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9 eSimon

Simon has five types of grunt:

Ask him about his mother,

his father,

or his parents’ marriage,

and you get a happy grunt for the first, a puzzled one for the second, and an incomprehensible bleat concerning the photo above.

It’s possible to extract more interpretation, if you work at it.

‘Simon, what do you mean, “Uuugheugh … gghuaha … ehhghH”?’

‘Haaaghuggh … oooh … ghughghEH.’

‘These are your parents. You grew up with them. Is this photo an accurate reflection of their relationship or not?’

‘Aaaghurghh … gghahuugh … eeehghuGH … is that a dog in the middle? Oh, it’s a bag. If it had been a dog these might not have been my parents, just people who looked like my parents, because we didn’t have a dog.’

‘Don’t you think there’s something remarkable about this picture? Sitting back to back on a pebble beach in Southern England with something that looks like a dead bulldog between you?’

Simon looks trapped and panicky.

‘Or is this just a snapshot of what marriage always is, to you?’

The grunt-bleat means bafflement. Why should he find something odd about the photograph? It’s a photograph: one of those things (so rare in life) in which a fact is made immutable. Why muddy it with interpretation? Why, if you do muddy it, pick on that particular interpretation? It could be one of a million others.

Simon is, verbally, one of the most adept and playful people I know – as long as he doesn’t have to speak.

Or use metaphor.

Or comment on photographs.

Simon’s parents’ marriage (according to other members of the family) was not happy or unhappy, just mannered and soulless.

The puzzled father-grunt Simon gives about his father signifies a lack of interest. The happy mother-grunt, ‘loveliness’. Loveliness is the only adjective Simon associates with Helene Norton. She ‘embodied’ the word, he says. There isn’t need for others – and he doesn’t mean ‘loveliness’ because of her startling beauty, which Simon claims he’d never noticed until I started ogling her, but ‘loveliness’ because of … because of … uuuggghhhAH! Grunt Number Four: Frustrated Grunt.

What’s the point of me demanding new words when he’s already given me the one that works to perfection?

‘Loveliness’ does not mean uncensoriousness, however. When his mother was alive, Simon used to visit her in London every two or three weeks, but she refused to greet him until he’d had a bath.

Then she would criticise his clothes.

‘If it wasn’t one thing, it was another,’ remembers Simon forlornly. ‘I got the feeling I could never satisfy her. Did it count if your clothes were wrong in the period before you’d had a chance to spruce up between the front door and the bath?’

After trying to ‘spruce up’ he’d step out of the bathroom in the fresh clothes that his mother kept in a cupboard, ready for his visits, and expecting now to be allowed to kiss her hello. ‘But I’d almost certainly forget something, and she’d draw attention to that one thing and home in on it. My shirt was wrong, or my shoelaces were undone. I hadn’t done up my trousers correctly.’

He gives a purgatorial groan.

‘It was too much for me.’

Two or three days after his mother’s death (Simon remembers it as ‘rather too quickly’) he and his two brothers let themselves into her five-bedroom apartment near Baker Street, and began picking over her possessions. From their mother’s cupboards and drawers they extracted everything small and unbreakable and piled it on the floor. Then they shuffled among the piles – in my image of this spectral, sacrificial scene I imagine them as three tall birds, and hear the clicking of their feet on the parquet floors – plucking up anything that took their fancy.

There was only one item Simon wanted: a photograph of his mother in old age.

There were paintings of her, when she was young and glorious. Simon wasn’t interested. He’d had nothing to do with her in those days. He doesn’t like portraits at the best of times, but he prefers at least that they correlate to an image already in his brain.

He held out his arms, eyes closed, to any other things the brothers didn’t take , then brought the fifty-or-sixty-item windfall back to a small flat he owns in London. There he laid them out, ten layers deep along one edge of the living room, like drying fish fillets.

Simon tells me he would like to hang the pictures up.

His mother has been dead nine years now, but the haul remains stacked against the wall, curing itself slowly of connotations. ‘Loveliness’ now resides only in the photograph of her old age and his memories.

The leftovers in his mother’s apartment – her letters, wrapped in pink ribbon, from a man who was not Simon’s father; her skirts and chemises, brooches, diamond pins, fur coats, perfumes, old swing-band records – the brothers sold, gave away or threw in the dustbin.

‘But you also got all your old school reports and exercise books, and the folder of newspaper clippings about when you won the Maths Olympiads and went to Cambridge, your IQ report?’

‘As I say, I didn’t want them.’

‘Then why take them?’

‘Why not take them?’

Simon is always eager to drop in schoolboyish retorts like this. The trick is to become instantly absurd.

