Читать книгу Mister God, This is Anna - Papas - Страница 7

During the next few weeks we tried to find out by a bit of cunning questioning where Anna lived. The gentle approach, the sideways approach, the sneeky approach, all proved to be useless. It seemed quite possible that she had just dropped out of heaven. I was ready to believe this to be true, but Stan, being much more practical than me, didn’t agree at all. The only certain thing we knew was that she wasn’t going to no bleeding cop shop. By this time I was sure that I had initiated this idea. After all, you don’t find an orchid and then put it in the cellar. It wasn’t that any of us had anything against the cops, far from it. In those days cops were more like official friends, even if they did clip you round the ear with a glove full of dried peas if they caught you up to any funny stuff. No, as I said, you can’t lock a sunbeam in the dark. Besides, we all wanted her to stay.

By this time Anna was a firm favourite down our street. Whenever the kids played team-games like four sticks everyone wanted Anna on their side. She had a natural aptitude for all games: whip tops, skipping, fag cards. What she couldn’t do with a hoop and a skimmer wasn’t worth doing.

Our street, twenty houses big, was a regular United Nations; the only colours in kids we didn’t have were green ones and blue ones, we had nearly every other colour. Our street was a nice street. Nobody had any money, but in all the years I lived there, I can never remember anyone’s front-door being shut in the daytime, or, for that matter, for most of the night either. It was a nice street to live in and all the people were friendly, but after a few weeks of Anna the street and the people in it took on a buttercup glow.

Even our boss-eyed cat, Bossy, mellowed. Bossy was a fighting tabby with lace-edged ears who regarded all humans as inferiors, but under Anna’s influence Bossy started to stay at home more often and very soon treated Anna as an equal. I could stand by the back-door and yell myself silly for Bossy, but he wouldn’t budge for me, but for Anna, well, that was a different thing. One call and he simply materialized with an idiot grin on his face.

Bossy was about twelve pounds of fighting fury, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. The cat’s-meat man used to leave the meat under the knocker, wrapped up in newspaper. Bossy used to lurk in the dark passageway, or under the stairs, waiting for someone to reach up for the cat’s meat, at which moment he would launch himself like a fury, all teeth and claws, using whatever was available to get up to his meal. If a human leg or arm could be used to claw his way up to the meat, Bossy would use it. Anna tamed him in one day. She lectured him with an admonishing finger on the vice of gluttony and the virtues of patience and good manners. In the end Bossy could make his meal last for about five minutes, with Anna feeding him bit by bit, instead of the usual thirty seconds. As for Patch the dog, he sat for hours practising beating new rhythms with his tail.

In the back-garden was an odd collection of rabbits, pigeons, fan-tailed doves, frogs, and a couple of grass-snakes. The back-garden, or ‘The Yard’ as it was called, was for the East End a fairly sizeable place. A bit of grass and a few flowers and a large tree some forty feet high. All in all Anna had quite a lot to practise her magic on. But no one fell under her spell more completely or willingly than me. My work, which was in oils, was not more than five minutes’ walk away from home, so I was always home for dinner at about 12.30. Up to this time the answer to Mum’s question as to what time I would be home that night as I left for the afternoon’s stint had been ‘Some time before midnight’. Now things were different. I was seen off by Anna from the top of the street, kissed wetly, promising to be back about six in the evening. Knocking-off time usually meant a few pints in the pub on the way home and a few games of darts with Cliff and George, but not now. When the hooter went I was off home. I didn’t run exactly but walked very briskly.

That walk home was a pleasure; every step was one step nearer. The road I had to travel curved to the left in a gentle arc, and I had to walk just more than half the distance before the top of our turning came into sight, and there she was. Come rain or shine, snow or icy wind, Anna was always there, not once did she miss this meeting, except – but that comes later. I doubt if ever lovers met more joyously. When she saw me coming round the bend of the road she came to meet me.

