Excerpt from Alphabetical by Michael Rosen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And the page of type: how could it be so perfect, its titles underlined, the margins so neat, the lines of type spaced so evenly? She explained how the 'return' could be altered, how you could arrange it so that the margins were regular. She showed us how to change the ribbon and – best of all – she let us clean the metal letters with a toothbrush. The tiny metal flanges of the letters would get a build-up of ribbon fibre and ink, and the toothbrush would get them sharp and shiny again. I loved the keys themselves: each letter was printed on to the cream- coloured disc of the key, looking as if it was under glass, surrounded by its own circular ridge of metal. Then the noise would stop. She would put the machine back in its box and slot it back in the alcove.

We weren't allowed to use it on our own. This was a special and expensive machine. For letters to appear on a page as cleanly and beautifully as this, she couldn't risk my brother and me just playing about on it. It was too important. This way of producing letters on the page had its own black box. This kind of alphabet was under lock and key. This kind of alphabet was handled by someone extremely clever who had gone to a special college to learn how to do speed clacketty-clacking.

The mystique was dented when my parents found us an old typewriter. It had no case. There were one or two letters that didn't type. The right-hand margin clip was broken. So? It was a typewriter and my brother and I spent hours on it. First as one-finger typers and then as two-finger typers, then as two-finger- and-a-thumb-for-the-space-bar typers. Because it didn't have a case, it grew fluff. Fluff got in amongst the thin arms that held the letters and under the keys. Norman and Butt, the estate agents in the shop beneath our flat, threw their old typewriter ribbons into the dustbins in our yard. My brother and I went through the bins and found two-coloured ribbons – half black, half red – and we put these on our typewriter so that we could write in two colours. Our forefingers were learning qwerty. We could make pages of print – of a kind – just like a professional, just like Mum. Or nearly. We knew that it wasn't as good as hers. But hers had to be better than good.

Once she wrote and typed a story about a girl she taught and sent it off to the BBC. The BBC said they liked it and she was on the Home Service reading it. I asked the head teacher if I could go to the Physics lab to listen to it. He said, 'No.' I was disappointed. He said, 'No, you can listen to it with me in my study and I'll get someone else to do assembly that morning.' So I sat with the headmaster, on a chair old enough for Shakespeare to have sat on, he said, and we listened to my mum reading the story that she had typed on her typewriter. 'Very good,' he said. 'She was very good.'

My brother broke through a barrier. He got an Olivetti. It was slim and sleek. It didn't clacketty-clack, it puttered. It was made of a serene dark green metal. The keys were like flat dice: black, square, plastic, with white letters. Everything worked. And when he finished, he could slot it into a case and carry it about with him. It was a 'portable'. With his Olivetti, my brother threw out the pre-war heaviness of qwerty and brought in some- thing as neat and as hard-edged as Bridget Riley's art and Mary Quant's hairdo. If I typed on it, he would tell me not to type so hard. You don't bang down the keys, like Mum has to, he said.

I spent my twenty-first birthday money on a portable too. I went German. It was an Adler: black and cream. Here the keys were like chunky cream lozenges. It wasn't metal. It was bendy plastic. It didn't putter. It clucked. What was I thinking of? I had foregone style for lightness. This was a writing machine I could take anywhere. It wasn't much thicker than a Dickens novel. I moved up a notch. I was doing two fingers on each hand and two thumbs now. I remember sitting in the dressing room of the Nuffield Theatre, in Southampton, dressed in my costume of Obadiah for a production of Tristram Shandy, with my Adler. I had a deadline for an article to write for the student magazine, Isis. If I could bash it out, while waiting to go on stage for the matine?e, get it into an envelope and into the post on the way home after the show, it would meet the deadline and get into the magazine. Cluck cluck cluck. I knew then that I was in charge of qwerty. Qwerty did what I told it to do.

Excerpted from Alphabetical by Michael Rosen. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Rosen. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.