Déjà Vu

Typewriters & Gravediggers

I can't forget the irregular clack-clack sound of my father’s light green Olivetti typewriter punching the quiet in our Hampstead home in the 1970s.

This now obsolete working tool is one of the most important technologies to remember, because it connects the human using it so directly to their “output”: words on a page.

Ideas are, as a Leader in the Economist once wrote “more powerful than blood or money”.

I'm reminded of the iconic but dying typewriter which accompanied this article I wrote in the Financial Times about dad’s burial at Highgate Cemetery because today we will bury my mother’s ashes there next to his and because the typewriter connected their working life together.

My mum was Dad’s muse in some ways - and also his secretary. A former actual secretary in the UN in the Congo, her typewriter was a shiny teal colour (very on trend today!) and she touch typed super fast.

She wrote his “correspondence” in the 1960s and 1970s, throughout the 1980s and then, well, the computer came along and he preferred that to write on..

The gathering family will have Déjà vu: the same place and the same sexton will be present - thirteen years on.

As I’m transfixed by the evolution of work and jobs, the fact that Victor Herman has done the same job at Highgate Cemetery for thirty five years fascinates me.

Gravediggers may be the last job standing in an age of automation, not because the physical “digger” part can’t be automated (clearly it can and is) but because of the other completely human part: being witness to the closure of life.

I challenge you to imagine a robot doing the work of calibrating and guiding the emotional family energy of the moment.

The nurse attending my mother’s final moment as she gasped her last: this was human work, not machine work.

Victor is going to have déjà vu again when he returns in a fortnight to a different part of the cemetery, where my husband Alaric will “live”.

Alaric and my mother Marlene, or “Marl” as he touchingly called her had a good “in law” connection which lasted throughout our years together, and during which he worked for her helping her on my father’s complex literary estate.

For a while he too was her secretary, an administrator and adviser. Keypads and touch keys flew in their correspondence which between 2012 and 2020 was daily then weekly.

Although his prized possession was an early electric typewriter it was of course email that they corresponded on.

I have Déjà vu as I write this: the green paths which threads through Highgate Cemetery, often unceremoniously squelchy from London rain are a reminder: Life’s work lives on in death.