Angela Patten

The other day when I was sorting out some cookbooks, a recipe for Ginger Biscuits fell out of the pages onto my lap. I instantly recognized my mother’s handwriting, distinctive as her hands or her voice. There were other recipes she had written out for Coconut Ice and Wholemeal Scones, along with her record of household items—the location of fuses in the cupboard under the stairs, and the date of purchase and proof of lifetime guarantee written on the underside of my parents’ Odearest mattress.

When I was growing up in 1960s Ireland, good penmanship was greatly prized. We did not call it “cursive,” an American word, but only “handwriting” since there were no computers or even typewriters available. How we labored over letters at school, joining them together in a flowing manner, with curls and loops in large-format “headline” copybooks.

At home when a letter arrived on perfumed floral sheets or on thin pale blue Airmail envelopes that unfolded to reveal their secrets, my parents commented on the writing as much as on the content, and they prided themselves on their own fine scripts.

Even now, as technology is making handwriting a thing of the past, my mother’s careful list of household goods reminds me that my parents, like other poor people, took care of the things they had to save up for and that had cost them so dear—the wireless with its pink satin face, the gas cooker and, of course, the mattress.