HANDWRITING

Valerie Grove

In The Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl (Chatto, £10.99, Oldie price £6.54), the diarist is the novelist and biographer Margaret Forster at sixteen, a swottish pupil at Carlisle High School. The book’s winning formula features facsimile pages of her round schoolgirl hand, punctuated with gleeful exclamation marks about her exam results: ‘Latin 55%, thrilled!’ and ‘History, top – 85%, smashing!’

Forster was one of the last writers to carry on writing only in longhand with her school fountain pen (a Waterman) to the end of her days, sixteen novels and many biographies later. At its best, the calligraphic art is always more interesting than faceless typing. Confronted by a beautiful notebook – from Il Pavone in Venice, for instance – most of us can hardly bear to profane the pristine pages, unless armed with a fine pen and a mastery of italic script. Prompted by Forster’s diary, I have been savouring other examples of calligraphy in facsimile.

Edward Marsh’s Little Book is the most famous: it began as a sixpenny notebook given him at Christmas 1911 by Lady Diana Manners, who painted a galleon on the cover. ‘No present that he ever received was to afford him greater long-term pleasure and satisfaction,’ wrote Lady Diana’s son, John Julius Norwich.

For the next 35 years, Marsh (Winston Churchill’s secretary) immortalised his notebook by inviting his many poet friends to inscribe a poem apiece. Rupert Brooke, object of Marsh’s infatuation, naturally obliged. So did Thomas Hardy, with ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’, inserting an improvement in the penultimate line. Robert Bridges recoiled at using the cheap notebook and wrote on a piece of vellum, to be pasted in. Yeats, Chesterton, Housman, Flecker, Kipling, DH Lawrence, TE Lawrence all took part. Max Beerbohm sent a joke, parodying Galsworthy’s pious entry.

That notebook, rebound in leather, eventually fetched up in the custody of Eton’s librarian, Michael Meredith. Martin Charteris, then Provost of Eton, was also a nephew of Lady Diana. He got his aunt, at the age of 91, to add a postscript to ‘dear, dead Eddie...’ on the last page, in her spidery hand. And in 1990 the book was reprinted in a facsimile edition of six hundred, with design by Humphrey Stone. The precious boxed sets are still to be found from dealers (at £250 or so).

Another holographic creation, inspired by Siegfried Sassoon’s compilation for the eightieth birthday of Thomas Hardy in 1920, was compiled on the fiftieth birthday of the poet Anthony Thwaite, ‘a loving gesture’ by his wife Ann. Fifty of Anthony’s contemporaries responded with autograph poems. The ‘unchilded and unwifed’ Philip Larkin sent his gloomy ‘The View’: ‘Where has it gone, this lifetime?/ Search me. What’s left is drear.’ To Larkin, Kingsley Amis confided that he thought Ann’s request ‘SODDING

‘Forster was one of the last writers to carry on writing only in longhand with her school fountain pen (a Waterman) to the end of her days’

CHEEK’. To Ann he wrote more kindly, but couldn’t resist adding: ‘Needless to say, nobody did anything like that for MY 50th.’

But ‘for clear-eyed Anthony’, Seamus Heaney transcribed his ‘North’ and Ted Hughes ‘The Kingfisher’. Peter Porter versified a memorable trip with Thwaite from Milan to Rome. Clive James opened with an Aristophanes couplet and covered three pages in his favourite metre. Alan Brownjohn’s brilliant ‘Palindrome’ summed up the discontent each generation feels for its own era. Betjeman’s hand was trembly with Parkinson’s, but others from Roy Fuller to Hugo Williams displayed a fine italic hand. A facsimile followed, alas for private circulation only.

Friendships, the architectural historian Mark Girouard’s latest book from Wilmington Square (£16.99, Oldie price £11.65), features facsimiles of letters to him from thirty dead friends. The first is from a master at his prep-school, Avisford, named Mr Trappes. A significant figure because, when Girouard’s mother saw him off to school on a train from Kings Cross in 1940, it was their last encounter: she was killed in a car crash a week later. So Mr Trappes befriended young Mark, and introduced him to literature.

In such books one dips, seeking mutual friends. The unforgettable Mariga Guinness typically invites Mark to take over her castle, Leixlip, while she is in India, and to invite whom he likes; Jeremy Sandford urges Mark to bring ‘the heavenly Dunn girl’ to a dance – Nell Dunn, later Mrs Sandford. Girouard’s friends are self-selected for one vital distinction: ‘We laughed at the same things.’ I enjoyed making their fleeting acquaintance. Perhaps I just enjoy reading letters, handwritten. As a biographer, I would, wouldn’t I?

‘Pity the biographers of the future; pity their readers,’ wrote Claudia Fitzherbert in the Literary Review in 2007. Ariane Bankes said the same in the Spectator recently: ‘What will we do when there are no longer caches of letters to piece together and decipher; only vague memories of myriad emails?’