Читать книгу Anna and the Black Knight: Incorporating Anna’s Book - Fynn - Страница 7

I told the story of Anna in Mister God, This is Anna. This is how it was. Anna and I found each other in one of these pea soup, foggy nights in November. I can’t remember the precise date, it was probably in 1935. I used to wander around the docklands of East London night after night. It was a nice quiet thinking place, and often I needed to think.

It wasn’t at all unusual to find a child roaming the streets at that hour – in the 1930s it was just like that. When I had taken her home, and after she had washed the dirt from her face and hands, I really saw her – a very pretty little red-haired child, but as she later told me, ‘that’s on the outside’. It took me a very long time to know her on the inside, as she demanded to be known.

The relentless pursuit of beauty engaged the few short years of Anna’s life. It was at first a little strange to be told that a picture smelt good, but I soon got used to that. Anything that delighted all your senses at once was, for Anna, God! And the microscope was a special way of seeing him.

So it was that Anna found God in the strangest of places – tram tickets, grass, mathematics and even the dirt on her hands, and then somebody told you to wash it off!

Whatever satisfied Anna’s idea of beauty had to be preserved, written down by anyone who was prepared to do so, and saved in one of her numerous shoe boxes. Every so often these boxes were placed on the kitchen table and the contents sorted out.

Where she got the idea of beauty I do not know. In those years the East End of London was, for most people, a grimy, dirty place, but for Anna it was just beautiful. Anna spent most of her efforts in turning the ugly into the beautiful. This often meant inventing a whole new situation into which the ugly facts could be transformed.

It was beauty that really drew Anna and me together. I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t been totally absorbed with the subject of mathematics. In fact, I’d rather ‘do’ mathematics than eat or sleep. Old John D., who taught me mathematics for seven years, once defined it as ‘the pursuit of pure beauty’. Although I liked that as a definition, it wasn’t until Anna had been with us for about two years that I really grasped what that meant. Anna and I were sitting at the kitchen table whilst I was working out the reciprocal of seventeen, which is another way of saying one divided by seventeen, which in the nature of things gave me another number, which was what I was after.

A little while later it occurred to Anna to ask what happens if you divide one by the number you’ve found? We worked it out the hard way. The answer was seventeen!! So often we sat at the kitchen table, Anna sitting on her curled up legs, chin cupped in her hands, whilst we ‘worked out things’.

One evening, after we had been doing things on pieces of paper, she suddenly announced ‘It is just beautiful ideas’. I don’t accept that entirely, but I do accept G. G. Hardy when he says ‘there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics’.

Although I was considerably older than Anna, this pursuit of pure beauty made us companions in our explorations.

Her life was a continuous quest for knowledge and understanding as well as for beauty. Any thing or person that could answer her question would be stored in boxes or asked to ‘write it down big’. This request to ‘write it down big’ did mean that her collection of writings were often spelt in various ways – not always right – but that didn’t really matter. Often what had been written on her bits of paper were the kinds of things that grown ups would say. Adults’ words on the lips of a six year old child were a bit puzzling at times, but Anna worked on the basis of ‘if it says the right thing in the right way, use it, if not scrap it’.

During the years that Anna lived with me and my Mum and our changing household she wrestled with words and sentences to fit her ideas. It took me some time to realize that although we lived in the same world we saw it in different ways. Everything was for Anna a means of understanding ‘what it was all about’. Grown ups had called her jackdaw, or parrot, little monkey, sprite – she was certainly all of these things but, more than these, she was a child.