Anna’s ability to polish any situation was truly extraordinary. She had some uncanny knack of doing the right thing at the right time to get the most out of an occasion. I’ve always thought that children ran towards those they loved, but not Anna. When she saw me she started to walk towards me, not too slowly, but not too quickly. My first sight of her was too far away to distinguish her features; she might have been any other child, but she wasn’t. Her beautiful copper hair stood out for miles, there was no mistaking her.

After her first few weeks with us she always wore a deep-green ribbon in her hair for this meeting. Looking back, I feel sure that the walk towards me was deliberate and calculated. She had grasped the meaning of these meetings and seen almost instantly just how much to dramatize them, how long to prolong them in order to wring out their total content. For me this minute or two of walk towards her had a rounded-off perfection; no more could be added to it, and nothing could be taken away without completely destroying it.

Whatever it was she projected across that intervening space was almost solid. Her bobbing hair, the twinkle in her eyes, that enormous and impudent grin, flicked like a high-voltage charge across the space that separated us. Sometimes she would, without any words, just touch my hand in greeting; sometimes the last few steps transformed her, she let everything go with one gigantic explosion, and flung herself at me. So many times she would stop just in front of me and hold out her closed hands. I learned rapidly what to expect on these occasions. It meant that she had found something that had moved her. We would stop and inspect whatever the day’s find was – perhaps a beetle, a caterpillar, or a stone. We would look silently, heads bowed over today’s treasure. Her eyes were large deep pools of questions. How? Why? What? I’d meet her gaze and nod my head; this was enough, she’d nod in reply.

The first time this happened, my heart seemed to come off its hook. I struggled to hold on. I wanted to put my arms around her to comfort her. Happily, I managed to do the right thing. I guess some passing angel nudged me at the right moment. Unhappiness is to be comforted, and so perhaps too is fear, but these particular moments with Anna were moments of pure and undiluted wonder. These were her own and very private moments which she chose to share with me, and I was honoured to share them with her. I could not comfort her, I would not have dared to trespass. All that I could do was to see as she saw, to be moved as she was moved. That kind of suffering you must bear alone. As she said so simply, ‘It’s for me and Mister God’, and there’s no answer to that.

The evening meal at home was more or less fixed. Mum, being the daughter of an Irish farmer, was given to making stews. A large black iron pot and an equally large black iron kettle were the two most used utensils in the kitchen. Often the only way one could distinguish the stew from the brew was that tea always came in large cups and stew was put on plates. Here the difference ended, for the brew often had as much solid matter in it as did the stew.

Mum was a great believer in the saying that ‘Nature grows cures for everything’. There wasn’t a weed, or a flower, or a leaf that wasn’t a specific cure for some ailment or other. Even the outside shed was pressed into use for growing cobwebs. Some people have sacred cows or sacred cats, Mum had sacred spiders. I never quite understood the reasoning concerning spiders’ webs, but all cuts and abrasions were plastered with spiders’ webs. If spiders’ webs were not available there were always fag papers under the clock in the kitchen. These were well licked and stuck over the cut. Our house was littered with bottles of juices, dried leaves and bunches of this, that and the other, hanging from the ceiling. All ailments were treated the same way – rub it, lick it, or if you can’t lick it, spit on it, or ‘Drink this, it’ll do you good’.

Whatever the value of these things, one thing was certain, nobody was ever ill. The only time the doctor entered our house was when something was suspected of being broken, and when Stan was born. No matter that the brew, or to give it its full title, ‘the darlin’ brew’, and the stew looked the same, they tasted wonderful and meals were certainly man-sized.

Mum and Anna shared many likes and dislikes; perhaps the simplest and the most beautiful sharing was their attitude towards Mister God. Most people I knew used God as an excuse for their failure. ‘He should have done this’, or ‘Why has God done this to me?’, but with Mum and Anna difficulties and adversities were merely occasions for doing something. Ugliness was the chance to make beautiful. Sadness was the chance to make glad. Mister God was always available to them. A stranger would have been excused for believing that Mister God lived with us, but then Mum and Anna believed he did. Very rarely did any conversation exclude Mister God in some way or other.

