Fynn - Anna and the Black Knight: Incorporating Annas Book

Mister God, This is Anna

In Mister God, This is Anna Fynn told the story of his friendship with this extraordinary child, and of her relationship with Mister God and the world around her.

Annas story, with its timeless truths, lives on in the minds and hearts of countless readers. But after her death, little was left of Anna herself except the abiding memory of her presence, and a few treasured fragments of her writing. In Annas Book Fynn shares these with us.

Annas spelling and punctuation were, like herself, uniquely original and exuberant. In a few places we have altered these slightly, for the sake of clarity, but in no way do these alterations detract from the flavour of Annas language.

The Publishers

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 cant 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 wasnt 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, thats 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 Annas 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 Annas 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 cant remember a time in my life when I havent been totally absorbed with the subject of mathematics. In fact, Id 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 wasnt 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 youve 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 dont 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 didnt 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.

Although Anna went to church and Sunday School she was often more than a little irritated by this experience. It didnt 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 wasnt 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 preachers 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 didnt 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.