The Pen Friend

But so hard to forget

When two similar and unlikely, or at least unexpected, events happen in relatively quick succession they achieve a certain equilibrium, a reciprocity: they are the two sides of an equation, and complement each other, like Yin and Yang. So it was with your first two messages: It’s been a long time, It’s easy to remember. But three? Three is a perfect number, the triangle of the Trinity, but triangles are notoriously tricky in human relationships, and I think again of the little accidental minuet we danced with Tony Lambe when I heard him call you Miranda. Nina. I write your name again this time in order to address you. Your third postcard was postmarked Stroud, Gloucs., a name which meant little to me. I looked it up in the atlas and found it to be a small town on the Welsh border, not far from Bristol, and I wondered what you were doing there. But then I used to wonder what you were doing wherever you were when you were not with me, when you were not in Belfast, away on one of your trips.

Stroud meant nothing to me, but the image on the postcard brought tears of recognition to my eyes. Belfast 1954, the caption on the back reads, John Chillingworth, © BBC Hulton Picture Library. It shows a back street in Belfast. It could be Sevastopol Street, where I spent the first six years of my life before we moved to Ophir Gardens, but it is not. Nevertheless this grey pavement is familiar to me, the corner shop, the lamp-post, the water running down the pavement from a broken gutter. 1954. I would have been five or six. I could be one of these five boys in the foreground, wearing wellington boots, or I could turn a corner and appear in the picture any time soon. A game is in progress, Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians, for the smallest two of the boys are wielding toy guns, drawing in on a third who is hidden from their view by a street corner; a fourth, evidently a passer-by and not part of the game, looks at the fugitive with amusement, and, from the eager expression on the face of the leading gunman, seems to have given the game away; the fifth boy, who might or might not be involved, is looking elsewhere. And I wonder what this little drama, so accidental, so inevitable in outcome because seen in retrospect, might have to say about our relationship.

I turn the card over. It took me a few readings of your brief message before I realised the link between it and your preceding one. But so hard to forget, those were your words, and suddenly I heard Billie Holiday singing, as you must have intended. It was you who introduced me to Billie Holiday.

Your sweet expression, the smile you gave me,The way you looked when we metIt’s easy to remember, but so hard to forgetI hear you whisper, I’ll always love you,I know it’s over and yetIt’s easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

And more than that, I heard her singing my favourite Billie Holiday song, as you must have intended, ‘Gloomy Sunday’. It’s playing on the CD player as I write, and I am hearing it, not now in my study at 41 Ophir Gardens, but in your flat at 70 Eglantine Avenue as I heard it over twenty years ago; for music, like perfume, has the power to abolish intervening time. The flat is more of a maisonette, the two top floors of a big three-storey Victorian house. We’re sitting in what would have been the drawing-room. It’s summer dusk, the curtains of the great bay window have not yet been drawn, and a tree bows and scrapes against the glass in the breeze which rises at dusk when the air grows chill; there’s a bright fire burning in the grate. The only other light is the deepening amethyst of the sky beyond the trees and a dim lamp which shines on the hi-fi system. There’s a gleam on the black undulating disc like silvery moonlight on a black ocean, and Billie’s voice emerges from the speakers the ghost of a beat ahead of the backing, but slowly, skimming above the melancholy horns, dipping and soaring then slowing as she pauses on the last word of a line before letting it go into a temporary silence, and the band comes to the foreground for a second or two, echoing the phrase before last, then fades back behind her.

Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberlessDearest, the shadows I live with are numberlessLittle white flowers will never awaken youNot where the black coach of sorrow has taken youAngels have no thoughts of ever returning youWould they be angry if I thought of joining you?Gloomy Sunday.