After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting and by and large fun. Reading the Bible wasn’t a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn’t much point in going over and over the same old ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what God is?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is God then?’

‘He’s God!’

‘Do you go to church?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I know it all!’

‘What do you know?’

‘I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees’, and the catalogue went on, ‘– with all of me.’

Carol grinned at me and Stan made a face and I hurriedly put a cigarette in my mouth and indulged in a bout of coughing. There’s nothing much you can do in the face of that kind of accusation, for that’s what it amounted to. (‘Out of the mouths of babes …’) Anna had bypassed all the non-essentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence – ‘And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don’t forget to love yourself.’

The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn’t everywhere, he wasn’t anywhere. For her, church-going and ‘Mister God’ talks had no necessary connection. For her the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn’t got the message, or didn’t understand it, or it was ‘just for swank’.

After the evening meal I always read to Anna, books on all manner of subjects from poetry to astronomy. After a year of reading, she ended up with three favourite books. The first was a large picture-book with nothing in it but photographs of snowflakes and frost patterns. The second book was Cruden’s Complete Concordance, and the third, of all the strange books to choose, was Manning’s Geometry of Four Dimensions. Each of these books had a catalytic effect on Anna. She devoured them utterly, and out of their digestion she produced her own philosophy.

One of her pleasures was my reading to her that part of the concordance given over to the meaning of proper names. Each name was read in strict alphabetical order and the meaning given. After each name had been tasted and thought over she made her decision as to its rightness. Most times she shook her head sadly and disappointedly; it wasn’t good enough. Sometimes it was just right; the name, the person, the meaning, all fitted perfectly for her and, with a burst of excitement, she would bounce up and down on my lap and say, ‘Put it down, put it down.’ This meant writing the name in large block capitals on a slip of paper, which she would stare at with complete concentration for a minute or two and then place in one of her many boxes. A moment to compose herself, and, ‘Next one, please.’ So we would go on. Some names took all of fifteen minutes or more to decide one way or the other. The decision was made in complete silence. On the occasions when I moved to a more comfortable position, or started to speak, I was reprimanded with a tilt of the head, a full-blooded stare and a small finger placed gently but firmly on my lips. I learned to wait patiently. It took us about four months to work through the section on proper names, moments of high excitement and moments of low disappointment, none of which I understood at that time. Later I was let into the secret.

Since our first meeting God had been given the title Mister God; the Holy Spirit, for some reason only known to her, was given the name Vrach. I rarely heard her use the name Jesus. Whenever she referred to Jesus it was as Mister God’s boy. One evening we were working our way through the J’s and came eventually to Jesus. I had hardly got the name out before I was stopped by a ‘No!’, a wagging finger and ‘Next one, please.’ Who was I to argue? I pressed on. The next name on the list was JETHER. I had to pronounce this three times, and then turning to me she said, ‘Read what it says.’ So I read:

‘JETHER meaning he that excels or remains, or that examines, searches, or a line or string.’

The effect of this was electric, catastrophic. With a blur of movement she had slipped off my lap, twisted about to face me and stood crouched with hands clenched, the whole of her being shaking with excitement. For one horrifying moment I thought she was ill or having a fit, but that wasn’t the explanation. Whatever the explanation was it went deeper than anything I could understand. She was filled with joy. She kept saying, ‘It’s true. I know it. It’s true. It’s true. I know it.’ With that she fled out into the yard. I made to go out after her but Mum put out a hand and held me back, saying, ‘Leave her alone, she’s happy. She’s got the “eye”.’ Half an hour passed before she returned. Without a word she climbed on to my lap, gave me one of her special grins and said, ‘Please write the name big for me tonight,’ and then went to sleep. She didn’t even wake up when I put her to bed. It was months before the word epilepsy faded from my thoughts.

