Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
My Father's Form of Words
The son of a registrar finds his father's set signing phrases arriving in his own letters, each one finished one word ahead of his nib.
- dated: "the oath weeks"
- narrator: "Eamonn Pawle, registrar's son"
Monday, 5 October. First of the oath weeks, when father used to say a man's witnessed words get renewed like a licence. I have been writing to the bank about the estate affairs, and on the second page of the third letter I found, below where my sentence had got to, one word waiting that I had not written. The word was certify, in my own hand, in my own ink, though the nib had not been near the paper yet. I know the word the way families know doors. It is the first word of my father's form of words, the one he said down over forty years of certificates before setting pen to them: I certify this...
I finished the sentence and posted nothing. I sat with my hands flat on the letters for a while, the way he used to sit with his after a heavy day of the dead.
Thursday, 8 October. It is not the word that comes early. It is the phrase. Whatever reaches a little past my nib is the old form itself, complete and in order, and it arrives one word at a time, and always one word past wherever I have stopped writing, so that I find I am not writing it but keeping level with it. Twice this week I have stopped mid-line to test it, pen lifted, and the next word has been there, set down, my slant, my spacing, and the phrase has waited for me there the way a queue waits at a counter. Each time I have had to write the word to close the line. Leaving one behind, unfinished, does not bear thinking about, because father's whole doctrine was that a form is only a form once it is entirely written.
Wednesday, 14 October. The forms of father's, for the record, since this may be read by somebody with no father of their own to consult. The certification, said over copies. The correction, said over errors, striking nothing out. The declaration, renewed at each first sitting of the year, which gives the oath weeks their name; he stood for it every January with his collar open and his hand up, the same six sentences, thirty-one years. And there was one more, which he did not keep in the set for use, because he found the occasion for it only once: remains in force. He wrote it across the last form he authorised, on the morning of the day he died, and the form was nothing to do with any of us, and nobody at the office ever traced what it certified.
I have been writing to ordinary people, that is the trouble. The butcher about the December order, my cousin about the tiles, the bank again. The phrases do not wait for a proper occasion. My hand is keeping my father's forms the way a register keeps its entries, in any old weather, into any old letter, and it will not be hurried and it will not be stopped.
Sunday, 18 October. Last of the oath weeks. I have written nothing for four days and the house has been very ordinary, tea, radio, the gate blowing. The question I have carried to the end of the page is not whether the hand is mine, I have stopped debating that, but a question about position, and I will put it down plainly in case reading it back helps: if the phrase always stands one word ahead of my nib, then whatever is keeping my father's forms has already crossed out everything I am about to write. Whose ink does it go on being when I put my name below?