy ending after all.

As a writer if there’s one thing I’m grateful for it’s the ability to type. Finishing school I enrolled at college for an OND in Business and Finance with secretarial training. The latter was very much involved with unlocking the mysteries of shorthand, audio typing…and typing.
Faced with a typewriter for the first time and looking at the QWERTY keyboard, I was at a loss to understand how anyone could use this machine and produce anything that resembled the written word. But we did and sitting down at a desk and spreading your fingers across what was termed your ‘home keys’ soon became second nature.

We had a formidable woman teaching us – Mrs Cameron Smith. She was built like an Amazon with muscular calves and elegantly arranged pale lilac hair – at the time it was fashionable for ladies of a certain age to camouflage any grey with pastel shades of lilac or blue. Her golden rule was NEVER look at your keys while typing. We learnt on manual typewriters which meant you had to exert quite a bit of pressure to get the keys to make any impact against the platen and the paper. It soon made us aware of how weak our small fingers were but after a while they became as strong and flexible as the rest.

At the beginning of each lesson (once we were fairly proficient) we warmed up by typing to music, usually to The March of the Tin Soldiers – something that still haunts me. This was followed by a speed test – five minutes of copy typing from a printed sheet of Quarto old-speak for a piece of paper slightly smaller than A4). While this was going on Mrs C-S would wander up and down the aisles between desks with eyes like a hawk and a twelve inch ruler lurking behind her back. Woe betide anyone who so much as glimpsed at their fingers. Luckily I was never the recipient of the flat of a ruler over my knuckles (something that in today’s world would surely have been labelled assault). Persistent offenders had the addition of having a special box placed over the keyboard to cure them of their illegal downward stare. They were instructed to use a huge poster of a typewriter keyboard on the wall at the front of the room to guide their fingers.

After leaving college I had only been working for a short while when the electric typewriter arrived. This was a total revolution! At last we were all able to say goodbye to aching fingers. Everyone coveted – and I was lucky enough to have – a red IBM Golf Ball typewriter and at the start it took some getting used to. No more keys leaping out of the type basket to make their impact on paper; this circular metal ball covered in letters simply whizzed up and down. There were downsides of course. It wasn’t a good idea to rest your fingers on the keyboard at any time as the slightest pressure on any one key would automatically set it off like a machine gun, leaving a trail of gibberish across whatever you were in the middle of typing.  Olivetti also produced an electric daisy wheel typewriter. The beauty of this machine was that you could buy replacement wheels with different typefaces making it a very versatile piece of equipment. Today, of course, the computer leaves us spoiled for choice with innumerable typeface options, so different from those dark days!

Things settled down for a while and then the electronic typewriter arrived. I guess this was the forerunner of word processing as the one I used had a small window built into the front to enable text to be edited – very cutting edge at the time. By the late ‘80’s early ‘90’s computers/word processors were beginning to become norm in the provincial workplace (no doubt London and other big cities had had them for some time). My first session on a word processor was surreal. In the past typing had been about movement and noise. Now here I was, sitting in front of a strange detached keyboard. When my fingers hit keys there was a gentle tapping sound but nothing felt as if it had connected with anything else. It was only when I raised my eyes to the screen in front of me that I saw words appearing as if by magic. It was probably as weird an experience as the progression from manual to electric typewriter.

In early desktop computers  WP packages were almost an afterthought and in some instances not very user friendly. Therefore I opted for a dedicated word processor instead, using the computer for spreadsheets and databases. Suddenly it seemed you no longer needed to be able to type to use a computer. Of course it completely transformed how things were done in the workplace. A manager doing his own typing? Shock, horror! That would have been unheard of during my early years at work. Then it was all about dictation and audio tapes and getting the secretary to type it all up.  It took a little time to adjust to typing on a computer keyboard but I got there and soon worked up to my 80+ words per minute. There is only one problem I have and that is as a touch typist I find it very difficult to build up any speed on a ‘flat’ laptop keyboard. That is why, I guess, I prefer my desktop.

Although the workplace has radically changed,  I’m glad I went through the fire and brimstone of Mrs Cameron Smith’s teaching sessions. It wasn’t wasted because if I hadn’t learned the skill I’d be reduced to two finger typing while typing my manuscript and working at a snail’s pace. As far as I’m concerned touch typing is definitely an added bonus if you’re a writer. So here’s to the unforgettable Mrs Cameron Smith with her lilac rinse, athletic calves and menacing ruler. I’m forever in her debt.