Mum always said that she pitied the girl that I married, for she would have to put up with my three mistresses – Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Gadgetry. I would rather read and practise these subjects than eat or sleep. I never bought myself a wrist-watch or a fountain-pen, and very rarely did I buy new clothes, but I never went anywhere without a slide-rule. This device fascinated Anna and soon she had to have a slip-stick of her own. Having mastered the whole business of counting numbers, she was soon extracting roots with the aid of her slip-stick before she could add two numbers together. Users of slip-sticks soon fall into a stable method of using this device. It’s held in the left hand, leaving the right hand free to hold the pencil; the ‘cursor’ can be moved with the thumb and the sliding-scale tapped against the work-bench. One of my particular pleasures was seeing the copper-crowned diminutive child doing her ‘workings out’, as she called it – looking down from a height of six foot or more and saying, ‘How you doing, Tich?’, seeing her head screw round and upward and watching one delicious wiggle start from her toes, pass up her body, to be tossed off the top of her head in a foam of silky copper thread, with a grin of absolute joy.

Some evenings were given over to piano-playing. I play a fairly good honky-tonk piano, a bit of Mozart, a bit of Chopin, and a few pieces like ‘Anitra’s Dance’ just for good measure. On the top of the piano were several electronic devices. One device, the oscilloscope, held all the magic of a fairy wand for Anna. We’d sit in this room for hours on end playing single notes, watching the green spot on the ‘scope do its glowing dance. The whole exercise of relating sounds that one heard with the ears to the visual shape of those sounds actively seen on the little tube’s face was a source of never-ending delight.

What sounds we captured, Anna and I! A caterpillar chewing a leaf was like a hungry lion, a fly in a jam-jar sounded like an airship, a match being struck sounded like an explosion. All these sounds and a thousand more were amplified and made available, both in sound form and visible form. Anna had found a brand new world to explore. How much meaning it had for her I didn’t know, perhaps it was only an elaborate plaything for her, but her squeals of delight were enough for me.

It was only some time during the next summer that I began to realize that the concepts of frequency and wavelength were meaningful to her, that she did, in fact, know and understand what she was hearing and looking at. One summer afternoon all the kids were playing in the street when a large bumble-bee appeared on the scene.

One of the kids said, ‘How many times does it flap its wings in a minute?’

‘Must be millions,’ said another kid.

Anna dashed indoors humming a low-pitched hum. I was sitting on the doorstep. With a few quick prods at the piano she had identified the note, her hum and the drone of the bee. Coming to the door again, she said, ‘Can I have your slip-stick?’ In a moment or two she shouted out, ‘A bee flaps its wings such-and-such times a second.’ Nobody believed her, but she was only a few counts out.

Every sound that could be captured was captured. Meals began to be punctuated with such remarks as, ‘Do you know a mosquito flaps its wings so many times a second? or a fly so many times a second?’

All these games led inevitably to making music. Each separate note had by this time been examined minutely, and a sound depended on how many times it wiggled per second. Soon she was making little melodies to which I added the harmonies. Little pieces of music entitled ‘Mummy’, ‘Mr Jether’s Dance’, and ‘Laughter’ soon began to echo around the house. Anna had begun to compose. I suppose Anna only had one problem in her little life – the lack of hours per day. There was too much to do, too many exciting things to find out.

Another of Anna’s magic carpets was the microscope. It revealed a little world made big. A world of intricate shape and pattern, a world of creatures too small to see with the naked eye; even the very dirt itself was wonderful.

Before all this adventuring into these hidden worlds, Mister God had been Anna’s friend and companion, but now, well this was going a bit too far. If Mister God had done all this, he was something larger than Anna had bargained for. It needed a bit of thinking about. For the next few weeks activity slowed down; she still played with the other children in the street; she was still as sweet and exciting as ever, but she became more inward-looking, more inclined to sit alone, high in the tree in the yard, with only Bossy as her companion. Whichever way she looked there seemed to be more and more of everything.

