The Soles of Ink Folk

My kind of town.

New York, though, not Chicago. I love the Windy City, yes, and one of the early Ink Quest posts sang its praises, but I have always felt that I should have been born a New Yorker, even though I've never actually visited the city in question. I blame this on a steady diet of Woody Allen films, Seinfeld, and a line in Don DeLillo's White Noise about how 'the art of getting ahead in New York [is] based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way'. (Isn't that what Ink Quest is really all about?)

I have, therefore, always had a grudge against the universe for deciding to have me born in small-town South Wales. The last part of R.S. Thomas' bitter 'Welsh Landscape' sums my feelings up rather nicely, ink fact:

There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

And it was while I sat surrounded by 'sham ghosts' and 'an impotent people' last weekend, dear readers, that I truly cursed my non-New-York-ness. I was reading the Sunday Times, and I happened across an extract from the autobiography of Stanley Johnson, father of Boris Johnson, the somewhat idiosyncratic Mayor of London. I have no interest in either figure, but the headline caught my eye: 'Baby Boris: All Blond Hair and Dipped in Ink'. I was compelled to read on.

The ink in question formed part of a remarkable tale about the author seeing his now-famous son for the first time in the maternity ward (which was, we're told, in a hospital 'situated by the river around East 70th Street'):

I was told that the new baby was already safely wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the nursery in a cot, along with half a dozen other new arrivals. As I peered through the glass, I found it difficult to determine which our child was. The babies were lined up so that all I could see was the soles of their feet, which were uniformly black. Just for a moment I thought there had been a mix-up and somehow Charlotte had given birth to an African–American or Puerto Rican child. I asked a passing nurse for guidance.

“We dip the feet in ink to take their footprints as soon as they are born,” she explained. “We want to avoid mix-ups. You can’t use the babies’ fingerprints. Not when they’re newborn. They’re too soft.”

I have no idea if this inky ritual was standard practice in the hospitals of New York in the 1960s; for all I know, it may still be ink operation. But I do know this: British hospitals did not welcome children into the world with a dip in ink when I was born (less than a decade after Baby Boris). And dipping certainly doesn't happen now, for Baby Ink's identity was marked in the maternity ward in 2007 with a seemingly indestructible electronic device that was strapped around his ankle. Impossible to remove without a special key, this object would set off alarms and cause all doors to lock shut if anyone attempted to take the new arrival past the sensor positioned near the door to the ward. I think we have the device in his 'baby box', but, while I have a clear memory of the nurse removing it from his leg, I have no idea how we then got out of the hospital without the alarms activating. The mystery of the modern world deepens.

If I had been born in New York, then, I would probably have had my tiny, wrinkled feet dipped in ink not long after taking my first breath. While I have spent many of my adult years worshipping at the feet of ink, that is to say, I was deprived of the chance to get my foot in the door at the very beginnink of my life. I got off on the wrong foot. This, no doubt, is why it took me a while to find my feet with writing instruments, why I used ballpoint pens without objection in school, why I did not buy a bottle of ink until I was in my thirties. Because I was not born in New York, it took me years to get my feet wet. (This is surely why I am, like poor Marcel, always ink search of lost time.)

I am going to put my foot down and put my best foot forward: my sole mission from now on will be to convince British maternity wards to dip the soles of babies into ink. The National Health Service will, in time, come to toe the line. Ink will be there at the beginning of every life, and every child will naturally gravitate towards fountain pens. The ballpoint will die as people start to vote with their feet. The soul of ink will survive. Some feat.

Ink underfoot today: Aurora Blue; Herbin Café des Îles.

PS (21 March): Honorary Penquod crew member Ike has been in touch to inkform me that I am clearly onto something. He was, he notes, born in Atlanta, Georgia, some years before Boris Johnson popped into the world, and he still has a card from the hospital that displays his mother's fingerprints and the prints of both of his feet. (The practice was clearly not confined to New York, then.) A decade later, he adds, he received his first bottle of ink and a green Esterbrook J fountain pen. This latter development can only have been because, as he puts it, ink has been in his blood from the very beginning.