And I see the drawing room in its entirety, the big Kazak rug, faded reds and yellowed greens on the black-painted floorboards, the shelves of books, the framed Japanese fans, the Art Deco dressing table. You had another in the bedroom; this one was more of a display unit for your collection of scent bottles. I hadn’t known, when I bought you the L’Air du Temps bottle, that you were a collector, and it pleases me to see its pair of intertwining doves here now, even if perhaps you only brought it out because you knew I was coming. Either way, you had me in mind. On the dressing table you’ve arrayed bottles of cut glass and blown glass and marble-swirl glass and opalescent milk glass and Limoges porcelain and rose quartz and green opaline, square-shouldered bottles and round bottles and cylindrical bottles, bottles with stoppers of ruby glass and silver and guilloche enamel and diamond-faceted glass, stoppers in the shape of lilies and roses and pineapples, bottles shaped like pineapples and translucent pears and apples. Here is an especially beautiful one, with a reverse-painted Japanese scene showing two boys playing hide-and-seek. There are bottles shaped like domes and spires and cupolas, ranged like the buildings of a city reflected in the triptych mirror of the dressing table, glowing and winking in the firelight. Then there are the accessories, the atomizers with beaded bulbs and the hairbrushes with tortoiseshell backs, the enamelled powder compacts. I asked you what drove you to collect these things, and you said, Because they’re beautiful, and as I write these words I think of my own collection.

I open the pen cabinet in my mind’s eye to see the pens like jewels, no two of them alike, the Conway Stewarts in casings of Teal Blue with Green Veins, Blue Cracked Ice, Autumn Leaves, Peacock, Grey Jazz, Candy-stripe Relief, Red Jazz, Blue Jazz, Blue Rock Face, Moss Agate, Pink Moiré, and Salmon Pink with Grey-green Flecks, to name but some.

I have a tray of Pelikans, like German burghers in their uniforms of black tops and trouser-barrels of striped green, brown and blue and grey, and the long Pelikan beak-shaped clip sitting against the black top like a gold tie with an upturned tip. I have a block of Parker Vacumatics in silver blues and greys, and if you stand them on end they look like skyscrapers at night with patterned strips of lit windows. I have a sheaf of Sheaffers and a quiverful of Swans and Blackbirds.

I’m writing this with an Onoto, which I chose because its Tiger’s Eye pattern of iridescent tawny browns and ambers matches the back of a hairbrush on your dressing-table. I got it from Beringer when I was starting off collecting, one of the first pens I bought. Lovely thing, Mr Gabriel, attractive name too, said Beringer, Japanese, wouldn’t you think? But no, English as Brighton rock. Made by Thomas De La Rue and Company, London, best printers in the world, Queen Victoria grants them a licence to print the stamps of the Empire. Immensely wealthy. Literally printed money. Banknotes, run your fingers over them, you can feel the engraving. Made diaries, too, stationery, playing cards, that kind of thing. It’s 1905, they decide to make pens. Fountain pens a new-fangled thing, expanding market. Logical step. So they look around for a new angle, most fountain pens were what they call eyedroppers, you had to unscrew them and fill them with an eyedropper. Messy business. So they get hold of this inventor chap, George Sweetser, comes up with a patent for a plunger mechanism, piston if you like, steam engine technology — here, I’ll show you — and Beringer showed me how to unscrew the blind cap on the end of the barrel and pull out the plunger. Funny thing is, said Beringer, you push it in, it fills on the downstroke, not what you’d expect. Vacuum system, ingenious. Opposite of a syringe. And of course you use ink instead of blood. You won’t be going signing your name in blood, Mr Gabriel? Funny thing about Sweetser, too, he was a roller-skating champion, did a music-hall act dressed up as a woman. If you made it up people wouldn’t believe you. Anyway, 1905, they buy Sweetser’s plunger pen. The same year, Battle of Tsushima, Admiral Togo blows the Russian fleet out of the water. End of Russo-Japanese War. So De La Rue thinks, fair play, better keep in with the Land of the Rising Sun, British interests in the Pacific, don’t you know. So they call the pen Onoto, Japanese ring to it. They have a sun logo on some of their pens, not this one. Here’s a thing — he rummaged under the counter — novel by Onoto Watanna, real name Winnifred Eaton, English father, Chinese mother, born in Canada. Dresses herself up in kimonos, does the whole Japanese thing, Americans think she is Japanese. He proffered me the book. The Heart of Hyacinth, he said,1903, not that rare mind you, they printed a couple of hundred thousand, and not great literature, to tell you the truth, but a big hit in its day, and a nice genre piece. Lovely illustrations, I’ll tell you what, I’ll throw it in with the pen. Two Onotos for the price of one. Oh yes, said Beringer, the pen’s a 1948 model. Year that you were born, if my memory serves me right. It does, I said.

