Anna and the Black Knight: Incorporating Anna’s Book. Fynn

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.

Chapter One

       Not Going To Church and What Mister God Is Like

      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