During these few weeks Anna slowly took stock of all she knew, walking about gently touching things as if looking for some clue that she had missed. She didn’t talk much in this period. In reply to questions she answered as simply as she could, apologizing for her absence by the gentlest of smiles, saying without words, ‘I’m sorry about all this. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve sorted this little puzzle out.’ Finally the whole thing came to a head.

She turned to me. ‘Can I come to bed with you tonight?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘Now,’ she replied.

She hopped off my lap, took my hand, and pulled me to the door. I went.

I haven’t told you Anna’s way of solving problems, have I? If Anna was confronted with a situation that didn’t come out easily, there was only one thing to do – take your clothes off. So there we were in bed, the street lamp lighting up the room, her head cupped in her hands, and both elbows firmly planted on my chest. I waited. She chose to remain like that for about ten minutes, getting her argument in its proper order, and then she launched forth.

‘Mister God made everything, didn’t he?’

There was no point in saying that I didn’t really know. I said ‘Yes.’

‘Even the dirt and the stars and the animals and the people and the trees and everything, and the pollywogs?’ The pollywogs were those little creatures that we had seen under the microscope.

I said, ‘Yes, he made everything.’

She nodded her agreement. ‘Does Mister God love us truly?’

‘Sure thing,’ I said. ‘Mister God loves everything.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well then, why does he let things get hurt and dead?’ Her voice sounded as if she felt she had betrayed a sacred trust, but the question had been thought and it had to be spoken.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘There’s a great many things about Mister God that we don’t know about.’

‘Well then,’ she continued, ‘if we don’t know many things about Mister God, how do we know he loves us?’

I could see that this was going to be one of those times, but thank goodness she didn’t expect an answer to her question for she hurried on: ‘Them pollywogs, I could love them till I bust, but they wouldn’t know, would they? I’m million times bigger than they are and Mister God is million times bigger than me, so how do I know what Mister God does?’

She was silent for a little while. Later I thought that at this moment she was taking her last look at babyhood. Then she went on:

‘Fynn, Mister God doesn’t love us.’ She hesitated. ‘He doesn’t really, you know, only people can love. I love Bossy, but Bossy don’t love me. I love the polly-wogs, but they don’t love me. I love you, Fynn, and you love me, don’t you?’

I tightened my arm about her.

‘You love me because you are people. I love Mister God truly, but he don’t love me.’

It sounded to me like a death-knell. ‘Damn and blast,’ I thought. ‘Why does this have to happen to people? Now she’s lost everything.’ But I was wrong. She had got both feet planted firmly on the next stepping-stone.

‘No,’ she went on, ‘no, he don’t love me, not like you do, it’s different, it’s millions of times bigger.’

I must have made some movement or noise for she levered herself upright and sat on her haunches and giggled. Then she launched herself at me and undid my little pang of hurt, cut out the useless spark of jealousy with the delicate sureness of a surgeon.

‘Fynn, you can love better than any people that ever was, and so can I, can’t I? But Mister God is different. You see, Fynn, people can only love outside and can only kiss outside, but Mister God can love you right inside, and Mister God can kiss you right inside, so it’s different. Mister God ain’t like us; we are a little bit like Mister God, but not much yet.’

It seemed to me to reduce itself to the fact that we were like God because of some similarities but God was not like us because of our difference. Her inner fires had refined her ideas, and like some alchemist she had turned lead into gold. Gone were all the human definitions of God, like Goodness, Mercy, Love and Justice, for these were merely props to describe the indescribable.

‘You see, Fynn, Mister God is different from us because he can finish things and we can’t. I can’t finish loving you because I shall be dead millions of years before I can finish, but Mister God can finish loving you, and so it’s not the same kind of love, is it? Even Mister Jether’s love is not the same as Mister God’s because he only came here to make us remember.’

The first salvo was enough for me; it all needed a bit of thinking about, but I wasn’t going to be spared the rest of her artillery.

‘Fynn, why do people have fights and wars and things?’

I explained to the best of my ability.