‘Would you have taken them had they been roast chickens?’

‘Heh, heh, heh, hnnn. I took them because it’s the sort of thing people do take, isn’t it?’

See? Simple, when you know how.

To Simon, correct conduct is like a wood. It has many trees, which represent how things ought to be done; one tree for each circumstance. It is a large wood, sterile and rather dark. The stormy forest where he goes to hunt for the Monster is infinitely more comforting.

Here’s Simon’s brother!

Hello, Michael!

He doesn’t have much to say.

‘Is it surprising?’ he protests, leaping up, holding out his hand – a strong shake. ‘I’m ten years older than Simon is. We were like different families. I studied chemistry at university, not mathematics; that’s a different language. Simon is interested in chemistry also? Really? I never knew. His favourite element is Boron? I’m surprised! Would you like some tea? Organic Lapsang or elderflower?’

Michael Norton OBE is the author of Writing Better Fundraising Applications, The WorldWide Fundraiser’s Handbook, The Complete Fundraising Handbook and Getting Started in Fundraising. Money – in particular other people’s money – is a big subject in Michael’s life. He wants it to pay for environmental revolution.

His latest book is 365 Ways to Change the World: How to Make a Better World Every Day. Each day of the year is allocated a noble deed:

5 January: ‘Start drinking.’ Reduce ‘beer miles’ by giving up sewage brands like Heineken or Budweiser, and brew your own beer using oysters and wild rice.

22 February: ‘Say no to plastic bags.’ There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic waste in every square mile of the world’s oceans. In Australia, eighty million plastic bags are added every year to the mist of garbage that floats across the scrub there. Cows eat them and die; then the sack re-emerges from the rotting flesh, is cleaned off by rain, scooped back up by wind, and bundled along to be eaten by another cow: it is, biologically speaking, a protovirus. Simon is therefore a force for salvation. He keeps these viruses out of reach. If it weren’t for him, thousands of extra plastic bags from the Excavation would be tumbling through our fields and woodlands.

1 May: ‘Join the sex workers’ union.’ Fight to give prostitutes access to health care, safe places to work and legal support against rapists and pervy Italian prime ministers. ‘Membership is free.’

‘Michael Norton is a one-man “ideas factory”,’ bellows the Guardian.

‘You know, he knows when he comes to dinner here dressed in a dirty T-shirt that he’s doing wrong,’ says Michael, stooping under the lintel of his cottage door (he lives in Hampstead, but the house looks as if it’s been airlifted from beside a village brook in Hampshire) and balancing a tea tray. ‘But there’s no point telling him. You’d physically have to burn his old clothes before he’d get rid of them.’

He’s brought a photograph album into the garden along with the Victoria sponge cake. The album’s green, with a cushioned cover, from 1954, and it’s all the paperwork Michael has that includes Simon. They are not a sentimental family.

‘That’s my hand at the edge there, sorting out his food, even at that age. We’re at our summer bungalow in Ferring. This is David …’. David is a friend who later murdered his wife by bludgeoning her to death with a champagne bottle:

‘And here’s Simon aged … oh dear, not a pleasant-looking young man’:

‘Our mother doted on Simon. She was really proud that he was a genius. I don’t think she ever understood why he didn’t sustain that. I mean, he sustained it in his brain, but why is he not a professor? Why has he not got a proper job?’

‘He’s too peculiar,’ I suggest.

‘He’s not that peculiar,’ retorts Michael sharply, catching me out, correctly, in one of the phrases I have lately come to use about Simon without thinking. ‘There are lots of peculiar people in Cambridge. Half the dons that I had as a student there were peculiar. There must be somewhere that would give him a home.’

He taps his china cup of elderflower irritably.

‘All I can say is that since our mother died, Simon’s become a different person. I noticed that almost immediately. He’s got more sociable. When he comes to dinner, he’s much more at ease. Instead of sitting in a corner reading a book as he did when she was alive, he joins in. I’ve bought him three clean shirts which hang in a wardrobe here, for him to pick up whenever he comes to London.

‘I think my biggest triumph is persuading him to get rid of his money. Did you know, he gives £10,000 a year to campaign against cars?’

Francis Norton, Simon’s middle brother, works here …

… in a jewellery shop.

Francis brings in the family money. The company, founded by Simon’s great-grandfather, is the oldest family-run antique jewellery business in the world, patronised by the Queen, pop stars, fringe aristocracy, footballers (if they know what they’re about) and all London people with 100-acre second homes in Wiltshire.

