Typing

by Hilary Jocelyn

I hve no clue hw tto type.

Well to be fair, my typing technique has definitely  improved over the years. After  lots of practice. I am now able to manage to get the sentences I am looking for down on the page. More or less. With lots of blood, sweat and tears along the way of course, and  with a few swear words thrown in for good measure. But the process is usually painfully slow, and multiple red lines continually  appear under my spewed out typewritten words .Thank you  technology for creating something called spell check and autocorrect.

I sit, and as I look out of the window, I reflect on my typing journey, which began probably when I was  in high school all those years ago, when I had to make a very important decision. I had to chose whether to take Secretarial Studies, a Domestic Science class, or instead to do something called ‘Community Service’. I had no desire to be a so-called ‘secretary’ which back in the day usually meant doing what one was told  to do by a man boss- who may or may not be a sympathetic soul. I was not very good at doing what I was told at the best of times, so I opted out of the secretarial studies bit. Plus, learning to type seemed to be a bit  on the  boring side to a rebellious teen who had trouble sitting still.

As for Domestic Science… Well, that was a no brainer, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want to be like my mother, who after a gruelling day at work, was unwillingly glued to the kitchen sink, so she could plate a decent meal for her growing family each evening .Besides, I had already learned to make a darned good non- lumpy  bechamel sauce and a mean apple crumble during my short time as a Girl Guide. Which I only joined, by the way, because I had my pubescent eye on one the Boy Scouts that met in the room next door. What more domesticity  did I need to learn? How to darn a sock? How to hem a dress? How to dutifully  iron a man’s shirt properly? No thanks!

So, off I went to do community service, loving  the opportunity it gave me to escape school, and visit isolated seniors in a nursing home nearby, who were full of elder wisdom, and beguiling stories of their past lives. I learned a lot during those tender days, and in fact it set me on a career path that has brought me much satisfaction and deep meaning- crossing paths with a huge diversity of people who I have been able to learn from, to care about, and to stand beside. Tears. Joy. Frustration. And many vibrating heart strings .  

But I digress, as usual, from my typing story, so let’s get back on track. I invite you to  close your eyes for a moment and to imagine a young naïve woman sitting in a derelict shed, looking out of a glass deprived  window frame. She is facing a huge ancient  typewriter that sits on a wobbly old school desk. She has just been assigned to carry out an enormous brain- daunting task, that she knows no one else in the vicinity will be able to do. Her fingers are seized up and she is  trembling at the mere  prospect of what she is expected  to accomplish. If it makes it any easier, I’ll  set the scene for you, so you get a better picture of what I am talking about…

A few weeks earlier I  had arrived in a small village in northern India, where I had nailed an amazing opportunity to be  a well-meaning volunteer. My plan  was to spend a year in a local  Community Development Project and learn about another culture, another way of life, and see how people in a very different part of the earth lived their day to day lives. The village was poor, with no electricity or running water, and was in a remote area, far away from western influences, faces, or communication with the rest of the world. I had  initially been paired with another bright young and  eager soul, but after a few weeks she had to leave due to overwhelming struggles with her mental well being. So, I had to face my many challenges alone.

My  official job was to help two of the village women to start a day care, but when I got there, I discovered that  there was no funding, no premises, no resources or materials, no money to pay the village women, and as a result, no day care. My grim-faced  somewhat local boss realised that this dream  project of his needed more financing. No one else in the village was able to read or write in  English, which was the language needed back then, for typing any much-needed funding applications. And so, who better to give this task to  than me- the unaccomplished and inexperienced young volunteer ?

And so  it was that I was assigned my shiny new job description, and was handed a list of the  charitable organizations that my boss wanted me to write these grant applications for. I took one look at the list and gulped into my morning chai. Oxfam. Save the Children Fund, UNICEF .To name but a few.

What I didn’t dare to  tell my boss was that I had no idea how to type. Gulp. Cringe. Panic .

I breathed deeply and tried to reassure myself that I would manage something, somehow. I sought some comfort from my motivation to help the children in the village, who I had already come to know and to care for. Feeling cautiously  brave, and slightly  ready to take on a new challenge, I followed his directions to a tumbledown shed that sat just  behind his mud walled house. I  opened the heavy door and immediately saw the prized machine sitting, gleaming at me from its rickety desk. To be frank, I wasn’t at all sure if we had the potential to be friends, or even neutral acquaintances, but I resolved at least to try to develop some kind of relationship with this large grey shiny box.

I sat down on the wobbly chair and took out my shaking hands. Again, I wished heartily that I had learned to caress the keys of a typewriter back in my teens. Up above  my head several gently cooing pigeons were perched like spectators at a hockey match, and I could sense their humour as they huddled closer to watch what was about to unfold beneath them. 

I had no idea how to set the margins or even how to make a capital letter, so typing the first sentence took me until lunchtime. Our paper supply was very limited, so I began by exploring the basics on old newspaper just to get started, before graduating to our  precious pristine paper. I discovered quickly that the keys F and C were not working, so the first letter was addressed to “Ox’am,” the second to “Save The ‘hildren’s ‘Und” , and the third to “Uni’e’.” After more finger exploration, I found out how to leave a space between letters and so decided that later I would fill in the missing letters by pen. If I could find one that worked.

So off I set, painstakingly, composing one hesitant letter at a time, outlining what I thought the village development project was all about, and what I believed the aid agencies would want to hear. I made lots of typing mistakes, and still hadn’t grasped the margins idea, so the letters were not exactly the well-ordered scripts that I had hoped for. I wished heartily that  I had white-out, so I could clean up some of my errors, but no such luck.Until suddenly I had a unique and original idea.

Remember those friendly neighbourhood pigeons? By this time, they  had got to know me, and their narrative had changed. Instead of laughing at my struggles, I could now hear them cooing at me sympathetically. Every now and again, being the avians that they were, a cluster of white would descend from one of their rear ends, and land somewhere close to where I was sitting. On impulse, after a long struggle with the correct  typing of  the word  ‘Amarpurkashi’ (which was the  name of the village I was living in) I reached out to a fresh donation of their white bird droppings. Using the tip of my finger, I rubbed a bit on to a piece of newspaper. The black newsprint faded dramatically under this layer of white fecal matter, and hey presto, I had invented a new and entirely biodegradable white- out that I could use freely to blot out my many mistakes. And yes, don’t worry, I did wash my hands after!

Eventually, after many hours of daily struggle, I  finally managed to  produce a few barely adequate pages. I showed them to my boss, fearing his fierce disapproval, but he appeared to be somewhat satisfied with my scrawl of  typed sentences. He didn’t seem to notice the smears of pigeon shit that did their very best to erase my many many mistakes. He took the precious pages from me, signed them with his name, and gave them carefully to the man in the village who collected the mail.

A few weeks later he commanded me to come to his office, on a stiflingly hot afternoon. He sat, perspiring in his pristine white shirt, beaming at me for probably what was the first, and definitely the last, time. He handed me the open letter he was grasping in his hand. It was from Save the Children’s Fund. To my incredulous disbelief, one of my funding applications had been granted, and a generous check was enclosed, along with an invitation for two village women to attend an all -expenses -paid, few days of training in a nearby town. Yes! The daycare was finally about to take off!

My typng has improed somwhat ovr the decades, but as you see, significant  challenges still present themselves to me as I try to  press the right keys. Thank you, typewriter, for your patience back then. And thanks to all the modern conveniences of my present day laptop.

And even more importantly, a big thank you to the pigeons.

by Hilary Jocelyn