‘Fynn, what is the word for when you see it in a different way?’

After a minute or two scrabbling about, the precise phrase she wanted was dredged out of me, the phrase ‘point of view’.

‘Fynn, that’s the difference. You see, everybody has got a point of view, but Mister God hasn’t. Mister God has only points to view.’

At this moment my one desire was to get up and go for a long, long walk. What was this child up to? What had she done? In the first place, God could finish things off, I couldn’t. I’ll accept that, but what did it mean? It seemed to me that she had taken the whole idea of God outside the limitation of time and placed him firmly in the realm of eternity.

What about this difference between ‘a point of view’ and ‘points to view’? This stumped me, but a little further questioning cleared up the mystery. ‘Points to view’ was a clumsy term. She meant ‘viewing points’. The second salvo had been fired. Humanity in general had an infinite number of points of view, whereas Mister God had an infinite number of viewing points. When I put it to her this way and asked her if that was what she meant, she nodded her agreement and then waited to see if I enjoyed the taste. Let me see now. Humanity has an infinite number of points of view. God has an infinite number of viewing points. That means that – God is everywhere. I jumped.

Anna burst into peals of laughter. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘you see?’ I did too.

‘There’s another way that Mister God is different.’ We obviously hadn’t finished yet. ‘Mister God can know things and people from the inside too. We only know them from the outside, don’t we? So you see, Fynn, people can’t talk about Mister God from the outside; you can only talk about Mister God from the inside of him.’

Another fifteen minutes or so were spent in polishing up these arguments and then, with an ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she kissed me and tucked herself under my arm, ready for sleep.

About ten minutes later: ‘Fynn?’

‘Yes?’

‘Fynn, you know that book about four dimensions?’

‘Yes, what about it?’

‘I know where number four is; it goes inside me.’

I’d had enough for that night, and said with all the firmness and authority I could muster: ‘Go to sleep now, that’s enough talking for tonight. Go to sleep or I’ll paddle your bottom.’

She made a little screech, looked at me, and grinned and squirmed in closer to me. ‘You wouldn’t!’ she said sleepily.

Anna’s first summer with us was days of adventures and visits. We visited Southend-on-Sea, Kew Gardens, the Kensington Museum and a thousand other places, most times alone, but sometimes with a gang of other kids. Our first excursion outside the East End was ‘up the other end’. For anyone not familiar with that term it simply means west of Aldgate pump.

On this occasion she was dressed in a tartan skirt with shirt-blouse, a black tammy, black shoes with large shiny buckles and tartan socks. The skirt was tightly pleated so that a twirl produced a parachutelike effect. Anna walked like a pro, jumped like Bambi, flew like a bird, and balanced like a daring tightrope-walker on the curbs. Anna copied her walk from Millie, who was a pro, head held high, the slight sway of body making her skirts swing, a smile on her face, a twinkle in her eye, and – you were defenceless. People looked and people smiled. Anna was a burst of sunlight after weeks of gloom. Of course people smiled, they couldn’t help it. Anna was completely aware of these glances from passers-by, occasionally turning her head to look at me with a big, big grin of pleasure. Danny said she never walked, she made a royal progress. Her progress was halted from time to time by her subjects: stray pussies, dogs, pigeons and horses, to say nothing of postmen, milk-men, bus-conductors and policemen.

As we walked west of Aldgate pump the buildings got grander and bigger and Anna’s mouth opened further and further. She walked round and round in small circles, she walked backwards, sideways and every way. Finally she stopped in bewilderment, tugged at my sleeve, and asked, ‘Does kings and queens live in them and are they all palaces?’

She didn’t find the Bank of England very impressive, nor for that matter St Paul’s; the pigeons won hands down. After a little talk we decided to go into the service. She was very uncomfortable, fidgeting about the whole while. As soon as the service was over we hurried outside and made straight for the pigeons. She sat on the pavement and fed them with great pleasure. I stood a few paces off and just watched her. Her eyes flicked from place to place, at the doors of the cathedral, the passers-by, the traffic and the pigeons. Occasionally she tossed her head in disapproval of something. I looked about me to see what it was that affected her so much. There was nothing that I could see which would account for her mood.

