The Way Out

Today

The next generation in our family is coming on, thick and fast. Yesterday we met 4-week old Isaac. He's got unusual eyes; they're dark, possibly brown (I was sort of surprised not to see the usual blue) which are very focused. I kept expecting him to give me a proper smile.

His mother was feeling not too well, so we all took our turn to hold him and eventually he fell asleep in my arms for well over an hour. I hope his mum felt recharged.

His name was a subject for discussion before the birth with much playing around with possible names, but I hadn't heard this one suggested before. He still doesn't have a second name - but that's not, after all, mandatory.

"Do you realise", I said to Alice "that the name has a resonance for our family?"

In My Day

Daddy used to describe to us his early life; how, because of his father's drunkenness, he had to scratch a few pennies sweeping horse dung from the streets of London. How his mother scraped to send him to a better school (where he didn't last very long). How he was apprenticed to a book binders as a "glue boy". And, finally, how he spent his spare time at evening classes run, free, by the Society of Friends.

There he avidly learnt all he could: English grammar, Music, French and Pitman's Shorthand, invented by Sir Isaac Pitman.

Using his new skills of English and shorthand he blagged his way into a reporting job which led him to the dizzy heights of being senior reporter at Hansard.

Daddy used to try to teach us shorthand; I think I did learn some and have an idea that Chris became quite good at it. Around the house one sometimes came across spiral-bound notebooks containing pages of squiggles and dots. These were clear to Daddy (although he was sometimes a bit careless over the dots which represented vowels so that he might not be sure whether a word was"if" or "of", "spit" or "spot"), but made me feel illiterate when I looked at them.

I know that Mamma gave Daddy's notebooks, carefully kept, containing the recording of the abdication of Edward viii and the declaration of WW2, to the House of Commons archive.

Later on Daddy also taught shorthand at Pitman's college in Holborn in London. Perhaps understandably, he rather dreaded the introduction of tape recorders and would have been appalled at such things as voice recognition software; he'd have been straight out of a job.

Daddy was a fan of Pitman's shorthand all his life, keeping a bust of Sir Isaac in the house and decrying all other methods as inferior. And why not? Pitman's was his way out of the pit.

Yesterday everyone was admiring Isaac's lovely long fingers and predicting a musical career for him. Who knows? At least he's unlikely to have to claw his way out of the pit.