Never Learn to Type. Book review

Never Learn to Type, autobiography of Margaret Joan Anstee. Published by John Wiley and Sons, 2004.ISBN 0470854316 It was an important meeting in the UN, ‘Someone needs to take notes’, they decided. ‘Margaret, can you…?’“Sorry. I never learned to type.’ which also meant that she could not use shorthand either.Which meant, crucially, that she remained an essential part of the decision-making team. Margaret Anstee grew up in a tiny village in Essex; no bathroom, and an outside toilet. Village school.But her educational promise was spotted, and nurtured. She was to go to Cambridge taking French and Spanish.How could she learn sufficient Spanish in the 1930s, in rural Essex?In that tiny village were a Gibralterian couple, refugees from Franco.This was one of many fortuitous meetings.Another was her Spanish tutor at Cambridge, he had personally known many of the writers of the Generation of ’27, Lorca was just one, Cernuda was a visiting lecturer. What to do with her First, in the late…