Although manual typewriters now belong in a file marked “dinosaur”, they were considered a luxury when I first arrived on Bequia. My parents had given me a small portable machine when I entered university, and I had packed it along with my meagre belongings when I left Canada to teach at the Bequia Anglican High School in 1977. I was by no means a skilled typist; I had taken a non-credit course in High School offered to students planning on attending university, and it was a class I didn’t excel in. My style remained “hunt and peck”, but I was able to “hunt and peck” faster with those lessons under my belt.
On Bequia, my humble manual typewriter was considered a prized possession. It sat on my desk in the staff room, and I was often asked to type documents by those who knew of its existence. It quickly became common knowledge on the Island that Miss Armstrong had a typewriter, and I soon found my somewhat dubious typing skills in high demand.
During my second year at the high school, a shipment of much-needed supplies arrived from the Bequia Mission. I laughed my head off when I saw that someone had donated twelve old Underwood typewriters, they looked old enough to be the great-grandparents of my little machine! They were real clunkers, and I knew they had been donated because they were no longer of any use in Canada. My laughter turned into dismay when Father Adams announced that Miss Armstrong would be the typing teacher! I protested vehemently, I didn’t REALLY know how to type, how could I be expected to teach others? My protests fell on deaf ears, and so began an extremely futile exercise for a seriously reluctant teacher and a handful of awfully confused students.
The heavy old typewriters were moved to the school’s annex and placed in a dismal, dusty room. The machines were downright ugly, and I looked at them with apprehension. I had no idea how to teach typing, and with no reference manuals it was going to be a painful experience. My parents had promised to find teaching material for me, but until they arrived I would simply have to fly by the seat of my pants.
What a miserable time. I felt sorry for my students, they were eager to learn how to type but it was next to impossible on those relics from the past. The ribbons had all dried out and therefore left no ink on the paper, and the keys themselves had to be banged hard in order to make an impression. This lack of ink on the ribbons added insult to injury, my students couldn’t even see what they were typing! In desperation I purchased a box of carbon paper, and slipped a piece between two sheets of paper. This was the only way the typing class could see their results, and it would have to do until new ribbons could be obtained. It took quite a while for me to discover that the machines were obsolete, therefore the ribbons were no longer manufactured. Well, Jaysus wept!
True to their word, my parents arrived a few months later armed with the promised materials, a teaching guide for me and books for the students to follow. The teaching aids helped, but those ribbon-less Underwood typewriters were a trial, and I considered the typing class an abject failure. I may have laughed when the antique machines had first arrived, but having to teach with them was no laughing matter. I can’t count the number of times I cursed the donor of those machines; why couldn’t they have given something of USE? Did they feel all warm and fuzzy when they had donated such useless pieces of junk?
In April of 1979 all classes at the school came to a halt when La Soufriere erupted on the mainland. The school became a refugee shelter for an extended period of time, and the teachers helped cook for the displaced people from Sandy Bay in lieu of teaching. My time at the high school was drawing to an end; I would be leaving Bequia at the end of June to work for the summer in Canada, and return to the Island a married woman. I would no longer be a teacher; Mac and I would be opening a restaurant, a different learning curve that I eagerly looked forward to with a side dish of apprehension. I didn’t know how to cook, but that would just have to change if my future was going to involve feeding people for a living! When saying my good-byes at the school I noticed the typewriters carelessly heaped in the Head-master’s office. They had not been covered, and were thickly coated with ash from the volcano. They had been useless when they arrived, and been made even more useless due to neglect. I doubt very much they were ever used again, and I for one was glad to see the last of them!