Ten years before Simon was born, S.J. Phillips established itself as the epitome of Englishness by taking part in a famous wartime deception called Operation Mincemeat, later dramatised in the film The Man Who Never Was.

In April 1943, a Spanish fisherman discovered the decomposing corpse of a man floating off the coast of Andalusia. Documents on the body identified him as Major (Acting) William Martin of the Royal Marines. He was handcuffed to a briefcase, which contained a bunch of keys, an expired military pass, two passionate love letters, a picture of a woman in a swimming costume (‘Bill darling, don’t let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do’), a £53 bill for an engagement ring and a letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten to General Alexander revealing the plans for the Allied invasion of Europe.

Spain, though neutral, supported a very efficient network of German agents. They soon found out about the drowned Marine, got hold of the briefcase and carefully extracted the top-secret letter from its envelope. The British had made the greatest intelligence blunder of the Second World War. With ample time to prepare his defences, Hitler now knew that the Allies were going to invade Europe through Sardinia and the Peloponnesus: the Germans transferred the 1st Panzer Division to Greece and started laying minefields.

It wasn’t until the British got the corpse of Major (Acting) Martin back, a fortnight later, that they knew the Nazis had definitely fallen for the trick. British Intelligence had folded the fake letter to Mountbatten only once before sliding Martin’s dead body into the sea from a submarine off the coast. When the body and effects were returned, investigators spotted under

Excerpt from an interview with Francis and his wife, Amanda

Amanda: When I met the Norton family, I thought they were all so bizarre.

Francis (nodding): My mother was very, very old-fashioned. It was, you know, ‘It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, you can go see your mother.’ We absolutely adored her.

Amanda: They were just so Victorian. I’d never met anything like it in my life.

Francis: My father always said his ideal was to have a tail-coated butler behind every chair.

Amanda: I’ve never known parents who were so unphysical. In the morning Helene, their mother, would go off and do her charity work, then come home and have a long cigarette, put on her kaftan for the afternoon, and sit there doing the crossword puzzle.

Francis: Terribly unfulfilled.

Amanda: I remember once – this is how old-fashioned they were – I’d just had my son Alexander, he was about nine months old, and Dick [Simon and Francis’s father] was standing there, with the table laid with all the silver, and Domingo the butler hovering around. And Dick looks at me and says, ‘Amanda, darling, has Alexander started masticating yet?’

a microscope that the letter had been carefully refolded, creating a second crease.

A month later, Britain and America began their assault 300 miles west of the location indicated in the letter, though Sicily.

S.J. Phillips, Simon’s family firm, provided the £53 engagement-ring bill – it was seen as the touch that the Germans would regard as unfakably, quintessentially English.

Francis is Simon’s saviour. It’s because Francis keeps the family firm alive and profitable that Simon has never had to have a job or a mortgage and, despite using seventeen different variants of bus, train and visitor-attraction discount cards, doesn’t actually need a single one of them.

A mild, self-effacing, apparently undogmatic man (I’ve met him only twice), Francis lives on the other side of Hampstead from brother Michael, and has the talcum-powder-dusted look of the very rich. He is an accomplished cellist.

Every year Francis or Michael invite Simon to their house for Passover; and every year Simon arrives with his shoelaces flapping, his holdall bulging, his bus timetables and his smells, and eats all the parsley.

Now, back to grunts.

The fifth type of grunt emitted by Simon is metaphorical – it’s not a guttural sound, it’s a full sentence. The mathematician Professor John Conway calls it a ‘Thank you, Simon’, defined as ‘a statement that is indubitably true, but the relevance of which is obscure’. For example, in the middle of a discussion with me about whether the Monster might in fact not be a large object at all, but something very small and everywhere, like a flea, Simon will burst out:

‘Incidentally, I was once going on a train and the conductor pronounced that we were now approaching “Manea, the centre of the universe”.’

What can you say after he’s said that? What does he mean? That the flea-Monster, which Simon suspects contains the solution to the symmetry of the universe, is living in Manea, a village in the Cambridgeshire Fens? It can’t be that. Simon is not a lunatic. Maybe it’s just the word, ‘universe’. But he clearly expects some sort of reply. So, after a suitable pause, you murmur, with a slight doff of the head,

‘Thank you, Simon.’

Then you attempt to pick up the pieces of the shattered conversation.

It’s important to realise that this fifth type of grunt never comes about because Simon isn’t able to keep up with the discussion, or because his brain has short-circuited and popped out the non-sequitur in a fizz of misfired neurons. They appear for the opposite reason: he has dashed too far ahead, gone off on a side path, left the ponderous, sequential-talking rest of us behind, raced up into the hills of puns and synonyms and humorous, leapingly interconnected memories … then jumped back with the result, waving his arms and grinning in triumph, like a child ambushing us from behind a tree.