So here I am in Eglantine Avenue in 1982, the 1950 Lalique bottle with the intertwining doves is on your drawing-room dressing table, and the hi-fi is playing ‘Gloomy Sunday’. They called it ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’, you said. Two Hungarians wrote the original, Rezso Seress the music, Laszlo Javor the lyrics, in, oh, 1933. The story goes that after it came out there was a spate of suicides among young lovers in Hungary. They’d find them dead in their apartment or whatever, empty syringe beside them, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ on the record player. Or the neighbours hear gunshots and when they burst in the record is still playing. Or the lovers leave a suicide note with ‘Gloomy Sunday’ written on it, nothing else. Well, it’s the Depression after all, and Hungary’s got the highest rate of suicide in the world, the song is in the air, so maybe there’s some truth in the story. Then an English version came out in the States, about 1936, and the same thing began to happen, so they say, lovers killing themselves all over the place. They say they banned it from the airwaves, the BBC banned it, but no one seems to have been able to come up with any hard evidence. They say this, they say that. Maybe the whole thing’s an urban myth. All we can be sure of, Seress jumped to his death from his apartment block in 1968. That’s, what, thirty-five years later, very delayed reaction, I would have said. As you spoke, I thought of Andy Warhol’s images of suicides, one in particular where the victim looks asleep amid the sculpted marble drapery of a baroque tomb; but when we look closer, we find her bed is the crumpled metal sheet of the car roof she has landed on. Yet she seems to have found some repose and grace, as if Divine mercy has been shown.

Soon there’ll be candles and prayers that are sad, I knowLet them not weep, let them know that I’m glad to go …

Funny thing is, you went on, the English lyrics are nothing like the Hungarian. Not that my Hungarian is up to much, but I came across a translation once, oh, something like, it is autumn and the leaves are falling, all love has died on earth, people are heartless and wicked, there are dead people on the streets everywhere, that kind of thing. Billie’s version came out in 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor. Not the happiest of times, in any event. And they say that Billie’s third verse was an afterthought, a kind of palliative to lighten the gloom of the first two.

Dreaming, I was only dreamingI wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, dearDarling, I hope that my dream never haunted youMy heart is telling you how much I wanted youGloomy Sunday

It’s dark by now and I’m in Ophir Gardens casting my mind back to Eglantine Avenue over the dark gulf of intervening time, and it’s dark by now there too. The record comes to an end and I think how there seemed to be more hiss and crackle on your vinyl copy, more of the atmospherics of lost time, forty years since Billie laid the track down and I imagine the dust of 1942 sifting down into the grooves of the recording back then, getting into the voice and the instruments, and making that slight lisp in her enunciation all the more poignant.

You got up and drew the curtains and the noise of the wind in the trees outside died to a whisper. I can see her with that white gardenia in her hair, you said, isn’t it strange how the song makes you see the singer, she’s standing in a spotlight in a bar in New York, you said, and it’s dark but there’s those little tea-lights in faceted glass holders on the tables and you can see hands holding cigarettes and cocktail glasses, a face or two maybe, the smoke curling up and drifting into the spotlight, and I think how strange it is that your few words, But so hard to forget, should make me see you as you were then, or what you have become to me since then. I see the blue vein in the back of your hand as you write and you go over to lift the needle from where it’s bumping at the end of the last track. You know, she took her name from Billie Dove, you said, her favourite movie star, her real name was Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father was Holiday but she hardly ever saw him, I think she took his name as a kind of accusation, or revenge. Not that you’d ever know from her autobiography, they say she made half of it up, you said. Billie Dove.

