Reels and reels of fax paper
It somehow happened that each edition of English File was written in a different place. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the first edition was written in Clive’s flat in Valencia. Despite being rather cold, and on the fourth floor with no lift, it was convenient in some ways, as it was very close to the British Council, where I was still teaching. We always worked together in the same room, usually side by side, at first with just the one computer. It was an early Apple Mac, which were told to use by OUP, as they were using Macs in those days. In the very early days, before email and the internet, we had to submit our drafts on floppy discs, which we posted to Oxford. However, technologically, we were ahead of them, as we had managed to get a very early version of email set up long before OUP were using it. It had one great feature, which was that you could tell not only if someone had received your email, but if they had actually read it or not – I still miss that in today’s emails!
I can’t remember exactly when the fax machine arrived in our lives, but when it did, it seemed like magic. OUP used to use it particularly to send us artwork roughs (that is, rough versions of the drawings that we had asked for for different pages of the books) and suddenly the fax machine would kick into action and spew out reels and reels of fax paper which we had to gather up and flatten out in order to inspect the pictures. Very hard work, as as soon as you had flattened one out, it would curl up again into a cylinder.
But there was one particular fax which I will always remember arriving, when we were writing English File 2. English File 1 had ended with an exclusive interview with Cliff Richard, a singer most people under 70 will barely have heard of, but which we had managed to get through a friend who worked for the BBC. We wanted to interview another singer for English File 2, and to use one of their songs in the book. I had a contact, an Irish friend, who said that his cousin knew the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, whose song Nothing Compares 2U was very big at the time. He agreed to get his cousin to pass her our interview questions. They were the typical questions that we would get our students to ask each other, like What do you do in your free time? What kind of music do you listen to? Do you do any sport or exercise?, things like that. One evening, Clive and I had just finished work for the day. We were at my house, and were sitting having a drink chatting about the day, when suddenly, a fax started to arrive. I got up and went to the machine to see what it was, and suddenly I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s from Sinead O’Connor! She’s answered our questions!’ It was indeed from her, and it became the last lesson in English File 2, along with the original version of her song which she also very kindly allowed us to use. We published the interview in full, except for one answer which OUP would not allow us to print. To the question Do you do any sport or exercise? she had answered, ‘Yes, sex. Lots of it’.
She died recently, and I thought, when I heard, about how kind she had been to bother to answer some questions for two totally unknown authors.