And I ask Neels what is the most big numbre I could say for luving Mummy becase I am not very gud with sums and Neels say if I rite down ‘infinity’ that is the most big. But it dont luk very big but milions and milions of them wold be, but I luv Mummy so much and I will rite sum more.
Mummy is not like no one els becas she dont have to speak if she dont want to. And somtime it is nice when she dont speak and somtime it is nice when she do speak. Becas when she dont speak, Mummy smile and this is very good. Mummy has got a speshul smile and you dont no where it is going to start. Somtime it start from her toes and somtime from her finger and somtime from her tummy and then it pop out of her eye and out of her mouth and this is very nice becas you now it is coming and you wate for it to cume. So it cum like a pressant wich is a big surprise. And wat is nice about Mummy is watever she do is like a pressant. And wen you think about Mummy this is good too. When you think about peple you can think bad thing and narsty thing like hurt and pane and sick, but when you think about Mummy, you cant. And you can only think nice thing that are happy like Mister God. And warm. And how nice to be me, becas if I was not me I would not know, would I?
Oh dear, ther is so many things I wish I culd say, but I do not know how to say becas how can you say about love with a pensel and a paper becas you can not reely. But you can try, cant not you, so I will try.
Love is a very funy thing becas you cant see it and you cant here it and you cant tuch it when it belongs to you. So how do you know you have got it? Well I will tell you. When Neels say to me pretend you have for sweets in one hand and six sweets in another hand, how many have you got? So I say I have not got none, becas I have not and if I say I have got some, it is a lie and this is bad to do. Wen someone say I love you Anna, how do I know if it is true?
The Bible at home was one of those huge brass-bound books. It was from this that Anna read or was read to. Seated at the table she worked her way through some of the passages of the Bible. At school and at church she was told which passages to read; at home she was free to read whatever she wanted to. This meant that she was often puzzled as to the meaning and I had to do my best to help her understand. Trying to understand that Adam knew Eve was not the same as Anna knew Fynn, or that God asked Adam, ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked?’ and caused her many problems.
The more she read the more puzzled she became. Often she was presented with passages that simply did not make sense to her, passages that seemed to contradict other passages. Like Luke 2:23 – ‘Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.’ And Luke 23:29 – ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bare.’
It seemed to Anna that the Bible was sometimes a bit muddled and that it asked more questions than it answered, but whatever its shortcomings, it was beautiful and since for her beauty was all important, there was no reason why she should not add her own idea of beauty to it.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about Anna was how she always managed to put together to her own satisfaction various ideas that in the normal course of education would have been frowned on. On one occasion she glued together shadows, mathematics, God and sundry ideas, to my delight and her satisfaction. It happened like this –
One evening I had been explaining to Anna how to tell the time from a sundial. Early next morning I took her to see the sundial in the local churchyard. I pointed to the part that cast the shadow and said this is called the ‘Gnomon’. As usual, I had to write this word down on a piece of paper. Later that day the word Gnomon had to be looked up in the dictionary. The definition read ‘That part of a parallelogram left over when a similar parallelogram is taken from its corner.’
This idea was passed over for about a year until it became another idea to work on. What excited her was the fact that it came from a Greek word meaning ‘Indicator’.
As she carefully wrote this down on her piece of paper, her eye caught the next word ‘Gnosis’ – knowledge of spiritual mysteries.
This bit of information made Anna search for all the words that started with the letters GN, which you must admit is an odd combination. All these words were carefully written down – gnarled, gnash, gnat, gnathic, gnaw, gneiss, gnome, gnomic, gnomon, gnosis, gnu.
Anna felt that these strange words which all started with GN ought, because of their very strange beginnings, to have something in common. And then – on the same page, was the word GOD. I did try to explain to her, but it was no use, she had found her clue, the GN words now made sense.
Serendipity is the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by chance.
On one evening we were scribbling numbers and ideas on pieces of paper. I was trying to explain to Anna the mysteries of the binary system by asking the question what is the fewest number of weights and what is the value of the weights that would enable you to weigh anything up to 1,000 lbs in steps of lib; after a little while she grasped the idea of how to ‘do it’:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512.
It was then quite clear to her that these 10 weights could weigh up to 1,023 lbs. This was certainly one of those beautiful things that had to be written down and treasured.
All this was nice and organized, but things are not always quite like you work them out. The greengrocer in the market didn’t do things quite like that. Anna took me to the market place to show me this new miracle. On our workings out we had put the article to be weighed in the left pan and the weights in the right pan, but the man in the market place wasn’t doing this, for he seemed to put weights in either pan. It certainly looked as if the man was cheating, so we went back to working it out again. In the first case we only put the weights in the right-hand pan, and in the second case you could put the weights in the right-hand pan or maybe the left hand or sometimes even both, and the numbers we had found for the first case certainly didn’t work in the second case, so I had to explain how to work out these other weights, and they turned out to be 1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243, 729.
This is a story about the very very first..Mister God is very very old, but a long time ago he was yung and before that he was only a baby and before that he was not even born and their was not a world and their was not a star and there was not anything.
But there was Mister God’s Mummy and Daddy. But you could not see them. And you could not see them because they were so big.
If you have a very little thing, you have to go very clos befor you can see it and if you go far away, you cant. If you have a montain wich is big you cant see the top if you are clos, but you can if you go far away and this is like Mister God’s Mummy and Daddy. You cant go far away from them, so you cant see them. If you go too far away, you can see them but you get very lonly, so you cant. So you have to stay very clos and you know they are there but you cant see them, so that is why they had a little baby.
Well, you see, when the little baby GOD was getting redy to be born he was in his mummy woom, that is were all the babys is made. It is very dark in there. When the baby GOD was born, then he must have some light and when his Mummy and Daddy had a party to selebrate with all the angles, they put lots and lots of light in the sky and made it look pritty and this is stars. The Mummy and Daddy are very polite and teech the little baby GOD to be polite
