The first evening class began on Monday, 8 September 1980, six days before my eighteenth birthday.
Mum had found the notice in the local paper. Fareham Technical Centre was offering typing, office practice and book-keeping in the evenings. She left the page folded beside my breakfast and tapped the advertisement when I came downstairs.
‘I already work in an office,’ I said.
‘Then you should be good at it.’
This was how Mum encouraged people. She began with the assumption that they were being unreasonable and allowed them to prove otherwise.
At Wessex Marine Supplies I had moved beyond making tea for visitors, though not so far beyond it that anybody else had started. I typed short letters, copied invoice numbers and helped in accounts. The women who earned more than I did had certificates. They also typed without watching their hands.
I enrolled for one evening a week.
The centre was in an older building with long corridors and signs directing us to rooms that had been renumbered. Eleven of us arrived for the class. Most were women who already worked in offices or hoped to. Two were men. One said he had been sent by his employer and gave this information as if the rest of us had attended voluntarily through poor judgement.
The typewriters were manual. Each had a cover, a carriage and a personality that became obvious within ten minutes. Mine needed a firm strike on the letter ‘e’. This was unfortunate because English had made heavy use of it.
The tutor showed us how to sit, where to place our fingers and how to return the carriage without hitting the person beside us. We began with rows of letters.
asdf jkl;
I had expected business correspondence. Instead, I spent the first part of my improved education typing combinations that would have worried anybody reading over my shoulder.
The woman next to me had worked in a solicitor’s office for twelve years. She typed quickly and made no visible mistakes. I made several. We were told not to rub holes through the paper when correcting them. This suggested that previous classes had tried.
Halfway through, the tutor gave us a short business letter. It began ‘Dear Sir’ and concerned an order that had not arrived. I knew this sort of letter. Wessex Marine Supplies received several each week, usually from people who believed capital letters would improve delivery times.
I finished within the time allowed. The left margin wandered, and I had typed ‘quantitty’ before correcting it. The tutor marked the page and said my accuracy was reasonable.
Reasonable was better than I had expected. It was also worse than I intended to be by June.
When I got home, Mum was waiting up. Dad had gone to bed because he started early at the Dockyard.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘It was all right.’
‘Useful?’
‘Probably.’
I showed her the marked letter. She read the tutor’s comments and ignored the extra ‘t’ that could still be seen under the correction.
‘There you are,’ she said.
I did not know where she thought I was, but I went back the following Monday.
By Christmas I could type without looking down for whole sentences. I still checked after each one. The class led to RSA Stage I Typing in 1981 and book-keeping the year after. At the time, it was one evening a week and a bus home in the dark with a folder on my lap.
Nobody had made me enrol. That was new.