You went over and touched the two intertwining doves of the L’Air du Temps stopper. Nineteen forty-eight, you said, March 16th, Billie plays Carnegie Hall, she was released from the reformatory just eleven days before. So you see, your Lalique bottle will always remind me of that, of Billie’s greatest concert. Do all your bottles have memories like that? I asked. Well, they’re all souvenirs of one kind or another, you said. Some of this, some of that. Inconsequential things, sometimes. Business trips even, the little bits of pleasure that happen when you’re somewhere on business, and you manage to escape the business for a while. Well, I don’t know that much about your business, I said, and then you began to tell me.

I work for MO2, you said. You won’t have heard of it. Technically — but unofficially, as it were — we’re supposed to report both to Home Affairs and the Northern Ireland Office, but they leave us pretty much alone. MO stands for Mass Observation, you know the group that was set up in the Thirties? Only vaguely, I said. Didn’t the film-maker Humphrey Jennings work with them? You know, Night Mail? My father loved the Auden poem that was written for it, and I recited

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,Bringing the cheque and the postal order,Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,The shop at the corner and the girl next door …

And behind my own voice I could hear Auden’s clipped English accent as the steam train trailed its long plume of smoke like writing across the English landscape. My father used to recite the fourth line in a broad Belfast accent, I said, it’s a proper rhyme when you do it that way. Well, it’s near a proper rhyme in Yorkshire too, you said. Anyway, you said, Jennings was one of the founders, it all started off quite by accident. By coincidence. It’s 1936, the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, erstwhile poet, that’s Harrisson with two esses, has a poem in the New Statesman, same issue as a poem by Charles Madge, and a piece by Jennings. Bunch of left-wing intellectuals, some might call them. They begin to collaborate. The ordinary British people have never been looked at properly before, so they begin to observe them. They want to know how things are, so they can make things better. They get other writers and artists on board. William Empson, for one, you know, the Seven Types of Ambiguity bloke. They hire a team of investigators, young middle-class clerks mostly, set them up in a terrace house in Bolton, mix with the working class. The investigators go to the pub, mix in, watch the drinking habits of the men, how often they use the spittoon, that kind of thing. They keep a record of everything, down to the number of pints they drink themselves. The portions of chips they bought at the end of the night, they even used to count the chips in the bag and put that into the record.

Then Harrisson recruits the poet David Gascoyne, Marxist, surrealist, you said, and in a way this is really a surrealist enterprise. And Gascoyne gets them to take on Humphrey Spender, the photographer, brother of the poet Stephen. You know Spender, those classic shots of Bolton, all smog and grit and washing on the line. The famous one, the two little boys peeing with their trousers half-down, and the factory chimneys belching out smoke in the background. Spender felt a little guilty about it all, thought of himself as a snooper, an eavesdropper, which of course he was in a way. Which they all were, for all that they were doing it for the greater good. But no one had done this kind of thing before, and Spender loved the detail, the way the light shone on the cobbles. He’s got a lovely picture, the chromium-plated parts of a Hoover someone had displayed on the mantel of their front parlour.

Mass Observation aimed to focus not only on the people, you said, but the things surrounding the people. Hence the mantelpiece ornaments, men’s penknives, their pipes, their collar-studs, kitchen implements, women’s hatpins, sewing-kits, anything they thought might represent the people. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of dialectical materialism. There’s a file somewhere of button-boxes and their contents, you know the sort of thing your mother might have had, biscuit-tins or tea-caddies filled with odd buttons — and here I remembered sifting through my mother’s Quality Street tin of buttons, buttons of Bakelite and Celluloid, mock tortoiseshell and amber, buttons for blouses and shirts and jackets and overcoats — quite incredible, really, you said, the level of detail they went into.

Anyway, you said, that’s where MO2 got its inspiration from, to begin with. Sometime in the early Seventies, some bright spark in Westminster decides Westminster doesn’t really understand Northern Ireland. This is about the time when the Brits — listen to me talking, and I’m half a Brit myself — decide for once and for all to get shot of Northern Ireland. So the bright spark gets them to set up an MO-type organisation. Of course it’s all done with a nod and a wink. They spend a couple of years putting wheels in motion, recruiting staff, before some other bright spark comes to the conclusion that the original MO methods wouldn’t be entirely appropriate for Northern Ireland. Just think of it, the Bolton people sometimes thought the MO people were spies. Spender nearly got his camera smashed on a couple of occasions. So it’s back to the drawing board, and they come up with MO2. And that’s a misnomer, really, for what they decide to do is not Mass Observation, it’s more like Focused Observation — FO, if you like — because they go for selected groups of people, not the ordinary folk, whoever they might be — and there’s nowt as queer as folk, you said in a stage Yorkshire accent — and not so much the people at the top, but the people they think might rise to the top. The up-and-coming cream, the incipient meritocracy. For this is a long-term project. After so many centuries, what’s another decade or two?