After some months I could now read her distress signal accurately. That sharp little toss of the head wasn’t a good sign. To me it always looked as if she was trying to dislodge some unpleasant thought in the same way that one might shake a money-box to get the coins out.

I went over to her and stood waiting. Most times just being near her was all the trigger she needed. The move towards her wasn’t in order to give her counsel. Long ago I had given that up. Her reply to the question, ‘What’s up, Tich?’ was invariably the same: ‘I can get it, I think.’ On those occasions when she couldn’t get the answers, then and only then would she ask questions. No, my reason for moving over to her was simply that my ears were at the ready if she needed them. She didn’t, and that was a very bad sign.

From St Paul’s we moved off towards Hyde Park. After all these months I was beginning to be rather proud of the fact that more and more I was learning to think along with Anna. I was beginning to understand the way she thought and the way she said things. This particular afternoon I had forgotten, no, not forgotten, hadn’t realized one simple fact. It was this. Up to now Anna’s visual horizon had been one of houses, factories, cranes and a toppling inwards of structure. Suddenly there were the open, and to her, the very open, spaces of the park. I wasn’t ready for her reaction. She took one look, buried her face in my stomach, grabbed me with both hands, and howled. I picked her up and she clung to me like a limpet, arms tight around my neck and legs around my waist, sobbing into my neck. I made all the appropriate noises, but this didn’t help much.

After a few minutes she took a sneaky look over her shoulder and stopped crying.

I said, ‘Want to go home, Tich?’ and she shook her head.

‘You can put me down now,’ she said.

I think I had expected her to give one whoop and gallop off across the grass. A couple of hearty sniffs and a moment or two to gain her composure, and we started off to explore the park, but she held on to my hand very tightly. Like any other child, Anna had her fears, but unlike most children she recognized them. And with this recognition came the realization that she could go on in spite of them.

How can any adult know the exact weight of that fright? Does it mean that the child is timid, alarmed, anxious, petrified, or frozen stiff with terror? Is a ten-headed monster more frightening than an Idea? If she hadn’t exactly mastered her fear, whatever it was, she had got it well under control. By now she was prepared to let go of my hand, to make a little sortie after something that interested her, always looking back to make sure I was there. So I stopped in my tracks and waited for her. She was still a little bit scared and she knew that I was aware that she was scared too. The fact that I stopped whenever she let go of my hand brought forth a grateful little smile of acknowledgement.

My mind flipped back to the time when I was her age. My mother and father had taken me to Southend-on-Sea. The sight of the sea and the press of all those people was like being hit by a bus. I had been holding my father’s hand when I first had a sight of the sea, and then, suddenly, I was holding a stranger’s hand. I can’t remember very much except that then and there the world came to an end. So I did have some inkling of her fears, whatever they were.

Her little explorations were slowly bringing things back to normal. She’d return with her usual treasures, different shaped leaves, stone, bits of twigs, etc. Her enthusiasm could not be restrained any longer.

Suddenly I heard the gruff shout of a park-keeper. I turned, and there she was, kneeling in front of a flower-bed. I had forgotten to tell her to Keep off the Grass. Anna would not have given way to Lucifer himself and certainly not to a park-keeper. Having negotiated one catastrophe, I didn’t want to face another. I ran and scooped her into my arms and stood her down on the pathway.

‘He,’ she said indignantly, pointing an accusing finger, ‘told me to get off the grass.’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘you’re not supposed to be on this bit of grass.’

‘But it’s the best bit,’ she said.

‘See those words.’ I pointed to the notice. ‘They say “Keep off the grass”.’

She studied the notice with great concentration as I spelt out the words for her.

Late that afternoon, while we were sitting on the grass eating chocolate, she said, ‘Them words.’