My fingers were the quickest off the keys at precisely 11.20 and 53 seconds, GMT, on Sunday 25 October. Bid submitted and confirmed. I was the highest bidder. It gave me a short sharp thrill of victory. I might have whooped.
Did you win it? My son asked, busying himself with the Lego.
Yes.
Yay! He said with acquisitive gusto.
My grandmother was a shorthand typist. It was a means to an end, an independent income that would free her from patriarchal dependence. But it was more than that. It was a means of expression. Over the seventy odd years during which she typed, she produced thousands of pages of typescript that are now in my possession, most of which go over the ground that nurtured her conviction; the curious intimacy she believed she shared with the economist John Maynard Keynes.
What hasn’t remained, more bafflingly, is the typewriter. My parents have no memory of it. My uncle, who would have known, died a few years ago.
I know it was a portable Underwood because she refers to it in her diaries from 1920, the time she worked for Keynes. I picture her cycling around Cambridge with it stowed in her pannier. It would have made her feel good, a sleek machine, the latest model, connected to the wider world of work and money. She liked to think of herself as a modern woman, a working woman, able to pay for a room of her own. And it would have thrilled her with its potential as a vehicle for translating her own thoughts and ideas (and emotions) into print. Not dissimilar to keeping a blog on the go.
According to a print ad from the 20s, the portable Underwood was: “light, sturdy, compact, it gives wings to words – enabling anyone to record ideas, clarify thoughts, express affections – to do Underwood Typewriting anywhere”.
The typewriter that I won is a portable Underwood 3. It looks like a model that might have been produced around 1920. It is on its way from Kendall. I am looking forward to ‘doing Underwood Typewriting anywhere’…
Ariadne Birnberg 