#blogjune Writing with pencil

Writing with pencil as a satisfying tell.  Perhaps it is the tactile or haptic feedback of pressure on paper.  Or the swirly, scratchy sound of the lead trailing behind the pencil tip as it travels over the paper landscape.  Typing has it's own satisfaction but it is different for me.

A primary school we had to use pencil until we could write sufficiently well to graduate to pen.  Those early letters, painstakingly traced in the double spaced books we had, were like explorers venturing into an unknown terrain.  For some, there were monsters waiting, especially if you deviated from the "correct" formation or held your pencil "wrong".  Not so for me.  I still have a callous on my right middle finger even though most writing I do now is via a keyboard.

5x HB pencils were listed on the stationery list.  Back in the 70's when I started school there were only a few options for pencil brands.  Red and black Staedtler were the most common, I think.  You weren't to use any other grade pencil except HB.  Most classrooms had a table mounted sharpener that curled out long shavings, releasing the fresh smell of wood and the somehow grey smell of graphite.  Children got told off for staying too long sharpening their pencils.  Once a classmate proffered the top of her pencil to everyone sitting at our table.  "Here," she said slyly, "Smell this."  I knew the smell, even as the other children wrinkled their noses and pretended not to.  My suspicions were confirmed when I watched her sneak it under the table and inside the edge of her Womble undies to re-anoint it with odour.

Pencils had to be named of course. Gently Dad would scrap off a little bit of paint at one end leaving the wood bare for my name to be printed carefully on it.  The name would sometimes be destroyed by teeth marks as many pencils suffered the indignity of having their tops chewed.  But oh, the sensation of breaking through the initial resistance of the paint to the softer wood below was irresistible to young teeth.

Ultimately we moved on to ball point pens.  Bic was the most common brand for school pens. How gratifying to see 2x Blue Ball Point Pens on your stationery list?  No more "baby" pencils for you in Standard 3.  Even so, sometimes you would write in pencil before tracing over with pen.  Usually for title pages on which we spend large amounts of time ornamenting with fancy lettering, colour and pictures until it was almost overwhelmed.  The popularity of lettering books grew exponentially among us of this age group.  Mine was one of the common titles of the day.  One offering in the book was a cursive font that I admired mostly because Dad commented favourably that it looked like my grandmother's writing.  He had been taught by Nanny to write growing up on a farm and attending the Australian School of the Air.  Now an adult, he wrote weekly to Nanny and Poppy who lived still in Australia, and each week there was a letter back in Nanny's elegant cursive.  I made it my mission to write like Nanny and at least until I went to University, my writing was pretty good with swoops and dives of copperplate cursive.

I have always loved stationery, so imagine my thrill when obliged to use fountain pens for writing while attending the Ernst Ludwig Schule in Bad Nauheim, Germany during Dad's sabbatical there in 1985-6.  There was a much greater choice in pen style than boring Bic, even in the austerity of the 80's.  Plastic capsules of ink removed the challenge of bottles and suckers for school children.  We even had an eraser pen to dissolve mistakes like magic.

I don't write in in pencil much now.  I once used it to scribe notes from an interview but was told it wasn't clear enough for recording purposes so had to go back to pen.  Writing with pencil has a sense of impermanence. It is easily erased and we use the phrase "pencil it in" when we're not sure about committing to an event or meeting.  Maybe it is the sense of transience or potential that adds to the attraction.  But for me, I mostly like how it feels, sounds and the memories it invokes of school classrooms baking in the afternoon sun while we practice our capital A's.