Cacography

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Although writing is an ancient invention, the Western tradition of personalised handwriting is essentially another product of the Renaissance's implicit agenda of subversive individualism.  Before that time, the main writing establishments, the medieval scriptoria, allowed no latitude in letter forms: to learn how to write meant to learn how to reproduce exactly the local variant of the uncial script, for example.  Variations were errors, not expressions of personality.  For this reason palaeographers typically talk of schools of writing, centred around a particular monastery, rather than of scribes.

Gradually, as writing became more widespread through an increasingly secularised Europe, the Church's grip on literacy - hitherto one of its jealously-guarded mysteries and sources of power - weakened.  With this centralised orthodoxy gone, personal writing styles began to evolve.

The teaching of writing in present-day schools mirrors this process.  At first, we are shown precisely how to produce each letter: there is a premium on exactitude.  Once the basic shapes have been learnt, though, there is a shift away from studying letters to using them.  Thereafter, provided the handwriting style is reasonably unobtrusive children are judged on what they write, not how they write it.

Through constant practice we can bypass the mental mechanics of writing.  Because the focus is on content not form, the latter evolves almost spontaneously and according to deep personal laws.  Mostly the process is a gradual evolution, but it can change quite dramatically and disjunctively.  One day as I was writing I watched with horror as I formed an 'x' not from a 'c' and its mirror image, placed back to back, but from two straight diagonal lines slashing through each other.  I have never relapsed, and I often wonder what terrible psychic shift occurred then.

The Surrealists were therefore almost correct when they saw in automatic writing - words written without thought - a revelation of the soul's innermost nature, but they erred in regarding what was written as important; in fact, the shapes of the letters tell all.

People's handwriting, considered purely graphologically, seems so revealing in its diversity; the big, brassy letters of the extrovert, the tiny, self-effacing embroidery of the recluse; the extravagant curlicues, the vertiginous slants - both forwards and backwards - the bizarre open dots of 'i's - all seem to be such manifest and true expressions of their writers' personalities.

Frightening, then, those handwritings that seem almost typeset, with effortless and sensuous curves, balanced shapes and a neatness which suggests obsession.  Such calligraphy bespeaks a perfection outside humanity, either angelic, or demonic.  Frightening, too, those hands that look the product of a deranged mind, illegible, ill-formed, spastic in their irregularities, now a series of jagged edges, now meaningless waves.  And doubly frightening for me who writes in just this way, exposing to the world the terrible implications of that blatant cacography.

(1989)

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Forever Eden

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"On Sunday 7th August your teddy can have a go at parachuting on Rusper School field...The guided walk will be 4-5 miles, starting from the Village Hall at 3 p.m., and returning for tea at approximately 5.30 p.m...There will be a coffee morning at Orltons, Rusper, on 11th July, from 10 a.m. till 12 noon.  Proceeds - 75% to St Catherine's Hospice, 25% to Rusper Conservative Association...Wanted urgently! Wool - odd balls or skeins - even old knitted items which can be unpicked - to keep the needles clicking on babies' vests and 6" squares...At the time of writing these notes, we are having quite a dry spell, and if this continues, it is a good time to hoe very diligently..."

Extracts from the July 1988 Parish News of St Mary Magdalene, Rusper.  A characteristic mix of endless tombola, religious propaganda, local politics, gardening, prayer, advertising and homely saws - 'a smile will always increase your face value.'  As English as the village of Rusper itself, with its main road, quiet and winding, and a side street dominated by the Victorian schoolhouse; a couple of ancient pubs, a general store with empty sherry bottles in its bare and dusty window, and venerable houses leaning on each other like old age pensioners; a noticeboard with the times of the daily bus to Horsham, and details of the next meeting of the parish council; an Elizabethan coaching inn - and, of course, the parish church.

Resplendent amidst the bright green grass and lichened graves, the warm stone of the neat and compact building has been meticulously restored, and looks as if it has been dressed and placed only yesterday.  Which it has, except that yesterday here is 700 years ago.  The simple and dignified nave ends in the thickset tower whose earliest arches are narrow and show only the slightest of points.  On the east face there is a clock; on the cover of the Parish News the hands stand at an eternal ten to three.  Inside, faded plaques record the three hours and three minutes taken to ring all the changes on the eight bells in 1903, together with a list of names.  Names of the bellringers, names that somehow always reappear on memorials to those fallen in that Great and most terrible war which shattered the old world of villages like Rusper forever.

Now it is the continual shrieking of the straining jets as they lift off from nearby Gatwick which rends the peace of this idyll.  But Rusper endures, just as the families who lost their sons and husbands and fathers endured.  Rusper and its ilk lie at the quiet and indestructible heart of England.  They populate a land which still has flower shows where the double crust apple pie is "to be displayed on a plate or board and not in a tin or container" if it is to be eligible for the 40p first prize or 20p second prize. A land which is easy to mock for its unfashionable beliefs: "Lady Cox asked for the prayers and support of fellow Christians in her endeavour to enshrine Christian worship and R.E. in our schools."  But it is also a land of fundamentally decent and caring folk - "my sincere and grateful thanks to the many people who wrote to me while I was in hospital.  The friendliness of Rusper people is indeed wonderful."  Wonderful indeed.  As the Reverend Eric Passingham says in his Letter from the Rectory: "The curtains pulled back revealed a touch of Eden."

(1988)

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