As I wrote these words the Onoto ran out of ink. I’d never got the proper hang of the plunger system; and to tell the truth, though it’s a beautiful pen, it doesn’t quite suit my hand, the nib has just that too much flex for me, and I find it difficult to control, sometimes there’s a wobble to my characters, it would suit you better, you always liked a supple nib, and when I look at your card the writing betrays the weight you give to your downstrokes. So I look into my pen cabinet and select a Conway Stewart instead, a No. 17 in Blue and Black Candle-Flame, and I fill it with blue Pelikan ink that comes in a nice little dumpy round-shouldered Pelikan bottle. The Conway, like practically all of its kind, is a lever-filler, and the gold lever ends in a little round gold shield, just four millimetres in diameter, and when you look at it through a jeweller’s loupe screwed into your eye socket you can clearly see the letters C and S emblazoned on it like a pair of intertwining snakes. The shield is set into a nice little groove in the barrel, which makes it easy to lift the lever with your thumbnail, it’s a very thoughtful ergonomic design. They call it a lollipop lever. Sometimes when the ink is a little low in the bottle you get a sucking noise as the pen fills up, and lollipop sounds right. So now I’m writing with the Conway Stewart, but the Onoto is still at the back of my mind as it lies on the mahogany veneer top of my desk, its colours glowing with an almost hallucinatory intensity in the light of the desk-lamp, russets and ambers like those of a New England fall, and they could easily have called this pattern Turning Leaves, not Tiger’s Eye. But I like the Raj implications of Tiger’s Eye, for the Onoto, after all, was a very Empire pen, its demise as a writing instrument in the Fifties coinciding with the loss of British possessions overseas. I learned just the other day that Onoto have started making pens again, not the original De La Rue Onoto, but a new company that got the rights to the name. They’re making expensive pens for the top end of the market. It’s 2005, they’re bringing out a pen to commemorate Admiral Togo’s victory at Tsushima in 1905, they’re calling it the Admiral Togo pen. And to commemorate Admiral Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805 — and Togo modelled himself on Nelson, he thought of himself as the Japanese Nelson, he’d studied his tactics at Trafalgar — they’re bringing out a pair of pens, the Horatio Nelson and the Emma Lady Hamilton. So I can never write now with an Onoto without thinking of Tsushima, and the Russian fleet going down in a cataclysm of steam, and of shot and shell, and of the blood running down the decks of the French and British ships, and of HMS Victory, and of Nelson with his one arm and his blind eye, and of Nelson freshly brain-damaged from the Battle of the Nile, meeting Lady Hamilton in Naples under the glow of a restless Vesuvius, of the sultry night, and of their subsequent long correspondence, and of quill pens and penknives and inkwells and pounces and portable writing-slopes, and the hundreds of thousands of words that passed between them. I write this to you, Nina, with the Conway Stewart Blue and Black Candle-Flame as I watch the blue ink of my words flow on to the page.

You stared into the fire as you talked, and there was a soft crash as a coal collapsed. If ever you read these words I wonder if you will see them as a true account of what you said to me that night twenty-three years ago, for I know that there is no memory that is not permeated with subsequent memories. And I realise I might have interpolated your story with some details not known to me then.

For instance, Tom Harrisson had conducted an anthropological study of the cannibal tribe known as the Big Nambas, of Malekula in the New Hebrides, now known as Vanautu. In Vanautu the principal objects of wealth and of religious veneration were pigs. In this system only male pigs were valued, their tusks being especially valued; most valued of all were male hermaphroditic pigs, whose incidence in the swine population had been raised to an extraordinary fifteen per cent by generations of inbreeding. This phenomenon had previously been described in 1928 by the Oxford zoologist John Baker, in an article published in the British Journal of Experimental Zoology. Somehow, this obscure piece of research came to the attention of a group of Hollywood moguls who thought it a wonderful premise for a motion picture involving cannibals and pigs.

