Deception As An Art Form

The Starcevich brothers continued to berate me for my alleged irreproachability from time to time, but their strange reluctance to reinforce their message by pugilistic means transformed them, in my eyes, from a real threat to a mere nuisance. This is not to suggest that I became entirely comfortable during my encounters with them, and I still endeavoured to avoid them whenever I could. But no amount of verbal aggression, however vitriolic or insistent, was ever going to get me to change my behaviour.

I was perfectly aware of the potential benefits to be gleaned from overt acts of misconduct, of course. For one thing, your status in the eyes of your peers could be enhanced no end, as could, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, your sense of self-esteem. However, I considered such rewards to be of negligible appeal compared with the feelings of achievement and superiority to be derived from ‘pulling a fast one’.

With that in mind, an important development during my time in grade three came with our introduction to the delights of cursive hand-writing. Right from the start, I was fascinated, both with the mechanical (but seemingly almost magical) process of conferring meaning on a blank page, and with the immense variation in potential ways to achieve this. Hand-writing, it seemed, was as uniquely distinctive an expression of personhood as physical appearance, finger prints, or the sound of the voice. This begged a question – how much of a person’s intrinsic self was embedded in such things? If I could somehow be made to look exactly like another person, would I thereby become that person? What if I learned to speak like them?

What if I learned to write like them?

Shortly after progressing to grade four, I began to spend hours with my collection of Mobil football photos, endeavouring to reproduce the footballers’ autographs. At first, I would trace them. Then, when I believed I had got the hang of the idiosyncrasies inherent in the letter shapes, as well as the flow and orientation of the words, I would start to do them freehand, slowly at first, then gradually faster and faster as the process became more natural and automatic. Initially, the standard of my attempts varied greatly – my ‘Lindsay Head’ was excellent, almost impossible to tell from the original; ‘Robert Martin’ and ‘Bob Edmonds’ were passable; but I found ‘Peter Anderson’ and ‘Terry Short’ almost impossible to master. In the end though, after hours and hours of painstaking effort, I could produce credible versions of all forty autographs in the series.

This was all very well in itself, but it was hard to imagine any practical use for my new-found ability, at any rate while it was restricted to reproducing the signatures of footballers. The hand-writing of my mum and dad, however, to which I next turned my attention, was another matter entirely.