Читать книгу Anna and the Black Knight: Incorporating Anna’s Book - Fynn - Страница 8

Although Anna went to church and Sunday School she was often more than a little irritated by this experience. It didn’t seem to matter to her that God was meant to be the Creator, all powerful and loving, etc. Anna saw God as something other than this. God wasn’t good because he loved or was just. God was good because he was beautiful. The very nature of God was pure beauty.

It was at first a bit of an ordeal taking Anna to church, for it was the chess board flooring that grasped her, more than any preacher’s words. As she once told me ‘it makes you tingle all over’, and whatever made you tingle all over was very close to God.

What bothered Anna so much about going to church was the fact that so many people seemed to be looking for miracles. For Anna everything was a miracle and the greatest miracle was that she was living in it.

I dont like to go to cherch very much and I do not go becase I do not think Mister God is in cherch and if I was Mister God I would not go.

Peple in cherch are miserable becase peple sin misrable songs and misrable prers and peple make Mister God a very big bully and he is not becase he is not a big bully becase he is funy and luving and kind and strong. When you look to Fin it is like wen you lok to Mister God but Fin is like a very baby God and Mister God is hunderd time bigger, so you can tell how nice Mister God is.

Anna divided numbers up into People Numbers and God Numbers. People Numbers were fairly easy to understand and fairly easy to work out. On the other hand, God Numbers were even easier to understand, but sometimes impossible to work out.

Anna seldom played with what would be recognized as the usual toys these days. The exceptions to this were her rag doll, her paints and my old train set. This consisted of one engine, one coal-tender and eight trucks. She played with them for about a week and then put them back into the box.

It was at this point that God Numbers started to appear. Anna asked, ‘How many different ways can I join together the engine, the coal-tender and the eight trucks?’ I told her how to arrive at the answer. It turned out to be somewhat bigger than she anticipated and so she thought the final answer went into the realm of God Numbers. It was 3,628,800 and this was merely the result of finding out how many different ways ten articles could be arranged in a straight line. It didn’t take her very long to realize that there would be a lot of questions with People Numbers that were going to land you up to your neck in God Numbers.

Peple say Mister God is like a king but fancy King Gorge coming down our street, I bet he do not know were our stret is is and I bet he do not know me. But Mister God know, Mister God know our stret and Fin and Mily and Twink and Pilet and all the darling flotkins. And I bet Mister God know the mark on my face even.

Anna had many friends in the neighbouring streets. Two of them were a little girl about four years old, Pilet, who was often called ‘Pill’ and her baby brother William, who was always known as ‘Twink’. All the children were known as ‘flotkins’. The poor of the East End were often referred to as ‘the flotsam of society’. Anna’s friends Henriques and Niels called the kids ‘die Kinder’ and the two words became ‘flotkins’.

Because of the poverty in the East End at that time it was rare that any child had a new toy; most of the time it was a question of pretending that cardboard boxes could be anything you wished them to be. Many of the younger children joined in these games of ‘let’s pretend’.

One of the things that I had made was a device for blowing bubbles. With this I could produce a constant stream of fairly large soap bubbles – these the children would chase and burst with their hands, cricket bats, rolled up newspapers, etc. Twink’s special instrument was a wire fly swat. Although these games could and did last as long as an hour or two, some of the children saw in these bubbles all the colours of the rainbow and realized the beauty of them. Some, Anna in particular, saw reflections. It was my efforts to explain to Anna just how these reflections came about that made me buy a garden globe for her. This garden globe was about eighteen inches in diameter, made of silvered glass. She soon realized that the images at the edge of the globe were, to use her own words, ‘squashed up’. What was never and could never be seen as a reflection in this global mirror was the bit behind the globe. It was for Anna an indication that it was here that Mister God lived.

Anna put together the idea of the garden globe, soap bubbles, glass Christmas tree decorations and finally highly polished ball bearings, which did exactly the same kind of thing, as everything could be reflected in a small ball bearing – that is, except the bit where Mister God lived. It was clear to Anna that everything that God had made could be reflected in a ball bearing. Being such a tiny thing it could easily be put in your pocket or even your ear, couldn’t it?

I did not go to cherch on Sunday becase I did not want to go and Fin tuk me on a trane to a big forist. It is a wondfull forist and Fin cudle me and tell sum wondfull story about Mister God and it was better than Sunday school. In cherch people make Mister God big and big and big and Mister God get so big that you dont know, but Fin make Mister God so little, he get in your eye.

This would have been Epping Forest.

In the forist I see sum rabit and sum bager and a lot of bird and sum deer and a ded one too, but I did not see no peple becase they was in the boozer and wen I saw the ded deer it make me cry a bit and Fin say it is sily to cry for ded thing but I can cry for peple in the boozer. Fin say to tuch the ded deer and I tuch the ded deer and it Puft like face powdr all up my nos. Wen it gos all to powdr it gos into dirt and then the gras gros in it and then the shep eat the gras and then I eat the shep and so I eat the ded deer and because Mister God make it all, I eat Mister God all time like the people do in cherch. But mine is better becase I do it all the time. Not only sometimes like they do in cherch but every time.

One of Anna’s problems was the fact that things had a habit of changing shapes, from frog spawn to frogs, from caterpillars to butterflies; dead rabbits she had seen in Epping Forest certainly changed their shapes. Even in the house near to us with the green painted woodwork, the house that Anna called the ‘green house’ was slowly changing its appearance and shape. It seemed to Anna that everything needed its shape to live in. I could, of course, have tried to explain the word ‘decay’ but I didn’t. Anna concluded that when a thing changed its shape it was because it had something else to do for Mister God. For Anna, death was just one of those things that happened. Death was that point in life when you began to change shape. Anna and I had sat by Old Granny Harding as she died; changing shape sometimes took a long time, a very long time. Even if Anna never knew what shape Granny Harding changed into, who would argue with her? Not me. After all, if Mister God wanted it, it must be good.

I asked Fin where do the shape (of the deer) go to? And Fin say about the green hous and Fin say becase no one is in it to look after the shape, it start to fall down becase mows and rat go in and they want their shape and they make hols and the shape go to another shape. So wen the deer gos out of its shape, som more thing go in for another shape. And it do too! becase we see a ded rabit shape that was full up of worms and betels and spidres to make another shape and every shape is Mister God shape, but Mister God has not got a propre shape. Mister God is like a pensil, but not like a pensil you can see, but like a pensil you can not see, so you not see what shape it is, but it can draw all the shapes ther is and this is like Mister God. When you grow up you get a bit funy becase you want Mister God to have a propre shape like an old man and wiskers and wrinkels on his face but Mister God do not look like that.

When Twink play tranes, he have a big wood box. Sumtime the box is like a trane and somtime lik a house and sumtime like a ship and sumtime like a car and sum-time you put sum thing in it and sumtime you do not, but you take sumthing out. And the box is like Mister God. Sumtime it luk like sumthing and sumtime is luk like another thing. If you say Mister God is green then Mister God cannot be red, but he is. If you say Mister God is big, how can you say Mister God is litle, but he is. And if you say Mister God is fat, you can not say Mister God is thin, ha! ha! ha! but he is too so! How can you say of Mister God, becase you can not. But I can becase I have a sekrit book Fin give to me. It is a pictur book all about snow flak and every snowflak is not the same. If you look at a snowflak shape it is not the same as another snowflak shape, so it has not got a propre snowflak shape. But you can only call it snow and you can not call it a shape and you see THAT IS LIKE MISTER GOD. You can not call Mister God a thing and you can not call Mister God a shape and you can only call Mister God Mister God.