The Point Is To Be Good-to Be

What A Grand, Higgledy-piggledy, Sensible Old Place Norwich Is!

There Is Romance, The Genuine Glinting Stuff, In Typewriters, And Not Merely In Their Development From Clumsy Giants Into Agile Dwarfs, But In The History Of Their Manufacture, Which Is Filled With Raids, Battles, Lonely Pioneers, Great Gambles, Hope, Fear, Despair, Triumph. If Some Of Our Novels Could Be Written By The Typewriters Instead Of On Them, How Much Better They Would Be.

It Is Good Fiction, So Largely Ignored Now, That Brings Us So Much Closer To The Real Facts.

It Had The Old Double Keyboard, An Entirely Different Set Of Keys For Capitals And Figures, So That The Paper Seemed A Long Way Off, And The Machine Was As Big And Solid As A Battle Cruiser. Typing Was Then A Muscular Activity. You Could Ache After It. If You Were Not Familiar With Those Vast Keyboards, Your Hand Wandered Over Them Like A Child Lost In A Wood. The Noise Might Have Been That Of A Shipyard On The Clyde. You Would No More Have Thought Of Carrying One Of Those Grim Structures As You Would Have Thought Of Travelling With A Piano.

The Most Lasting Reputation I Have Is For An Almost Ferocious Aggressiveness, When In Fact I Am Amiable, Indulgent, Affectionate, Shy And Rather Timid At Heart.