Clackety clackety clackety clackety clack - ping!

When the pre-Christmas Powers-That-Be ran out of ideas for training the housewives of tomorrow (see, amongst others, the “A La Cart Kitchen”), someone had a bright idea: let’s train the secretaries of tomorrow! But let’s do it covertly, so that they don’t know what they’re doing. Actually manufactured by Byron International (itself a division of super-conglomerate mining corp. Dobson Park Industries), the Petite brand was a front for a range of portable toys including cash registers, sewing machines, and various pretend shop fronts which all came in suspiciously typewriter-shaped cases.

We suspect that Petite’s moment of glory may have coincided with the rise of the Superman films - suddenly journalism was a glamorous career and, with one of these babies, an adventure-packed life as the next Lois Lane or Clark Kent (or failing that, Julie Burchill) seemed only a Caps Lock away. The Super International was the foremost in a series of fully functional toy typewriters (although time would deliver the De-Luxe, Electronic and Talking versions) which differed from its grown-up Silver Reed, Olivetti and Brother – erm – sisters only in its, well, petiteness (and sometimes its colour - snazzy blue if you were lucky, dull grey if you weren’t).

Although Petite were not the first to market (Mettoy had already produced a none-more-’50s tin plate Junior typewriter which had only one effective key and a manually rotated daisywheel - Dymo labelwriters were more efficient), the Super International soon had it cornered. At any rate it was far more businesslike and chic than the crappy pink Barbie typewriters that followed. (Although, was it just us, or did the red half of the ribbon always dry out after about two days?) Anyway, had you wanted to use it to write a sequel to “The Bitch”, you probably could have done so.

Really enterprising kids probably supplemented their pocket money by knocking out a spot of porn and sending it in to Mayfair. Most of us, however, just sat banging away for hours at the asterisk key, giving our parents a migraine. The novelty really wore off when we realized that all it was good for was typing thank-you letters to our gran, and now we had no excuse not to. Drat.