As the fact dawns on Simon that no one has the foggiest idea what he’s talking about, he is not resentful. Politely, he allows the intensity of his grin to slip away. Measuredly, he rejoins the conversation.

(1) Happy, (2) puzzled, (3) incomprehensible, (4) frustrated, (5) phrasal (‘Thank you, Simons’). Sometimes, Simon will go for weeks without offering anything to his biographer but one of these five grunts.

And then, PING!

An email comes.

And behind the grunts, a man.

Monday, February 8th, 9.19pm

I’m sorry, I can’t make head or tail of the last chapter you sent me. I think that any reader who shares my way of thinking will be completely bewildered.

Tuesday, February 9th, 1.17am

I can’t follow the thread of your writing. If I were someone I didn’t know rather than myself, I suspect that in reading it I would have problems following the story even if I could understand the sentences. Incidentally, this is not something I’d say with your previous book. There I could understand your description of Stuart, my problem was you gave me no motivation to understand his character.

Wednesday, February 10th, 12.32am

I’m not sure what you mean [in Chapter 10] by my ‘jocular’ attitude to mathematics, but never mind. You’ve got the calculations wrong – 2⁸ is 256, not 4096, which is 2¹², and the others are similarly shifted. I don’t understand your bit about numbers floating in the sky. No, I haven’t a clue whether it was a right or left leg that the duck was missing.

[This is followed by fifty-two lines explaining the story of the legless duck, which also includes a self-playing piano, an inferno in the Channel Tunnel, admission that he reads a magazine called Cruising Monthly, and a threat of imprisonment by gas inspectors.]

Wednesday, February 10th, 12.48am

I know what the word ‘jocular’ means. What I don’t know is what you mean when you describe my love of mathematics as jocular, I might be jocular, but how can my love of mathematics be? I don’t know what you mean by a ‘Rabelaisian’ series (and don’t say ‘in the style of Rabelais’!). However, unlike you I do know how to spell the word.

eSimon, the Simon who logs on to his computer at one in the morning, is a different man to Simon the grunter: eloquent, fluent, conversational, reflective, poignant, sometimes funny and – if the subject matter has anything to do with my attempts to understand genius, popularise mathematics or write biography – acerbic.

Simon’s interview with Kevin, resident of Cambourne, in 2016 (An example of Simon’s clear, fluent, amusing writing style. Abridged from an editorial (2006) in his Public Transport Newsletter, which he writes and publishes three or four times a year.)

Q: What decided you to move to Cambourne (a village outside Cambridge)?

A: We chose Cambourne because there was a direct bus link to my job in Papworth, and we could also get buses to St Neots for trains to London. It also seemed a good place for my wife’s ageing parents. And we hoped our house would be a good investment – its value would have gone up had the east–west rail link been built close to the A428, as recommended by the London-South Midlands Multi-Modal Study.

Q: But I gather things then went sour.

A: Yes. In 2005 the bus links to Papworth and St Neots were reduced, and I found I had to cycle in most days. The main road was very unpleasant, and the side route via Elsworth took twice as long. Then in 2006 came the Council’s budget cuts to buses. In 2007 the A428 dual carriageway opened, our road became an ‘overspill A14’, and Madingley Road became clogged, making our buses increasingly erratic.

Q: But things are better now, aren’t they?

A: Yes, in one sense. The big stores left the city centre because they realised people didn’t want to have to put up with gridlock every time they went shopping. But there’s the downside that it’s now much harder to get to the shops by public transport. Nor could we use internet shopping as there was rarely anyone in the house to accept deliveries, apart from my mother-in-law who was often asleep, and even when she was awake she could never get to the door on time.

Q: How have your family been coping?

A: My father-in-law died in the bird flu epidemic. My mother-in-law has become increasingly frail. Visiting the children in Oxford and London is a problem – the bus to Oxford has been taking ever longer because of growing congestion, and it’s a long walk from the city centre to the rail station. For a time we tried the coach, but then they moved the coach terminal to the rail station too …

Q: Have you ever thought of buying a car?

A: Yes, often. But then we’d ask, how could we face our children knowing we’d helped to ruin the world for them? Our generation has badly betrayed our children’s.

Q: I gather you’re leaving Cambourne soon?

A: Yes, we’ll move to London or Oxford as soon as we’ve settled on a place for my mother-in-law. Good riddance – to the Cambridge area I mean, of course!

see www.cambsbettertransport.org.uk/newsletter93.html for the full version.