One day in the year 1935 Harrisson, by his own account, was wandering the shoreline of Vanautu in an emaciated and delirious condition after spending months in the highlands with the Big Nambas, when an immense yacht glided into harbour. On board was Douglas Fairbanks Sr., erstwhile star of The Mark of Zorro, who appeared to Harrisson ‘like a vision’ wearing orange-flame pyjamas. Fairbanks and Harrisson then spent the next few days drinking ‘perfect gin slings’ and discussing the logistics of the proposed motion picture. Harrisson was given firm indications that he would be hired as a consultant on the project, but it never materialised, perhaps cannibal movies had gone out of vogue, and he found himself back in England jobless.

It then occurred to him that he could easily transpose his anthropological methods to the English population, and so Mass Observation was born. The town of Bolton was not chosen by accident. It was the birthplace of Lord Lever, founder of Lever Brothers, the largest soap company in the world, producers of Sunlight, Lifebuoy, Lux and Vim, among other brands. In 1930 Lever merged with the Dutch company Margarine Unie to form Unilever, which had links with the electronics firm of Philips, where your father worked. Unilever was one of the chief sponsors of Mass Observation. I note that today Unilever are the manufacturers of Dove deodorant, which makes me think of the intertwining doves of the L’Air du Temps bottle that sits on your dressing table; which is possibly neither here nor there, though it could be argued that any one thing in the universe implies the existence of every other thing.

So I was tempted to have you tell me things you had not told me: you might have said, for example, that the poet Kathleen Raine, the partner of Charles Madge and author of such poems as ‘The Invisible Spectrum’, ‘Lenten Flowers’ and ‘The End of Love’, conducted a survey on the incidence of handkerchief use among Bolton women, from which we learn that on a particular day in 1937 a woman in a plum-coloured coat stopped outside the Regal Gown shop in Bolton and paused for two minutes and ten seconds before taking a handkerchief from her handbag and blowing her nose. You might have said that the poet and eminent literary critic William Empson was assigned to detail the contents of sweetshop windows in Bolton, and that the journalist Woodrow Wyatt was given the job of playing George Formby records on the gramophone in Harrisson’s rented house in Bolton, in order to give it an authentic Lancashire atmosphere. You might have told me that Harrisson’s first discipline had been that of ornithology, and that his experience of watching birds and then of listening to a people whose language he did not speak had convinced him that speech often hindered understanding. We cannot afford, said Harrisson — you might have said — to devote ourselves exclusively to people’s verbal reactions to questions asked them of a stranger in the street, without running a grave risk of reaching misleading conclusions. What people say is only one part — not a very important part — of the whole pattern of human thought and behaviour, said Harrisson.

There was a soft crash as an archway of coal collapsed in the fire and for a second I got the smell of coal-smoke, and then it died and your perfume came back to me as it does now. I remember wondering if Mass Observation had surveyed the fragrance departments of the big stores in Bolton, and I thought of what it must have been like to come from the Bolton smog into their brightly lit foyers. Andy Warhol loved the names of those perfumes in the Thirties fashion magazines he liked to read, and used to say them over to himself, imagining what they smelled like, I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much, he said, Guerlain’s Sous le Vent, Worth’s Imprudence, Lenthéric’s Shanghai and Gardénia de Tahiti, D’Orsay’s Belle de Jour and Trophée, Kathleen Mary Quinlan’s Rhythm, Saravel’s White Christmas. What’s that? I asked. What’s what? you said, a bit piqued, I thought, that I had interrupted the flow of your story. Your perfume, I said, and then you offered me the blue vein in your wrist. Je Reviens, you said. It works on two levels. First you get a woody base with green ferns running through it, then a heady rush of flowers. Wild narcissus, jasmine, a dash of ylang-ylang.

Let’s leave the job for now, you said.